(To Mike & Mike :o) )

This is a custom programme played in The Gap clothing stores in early 1993. This tape was in a lot of several acquired through an online auction. See "Classical Chamber" #5590 for AEI Employee Mike Brady's rather revealling memories of programming custom tapes for these guys!

I will personally attest, it is a really great riding tape. Many hours were spent late this summer and early this fall exploring alleyways and other back streets, and doing training rides, in downtown Vancouver, WA with it playing on the bike's inflight audio system.

Partial setlist compiled "from memory" by Mike Bise, who worked at a Gap in Texas during the 1990s. (JPEG option) (See "New Yorker" article below.)

Speed correction -26.75%; no restoration, noise reduction or EQ was done. (You know the drill by now....) Sides were split to mono blocks for this presentation. Refreshingly, both sides actually worked out to the same splice-to-splice length this time!


AEI scan provided by Mike Bise. Select image to view full-size playlist.

Notes
DOWNLOADING
When downloading this recording e.g. for local listening or to post elsewhere, please select only the original high-bitrate PCM ("WAVE" option) files. The lossy MP3 files for immediate previewing in the built-in Web player above were encoded from the PCM files using LAME 3.99.5 Linux (command $ lame -b128 -mm -o -q0 "'filename.wav]") but for optimal listening please download and use the PCM version. The FLAC files listed are Archive's own autoderivatives and cannot provide technical support if you download them. Master files are encoded as 44100 Hz 16-bit linear PCM (RIFF header). The unprocessed tape-in files are also provided for reference.

To stream this programme as a sequence in an external media player (e.g. VLC), open the "VBR M3U" file in your player's playlist editor and select "play". To stream individual files, load the file you want from the "WAVE" option into your player directly.

LICENCE
For private listening (home/headphones/car) and historical-interest uses only. If you want to play this music in a business, you will need to contact Mood Media and set up a subscription.

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An Obsessive Guide to Music Played at the Gap in the Nineties and Early Aughts
By Eric Harvey / August 25, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/an-obsessive-guide-to-music-played-at-the-gap-in-the-nineties-and-early-aughts

Confession: I discovered one of my favorite songs through a Gap ad. The 1999 "Khaki Soul" spot, specifically, which featured attractive young people clad in Gapwear dancing to Bill Withers's 1977 hit "Lovely Day." That song and I are the same age, and there's a good chance that it had wound its way into my aural periphery in the prior two decades, but this ad--more of a miniature music video, not unlike Volkswagen's resurrection of "Pink Moon," later that same year--was the first time I'd had a moment with it. "Lovely Day" didn't trigger a desire for khakis, but it did prompt a trip to my local CD retailer, where a clerk located the phrase "lovely day" in the store's proprietary database, and off I went with its lone copy of "Lean on Me: The Best of Bill Withers."

From the launch of its first stand-alone store, in San Francisco, in 1969, the Gap has always been in some proximity to the record business. Initially, its founder, Don Fisher, wanted to call the store "Pants and Discs," because the only things it offered were Levi's and music. (His wife demurred and suggested a name that referenced the generation gap.) In the eighties and nineties, under Mickey Drexler's leadership, the company's store design was simplified to white walls, polished wood floors, and stacks of clothes, while ad campaigns like 1988's "Individuals of Style" and 1993's "Who Wore Khakis" invented a history of everyday fashion. By the late nineties, Gap had positioned itself in the mainstream of pop-music trends: Gap TV ads linked the modest, durable cotton pant to country, electronica, and swing.

Recently, when Googling to see if "Khaki Soul" was online, I discovered just how much the Gap's music curation could mean to someone. The blog Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006 is the passion project of a Texan named Mike Bise, who worked at Gap for the fifteen-year span of his blog's title, and who really loves the music that was piped into the store during that time. As an irrepressible music sorter and list maker myself, I was immediately drawn to the blog's stated mission: to acquire a complete set of monthly in-store playlists, on paper, from June, 1992, to February, 2006--a hundred and sixty-five in all. The playlists accompanied the four-hour music programs that the Gap initially received from a company called Audio Environments, Inc. Launched in 1971, A.E.I. provided retailers with "foreground music," intended as a hipper form of programming than Muzak's "background music," which had been piping light re-creations of popular tunes into elevators, shopping malls, and workplaces since the nineteen-twenties. Muzak entered the foreground-music arena in 1997, rebranding its employees as "audio architects" and securing Gap's in-store music contract in 1999. You can see "Lovely Day" on Muzak's April, 1999, playlist--which Bise found a CD of on eBay--slotted between Sugar Ray and the B-52's.

