While Tower’s presence is barely mentioned in “Other Music,” it’s worth pointing out here that this conspicuous location was most likely an advantage. And he’s like, ‘Man, have you looked out your window?’”
“A guy came in and said, ‘What are you guys gonna be selling here?’” recalls Madell. Madell and his partners were still setting up the store when that started to become obvious. The incongruity of the situation did not go unnoticed. This, of course, was during a time when the Starbuckses of the world were deliberately opening retail outlets as close as possible to existing mom ’n’ pop shops that, more often than not, would be forced to go out of business. The only catch was that it was directly across the street from Tower Records’ four-story flagship NYC store. As luck would have it, they found one on West Fourth Street, between Lafayette Street and Broadway, a cozy little storefront in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with plenty of walking traffic. Other Music’s business strategy - to the degree one existed - would have made perfect sense in the alternate universe of DC comics’ “Bizarro World.” Having found some success selling records in the back of a friend’s video store, the three music fanatics began scouting for a location of their own. It was like, there’s a whole world that you have no idea about, and get ready to learn!” “I was like, ‘What the heck is this?’ - I just couldn’t figure it out - and I got so freaked out I just left,” she recalls with a laugh. Longtime staffer Nicole Lang recalls the sensory overload she felt while wandering through the store for the first time as a customer. Madell and his fellow Other Music co-founders, Chris Vanderloo and Jeff Gibson, soon discovered how many others shared that desire, as the small shop’s reputation and customer base expanded from its local community to esoteric music lovers from around the world.īut it took some time to get there. “We just always wanted to be on the edge of what was happening in the culture,” says co-owner Josh Madell early on in the documentary. It’s a deeply moving, beautifully crafted film about a record shop that became a kind of community center for local underground musicians, devoted record collectors, and anyone else open-minded enough to understand that alternative music can transcend aesthetic and geographical boundaries. The documentary has now gotten a much-deserved wide release - via streaming services like Amazon, iTunes and Google Play.
“Other Music,” which made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, has already raised thousands of dollars online to help temporarily shuttered indie record shops stay afloat. In this case, the dearly beloved was Other Music, an indie record shop that opened in Manhattan’s East Village in 1995, a time when the neighborhood’s indie music scene had yet to be eclipsed by its Brooklyn counterparts. So it’s only appropriate that the film opens with a New Orleans-style second-line funeral, complete with a somewhat avant-garde marching band, festive umbrellas, and the progression from sorrow to celebration that goes along with all of that. The newly released documentary, “Other Music,” serves as both a love letter and sympathy card for a one-of-a-kind record store. The Newly Released Documentary, “Other Music”
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