The quest for every Gap store playlist ever

""Just right away, it was so different from what I was expecting," Bise says. It wasn't the classic soft instrumentals of a chain department store, nor was it pop radio hits. There was house, dance, David Bowie deep cuts, The Bangles - four hours of music on tapes produced for the retailer that looped throughout the workday."

"One song in particular, Rozalla's "Love Breakdown," so enamored Bise that after his first shift he went out and bought a CD of the album. Listening to Opus III's "It's a Fine Day," another track on the October 1992 playlist, is transporting."

"In August 2002, I was probably back-to-school shopping with my mom at our local mall, bouncing from store to store for backpacks, socks, and a first-day-of-school outfit. Gap was no doubt one of our stops - and thanks to Michael Bise, I now know what music was playing as we browsed."

Michael Bise started working at a Gap store in Dallas in 1992 and was immediately struck by the store's unconventional music. The retailer used four-hour curated tapes that looped throughout the workday, featuring house, dance, deep Bowie cuts, and The Bangles rather than typical soft instrumentals or pop radio hits. Certain tracks, including Rozalla's "Love Breakdown" and Opus III's "It's a Fine Day," became personally memorable and transportive. Bise collected those in-store recordings and related CDs to reconstruct the sonic atmosphere of 1990s and early-2000s mall shopping, recreating the sensory memory of that era even with gaps in the archive.

Read at The Verge