(The article stated Muzak had been programming business music "since the nineteen-twenties". Well, shame on them! In 2006 "New Yorker" published a very comprehensive article on Muzak's operations, called "The Soundtrack of Your Life", which correctly stated Muzak began such operations in 1934. What a difference a couple minutes looking through the morgue file would have made. -ORT)

So far, Bise has scanned and posted fifty-four paper lists, he told me in a recent phone conversation. He once had many more in his possession, but he lost them during a move, in 2006, a loss he characterized as "devastating." (Hearing the story, I shivered thinking about losing my own collection of ticket stubs and concert T-shirts.) He started the blog in 2015, he told me, in order "to catch others out there in the sea, and scoop them up." In January, 2017, Bise was contacted by another former Gap employee, named Justin, who had a stack of paper playlists stashed in a box. Justin was going to simply scan and e-mail the playlists en masse, Bise said, but decided that it would be more fun to send a couple at a time from the unsorted stack and chat about each list over e-mail. So far, Justin has sent Bise thirty-three scans.

Justin doesn't have any lists from 1992, though, so while Bise waits for those to come in, he re-creates them, from memory, as iTunes playlists. Over the phone, Bise recited song titles from his first month on the job, October, 1992 (the blog starts in June because, early in his tenure, he found some tapes from a few months before), like someone else might recall a great d.j. set or a twenty-first-birthday mix: Sounds of Blackness's gospel-R.-&-B. gem "Optimistic," Opus III's club classic "It's a Fine Day," Utah Saints' Kate Bush-sampling "Something Good," Soul II Soul's "A Dream's a Dream," and Rozalla's "Love Breakdown." These tracks--a neat encapsulation of house music's infiltration of dance-pop in the early nineties--share space with the Replacements, the Bangles, and XTC. At the time, radio playlists were becoming more constricted, thanks to the Telecommunication Act of 1996, which deregulated station ownership. The Gap's taste in music, on the other hand, was impressively eclectic, though two wildly popular genres were underrepresented on the playlists through much of the nineties: country, which was, apparently, still too uncool for the Gap; and rap, which conservatives were loudly assailing as a destructive cultural force. (The Gap declined to comment for this article.)

A.E.I. and Muzak constructed their in-store programs as sonic packaging for the otherwise simple clothes on display, but they also often worked in cahoots with record labels, sometimes débuting singles--such as Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away" and Morcheeba's "Part of the Process," both from 1998--before they were heard on radio. In other cases, the specific versions of songs sent to Gap stores were obscure, leading Bise on crate-digging hunts. In January, 1995, after more than two years of searching, he found the European CD single containing the "Elevation Mix" of Des'ree's "Feel So High" (from the June, 1992, in-store program). Even tougher was "Sense of Danger (Attaboy Remix)," by Presence, featuring Shara Nelson, from the March, 1999, playlist. "I bought two CD singles and three different twelve-inch combos in order to find the correct mix, which was on vinyl," Bise confessed. In 2010, he noticed that several mixes of Joe T Vannelli Project's "Sweetest Day of May" (from May, 1996) had appeared on iTunes. The Gap version, which he owns on vinyl, was not one of them. It is possible, it turns out, for in-store programmed music to create its own strain of music-nerd exclusivity.

Along with being an autobiographical, and gently monomaniacal, memory project, Bise's blog acts as an autodidactic mini-history of retail soundscaping. During some months, the Gap's music theme was straightforward: the release of the Gap Blue No. 655 scent, in October, 1997, led to a program in which each song had the word "Blue" in the title. April, 2000, nodded to Latin pop, which was having a crossover moment. A personal favorite is the January, 1997, playlist, which captures an instant in which mainstream pop was more heterogeneous than it had ever been: there's the Beastie Boys, the Butthole Surfers, Beck, D'Angelo, the Roots, Maxwell, the Posies, Soul Coughing, Sublime. Programmed-music companies are generally held in low esteem by music nerds--even lower than a tight-playlisted, payola-taking corporate radio station. But stark anti-corporate stances have become somewhat passé among many music lovers, and the Gap of the nineties is now a source of nostalgia for thirty- and forty-somethings. When I tweeted out my discovery of the blog, in July, I saw no one critique the political economy of Gap music. Instead, many of my contemporaries fondly recalled their own nineties, and noticed, hey, a lot of these are pretty good.

