When entering an Abercrombie and Fitch store, you are not welcomed only by loud music and powerful perfume. [...]--Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær (2012): Dance in the store: on the use and production of music in Abercrombie &; Fitch, Critical Discourse Studies, 9:4, 393-406.Apart from the reception area, the store is characterized by a series of interconnected rooms,stairwells and narrow corridors. There is no clear demarcation of where to go or where specific clothes can be found. For example, there are no apparent signs indicating where to find men’s and women’s wear, and, in addition, mirrors en masse challenge the sense of direction. The store is poorly lit, and the interior is marked by dark wooden tables, shelves, floors and roofs. Except for step lights on the stairs, bright spotlights are the only source of light directed at the clothes on shelves and tables and in glass showcases. Also, on a more general level, the place is undetermined in terms of ‘where you are at’ – you only know that you are in an A&F store which shows by logos and brand name throughout the store and clothes. [...]
Since you are not able to look outside the store, a stay in the store leaves you with no particular sense of the external environment.Similarly, the sense of time is to a considerable degree suspended, since there is neither daylight nor clocks present, while the above ‘musical clock’ is arguably ‘distorted’; only the range of clothes and music may hint at the time of the year.
In December 2005, Human Rights Watch posted brief first-person accounts of detainees released from a secret prison in Afghanistan, many of whom asserted that part of their experience included being held in a pitch-black space and forced to listen to music that they described, variously, as “unbearably loud”, “infidel”, or “Western”. A long New York Times story on March 19, 2006, described in detail “Camp Nama”, the headquarters of a multiple-agency interrogation unit at Baghdad International Airport; there, “high-value detainees”–those believed to have information directly pertinent to battlefield movements, terrorist ringleaders, or imminent terrorist attacks--were sent first to the so-called “Black Room”, a garage-sized, windowless space painted black where “rap music or rock’n’roll blared at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker” (Schmitt and Marshall 2006)Read together, these reports suggest that the “deafening music” is usually delivered to a detainee who has been chained into a “stress position”, in a pitch-black space made uncomfortably hot or cold--Susanne Cusick (2006): Music as torture / Music as a weapon. TRANS: Revista Transcultural de Musica, 10.