Oh, fun! These came up on HN a few years ago[0]. Recycling some of comment from then:
The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded many of these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery store when I was growing up.
Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home town, too. He died in November, 2020.
He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff because gas stations and credit cards.
Quoting the obituary[2]:
He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".
Same! It was on the first page for me, and I just jumped right to the shoe commercial on a random click. When that synth dropped I realized that I had just roll'd myself. In 2025. Absolute clownery!
right up until the parental unit twisted my ear dragging me out of the rack. never did it again after that. such great memories of parenting in the 80s
There was a security guard dressed like a NYC cop as they did back in the early 60s who grabbed my ear and made me leave the toy section because I was trying to open packages with my tiny hands when mom was in another aisle. I was terrified of K-Mart from then on.
From "The music theory of V A P O R W A V E" where Adam Neely not only explains and critiques Vaporwave but takes a big steaming dump on it by creating the track that captures and parodies its entire aesthetic.
He got his source material directly from this archive.org collection, as it says in the opening titles:
"On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org, free for anybody to use.
I thought this remark in the comments was pretty interesting:
> Something that helps identify Vaporwave is the natural vibrato that occurs from using tape cassettes etc. I often wonder if vibrato, as an effect, gains it's ability to evoke emotion through a psychological connection with the natural vibrato of a person's wavering voice while near to crying. If so wouldn't that be a potential factor in this kind of music's popularity?
It's a good video, but I wouldn't go anywhere near as far as saying he's taking a "big steaming dump" on it. He takes pains to explain why the experience of listening to a piece (accounting for the emotions that a given piece evokes) takes ultimate priority, and the trappings of classical music theory only follow from there. To a listener it doesn't particularly matter if a piece of work is unserious, amateurish, low-effort, etc. if the emotions that it evokes are genuine, and nostalgia is a legitimate emotion to evoke, and sampling from period-appropriate music only enhances that effect.
On a slightly related note, Internet Archive archivist and notable speaker Jason Scott (@textfiles) shared to his Twitter followers Juicy the Emissary's "Attention K-Mart Choppers" - an enjoyable remix from this collection. He linked to the Medium article here: https://medium.com/micro-chop/traveling-back-in-time-with-ju...
If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic
I wonder if anyone remembers the K-Mart diners and cafes. This image search[0] shows various styles. Some or all of them were branded as K-Café.
The one that I and my older brother remember from our local K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister. (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They thought we were trolling when we brought it up.
Yes, the K-mart in my town had one when they opened the store in the 1970s. I think they removed the cafe some time in 1980s? The store itself closed about 6-8 years ago, sat vacant until about two years ago and was finally torn down.
Remember blue-light specials? They had a little cart with a flashing blue light that they would roll around the store and have short-term unadvertised sale prices on things.
The K-Mart where I worked in 1983-1988 had a cafe, called 'The Grill'. Ours had booths, with smooth curved plastic (unpadded) benches. The ones along the edges were typical booths but there was also a row down the center of the same thing without side walls. Orange seats and brown tabletops, I believe. A quick look at the google'd images from above doesn't show anything that looked quite like what my store had.
I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.
Readit News
The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded many of these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery store when I was growing up.
Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home town, too. He died in November, 2020.
He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff because gas stations and credit cards.
Quoting the obituary[2]:
He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464
[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...
[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Collected K-Mart background music tapes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35593133 - April 2023 (8 comments)
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464 - Dec 2020 (91 comments)
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Recordings of K-Mart In-Store Music from 1992 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105 - Oct 2015 (13 comments)
(for those curious, EvanAnderson's prior comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296389 from the Dec 2020 thread)
[0]https://archive.org/details/KmartJuly1992Generic?start=447
Leave it to k-mart to never let you down.
Deleted Comment
Trust me. It was the '80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s
He got his source material directly from this archive.org collection, as it says in the opening titles:
"On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org, free for anybody to use.
Vaporwave producers rejoiced."
I thought this remark in the comments was pretty interesting:
> Something that helps identify Vaporwave is the natural vibrato that occurs from using tape cassettes etc. I often wonder if vibrato, as an effect, gains it's ability to evoke emotion through a psychological connection with the natural vibrato of a person's wavering voice while near to crying. If so wouldn't that be a potential factor in this kind of music's popularity?
https://juicytheemissary.bandcamp.com/album/attention-kmart-...
It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day
I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80
The one that I and my older brother remember from our local K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister. (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They thought we were trolling when we brought it up.
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=k-mart+diner&udm=2
Remember blue-light specials? They had a little cart with a flashing blue light that they would roll around the store and have short-term unadvertised sale prices on things.
I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.