For Bise, it's not a matter of cherry-picking his favorites from the past and discarding the rest. The quest--like acquiring an artist's discography, or a run of 45s released by a defunct regional label--is one of completion. He's spent months looking for former A.E.I. and Muzak employees, and reaching out to Gap and Mood Media to see what might be lingering in their archives. In the meantime, he trades e-mails every few weeks with Justin. A few days ago, Justin sent him the lists from June and October, 1996, and they chatted about their memories of that time. Justin doesn't have every list that Bise wants, but he has confirmed that, somewhere down in that box of old paper playlists, he has Bise's all-time favorite: August, 1998, thirty-five songs of which Bise can recall on his own. Justin is waiting until it arises naturally in the stack to send it over.
-----------
Eric Harvey writes widely about music and teaches journalism at Grand Valley State University.

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This man is obsessively cataloguing Gap's store playlists from the '90s to the early '00s
By Team Jukely / September 19, 2017
https://fouroverfour.jukely.com/culture/this-man-is-obsessively-cataloguing-gaps-store-playlists-from-the-90s-to-the-early-00s/

Background music is more important in your life than you think. Think about it. How much time during your everyday life do you just absorb sounds without thinking about them? And how much of that noise is specifically manufactured? Meaning, you didn't choose it and it's not incidental, somebody chose it for you.

In fact, these background noises are heavily researched, for things like building work productivity and encouraging certain shopping behaviors.

Of course, all these effects are for subconscious effects and the conscious effect of the music is mostly irrelevant. Unless you happen to pay attention.

And for 14 years, Mike Bise did. From 1992 to 2006, Bise worked for Gap and every single month the company would send each of its stores a four hour long CD or tape (depending on what year we're talking about) to play in the store that month. On a loop.

In 2006, he lost the playlists. And this is when the journey really took off. It became a quest to recover those playlists. In the meantime, he reconstructs as many of them as he can from memory. All of this takes place on a site he created to document both the playlists and his journey.

And thus, Bise obsessively catalogues that part of his life, even connecting along the way with other people who have shared similar experiences, and in doing so, celebrating the store and the era.

Why?

That's really not the point.

You can check out the website here.

###

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A former Gap employee embarks on a quest to collect every in-store playlist
Jonaki Mehta - May 5, 2022 5:01 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096564202/gap-store-playlist-music-collection

It was the blistering summer of 1992 in Dallas, Texas and Michael Bise had just graduated from college and needed a job.

He saw an ad in the paper for his local Gap store.

"You know, it was just seasonal sales. I needed something," he said.

Bise got the job, but he found something unexpected when he started.

"I went there in that very first day. It was just like, immediately, I was hit with the music," he said.

A soundtrack played over the speakers of that Highland Park Village Gap store as the customers browsed. Perhaps for them, it was in the background of their experience in that store, but for Bise, it was at the forefront.

He had an ear for music. He was a DJ in college. But this carefully crafted mix of music was like nothing he'd heard before.

"You know, classic R&B, and then it's followed by a modern pop song and then followed by acid jazz and then trip hop or something," he said.

That music opened up Bise's world, and that first job turned into 15 years at Gap.

"And so it's like, I found a career, but I probably wouldn't have stayed if it hadn't been as fun being there and listening," he said. "If it was just drudgery, it would not have worked. I still have some of the best memories being in that store and learning how to do it all on my own. I'm serious. Those memories - the music brings all of it up."

Bise would collect the paper playlists that were posted in his break room each month - they were the same ones that were pinned up in Gap break rooms all across the country. The mixes were curated by an outside company Gap had hired called AEI Music.

But to Bise, they were special - not only because the music was good, but to him, they also represented what was happening beyond the doors of Gap stores.

"As the years went by, the tapes did seem to reflect what was going on in the country," he said. "There was a lot of experimentation at the beginning of the '90s. Then, you could, I mean, literally feel the change ... like September 11, 2001, it was very, very somber. And, you know, that's how the country was. You felt it.

A career change and a move meant he lost that stash of playlists he had meticulously collected. He is now an elementary school computer teacher. Then in 2010 a lucky break: In the flap of an old folder he found 24 Gap playlists.

