Traveling Back In Time With Juicy The Emissary’s “Attention Kmart Choppers”
Mark Davis was only 16 years old when he started working at the Kmart in Naperville, Illinois in the fall of 1989. Though his first day as a store employee was almost 30 years ago, he still remembers his experiences there well — especially the Kmart issued cassette tapes he used to listen to. “I worked at the service desk and we would get these tapes every month to play and they would play continuously on an auto-reverse deck behind the service desk,” he explained in a YouTube video. “Every month we would get a new tape, and instead of throwing them out, I just put them in my apron and took them home because I figured some day it would be kind of interesting.”
Manufactured by the Tape-Athon company and played upon Tape-Athon audio equipment, the Naperville store would run the cassettes until the tape inside was almost threadbare before replacing them. “These things ran for 12–14 hours a day for one month straight,” Davis explained.
Davis described the songs on many of the tapes as “stock, generic, muzak type of songs.” They work as a perfect auditory distillation of the late 80s/early 90s — picture the soundtrack to a long escalator ride in a crowded mall or an extended wait in a doctor’s office. And though the tapes were discontinued almost 25 years ago, Davis couldn’t bear to part with his collection and kept them as a nostalgic reminder of both a bygone era and a formative time in his life.
“If you don’t have a gimmick, pretty much nobody’s gonna listen to your shit.”
After hanging on to his anthology of discarded media for a quarter century, Davis finally decided to upload his tapes to the website archive.org in a collection called Attention K-Mart Shoppers in September of 2015. The collection was later expanded with some of collector Tom Schwarzrock’s reel-to-reel Kmart tapes, but Davis’s cassettes make up the bulk of the audio. Filled with muzak, the occasional popular song, and original corporate adds, the tapes became an instant hit with audiophiles around the net and soon went viral.
It wasn’t long before the treasure trove of obscure sounds made it’s way to Denton, Texas producer Juicy The Emissary. An instant fan of the intriguing backstory and the music contained within each cassette, Juicy saw the 59 tape archive as a perfect sample source for an album that he would eventually title Attention Kmart Choppers.
After previewing a few snippets of Davis’ collection online, Juicy dedicated himself to spending several days listening to each tape and capturing any sound that might fit in a future composition. From there, every sample was meticulously sorted into folders. “Once I have everything cataloged in folders I might take another day and just chop stuff,” he says while describing his process. “Then I bring stuff up in Reason 4. Once I start messing with that, I’d say most of the time I’m starting with a sample. I just start messing around with that and see what kind of sounds I can get.”
With his decades old tape samples chopped and ready for the next stage, Juicy used Reason in conjunction with a simple keyboard midi controller from M-Audio to play out different melodies and patterns. “It’s just keys, nothing fancy,” he says. “I go through, chop the audio file, and then open that up in the sampler in Reason so that I can program it on the keys on the keyboard.”
“With a lot of my projects I like to try to tie everything together to make on cohesive, extended listening experience.”
Once the required samples were locked and loaded, Juicy went to work. Although many producers work on a track-by-track basis, Juicy is careful to point out that he doesn’t like to restrict himself by dedicating each session to a specific song. “I don’t think like, ‘I’m working on a beat’ — I’m just working. Whatever I’m working on might turn into a beat, or two, or three beats,” he explains.
One of his central goals throughout the making of Attention Kmart Choppers was maximizing the amazing audio archive provided by Davis without wasting any useful parts. “There’s 12 different flips,” he explains. “In each flip I would guess I have at least several different things that I sampled from. In some of them, more like a dozen. I basically wanted to use as much of the tapes as possible. Whatever was usable or really good I tried to find a way to fit that in there.”
Trying to turn a treasure trove of samples into a cohesive listening experience falls in line with a typical Juicy project. When he makes an album, he never slaps together a batch of random instrumentals, he aims to forge a lasting connection with his listeners. “With a lot of my projects I like to try to tie everything together to make on cohesive, extended listening experience,” he says. “A lot of the samples that I’m looking for, I’m thinking of that application.”
“I don’t think like, ‘I’m working on a beat’ — I’m just working.”
When asked if he thinks the amazing backstory to Kmart Choppers could detract people’s attention from the actual music, Juicy tells me that having an amazing backstory only helps separate you from the pack in today’s crowded landscape. “I really think having a gimmick is how you get people's attention,” he explains. “If you don’t have a gimmick, pretty much nobody’s gonna listen to your shit. It’s a good story, it catches people’s imaginations. Once you get them with that, then they actually listen to the music — which is not easy to do.”
In Juicy’s experience, being “good” isn’t nearly enough to capture the ears of the modern listener. “There’s so many different reasons people listen to music. Unfortunately, it’s rarely, ‘This is good.’ You can’t just promote something by saying, ‘Listen to this, it’s good,’” he says with a laugh.
With his latest album just dropping on June 2nd, Juicy is hopeful that his novel idea and the fact that he’s releasing Kmart Choppers under the Street Corner Music moniker will help get it some additional exposure. “I feel like there is an audience for the type of stuff I do, it’s just not so easy to access them,” he says. After some early positive reviews from producer heavyweights like Black Milk, it looks like Juicy might get a desired boost in listeners.
And with 59 tapes of awful/amazing muzak still sitting on the archive.org website, who knows what future projects Juicy could inspire from other producers. For now, Juicy can rest assured that he has successfully given new life to a fascinating, forgotten piece of audio history.
Connect with Juicy on Bandcamp, Instagram, his website, and on Twitter @juicythemissary.
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