Chesterfield Mall, like many 1980’s shopping malls, was once a center for culture and commerce. As a teenager I remember going there both to grab a quick bite to eat and to rent a tux for high school prom. I also worked regular hours at the cinema in the mall’s parking lot.
In 2022, I returned to Chesterfield Mall after a 30-year absence, hoping to buy lunch and an espresso machine for my office. What I found was mostly a large, abandoned space. Only a handful of businesses remained, and most people were there either hiking the periphery for excercise or hitting the birdie at the badminton courts now located at the grand center opening.
For reasons both sentimental and acoustic, I asked the Mall manager if a few friends and I could record some live music in the Mall space. They agreed, and on 8/25/2022, Gabe Raines, Rylee Short and I performed a set just shy of 50 minutes of live music in its vast, resonant emptiness.
I found the performance to be spiritual, rendering well the end of the shopping mall and so many other people and phenomenae from the 1980’s– and fortelling the economic and various forms of hardship to follow.
Gabe Raines: Keyboards
Rylee Short: French Horn
Thomas Park: Ambient Loops, Trombone, Valveless Bugle, Acoustic Chimes
Microphone Recordings by Gabe Raines
Zoom Recorder Recordings by Thomas Park
Mastering and Release Logistics By Thomas Park
https://archive.org/details/TwilightShoppingMalILive
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Treetrunk Records 