The hunt was on.

Bise wanted to find every playlist from his years at Gap - 1992 to 2006. He started a blog where he posted the playlists he found and some that he simply remembered. Bise began soliciting playlists from former Gap employees on online forums. Then, in January of 2017, Bise got an email from someone in California.

"He said, 'I think I have what you need,'" he said.

That former employee had playlists from 1993 through 2000. And the responses are still rolling in. Bise only has a few incomplete years of music left to find.

"It's almost like doing a service because I have so many people tell me how much they enjoy it. And so, you know, even if I find 100% of everything I want, I'm always going to continue doing this," he said.

* * * * * *

This former Gap employee is on a quest to collect hundreds of in-store playlists (Heard on All Things Considered)
May 3, 2022 4:59 PM ET - Jonaki Mehta/Justine Kenin
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/03/1096398297/this-former-gap-employee-is-on-a-quest-to-collect-hundreds-of-in-store-playlists
https://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/2022/05/03/1096396663/all-things-considered-for-may-3-2022

ABSTRACT
When Michael Bise started his job at Gap in 1992, he was struck by the music the store played. He's been on the hunt for in-store playlists ever since.

TRANSCRIPT
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

It was the blistering summer of 1992 in Dallas, Texas. Michael Bise had just graduated from college, and he needed a job. He saw an ad in the paper for his local Gap store.

MICHAEL BISE: You know, it was just seasonal sales. I needed something.

SHAPIRO: Bise got the job, but he found something unexpected when he started.

BISE: That very first day, immediately, I was hit with the music.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROZALLA SONG, "LOVE BREAKDOWN")

BISE: Rozalla, "Love Breakdown" - that was the one that got me.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROZALLA SONG, "LOVE BREAKDOWN")

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

Bise is talking about the music that was playing over the speakers of that Dallas Gap store as the customers shopped. He had an ear for music. He was a DJ in college. But this carefully crafted mix of music was like nothing he'd heard before.

BISE: You know, classic R&B, and then it's followed by modern pop song and then followed by acid jazz and then trip hop or something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAMB SONG, "COTTONWOOL")

FLORIDO: That music opened up Bise's world, and that first job turned into 15 years at Gap.

BISE: And so it's like, I found a career, but I probably wouldn't have stayed if it hadn't been as fun being there and listening. It was just drudgery. It would not have worked. I still have some of the best memories being in that store and learning how to do it all on my own. I'm serious. Those memories - the music brings all of it over.

SHAPIRO: Bise would collect the paper playlists that were posted in his break room each month and in Gap break rooms all across the country. The mixes were curated by an outside company Gap had hired.

FLORIDO: But to Bise, they were special - not only because the music was good, they also represented what was happening beyond the doors of Gap stores.

BISE: As the years went by, the tapes did seem to reflect what was going on in the country. There was a lot of experimentation at the beginning of the '90s. Then, you could, I mean, literally feel the change. And September 11, 2001, it was very, very somber. And, you know, that's how the country was. We felt it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BELIEVE")

LENNY KRAVITZ: (Singing) I am you, and you are me.

FLORIDO: A career change and a move meant he lost that stash of lists until 2010, when he found...

BISE: In the flap of a folder, there are about 24 Gap playlists.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEROES")

RONI SIZE AND REPRAZENT: (Singing) I don't know no heroes.

SHAPIRO: The hunt was on. Bise wanted to find every playlist from his years at Gap - 1992 to 2006. He started a blog where he posted the playlists he found and some that he simply remembered.

BISE: In January of 2017, I had an email from a guy in California, and he said, I think I have what you need.

(SOUNDBITE OF RONI SIZE AND REPRAZENT SONG, "HEROES")

FLORIDO: That former employee had playlists from 1993 through 2000. And the responses are still rolling in. Bise only has a few incomplete years of music left to find.

BISE: It's almost like doing a service because I have so many people tell me how much they enjoy it. And so, you know, even if I find 100% of everything I want, I'm always going to continue doing this.

SHAPIRO: Michael Bise, elementary school computer teacher and former Gap employee.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEROES")

RONI SIZE AND REPRAZENT: (Singing) Shidoobeedoo, beda, bedaii. Shidoobeedoo, da, down da down (ph). I don't know no heroes.

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