The first time someone invited me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that happens inside the app—I didn’t know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and moused away into the sad forest of a thousand open browser tabs on my computer.
Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my MacBook speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone—maybe a fake vibraphone?—with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud.
WTFWe looked into it so you don't have to.The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn’t I hate it? On some instinctive level, I could tell—as I hunted through Chrome tabs one by one—that whatever circumstances normally produce elevator music had not produced this. This music wasn’t canned; it was uncanny.
I’d scanned all my tabs twice, across two browser windows, before I realized the tune was coming from Slack. (By now an electric organ had replaced the vibraphone, and the sax seemed to be winking at how cheesy it was getting. Was this music … looking at me?) When I finally toggled the track into silence, I’m not going to say I felt bereft. But it wasn’t long before I figured out how to play it again.
I went to the internet to see if anyone else had perked up at the Slack Huddle hold music. Sure enough, I found several uploads of it on YouTube, including one that looped it for 60 minutes. If anything, judging from comments, my reaction had been understated: “This has no right to be as good as it is.” (211 likes.) “Absolute banger.” (25 likes.) “So chill. After a long stressful discussion with my coworkers, I listen to this song to relax!” (59 likes.) “Emerges from the silence like a beacon of hope, a buoy in the choppy seas of corporate tedium.” (55 likes.)
What was the deal with this music? A minimal amount of internet sleuthing turned up an answer: It wasn’t a glitch in the simulation. It was a simulation from something called Glitch. In September 2021, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield responded to someone who was gushing over the hold music on Twitter. “Funny detail,” he wrote: “That was composed/performed by @DannyboySimmons for the failed MMO Glitch, the original project of the team that made Slack.” I knew “MMO” meant “massively multiplayer online game,” but the rest of Butterfield’s tweet made no sense. He said the track had something to do with a “waiting quest” and a “Bureaucratic Arts skill.”
