Doc brings former alt-music shop to life
BY GABE HERMAN
The documentary “Other Music,” about the
Village music store of the same name,
premiered April 26 at this year’s
over the years. The latter included setting up a shortlived
MP3 store in 2007, and having an e-mail
newsletter that went out to tens of thousands of
devoted fans.
Josh Madell, left, and Chris Vanderloo, two founders of Other Music.
The staff was full of experts in different
genres and subgenres of music,
Tribeca Film Festival and tells the story of
the legendary shop for alternative music.
Other Music was at 15 E. Fourth St,
between Broadway and Lafayette St.,
for 21 years until closing in June 2016.
Its name referred to its focus on
lesser-known music outside the mainstream,
with some even being musicians themselves.
Many signs in the store were handwritten,
giving detailed descriptions
and reviews of albums and CDs that
went beyond just artist and title.
The store also hosted live performances
from indie artists, many of
them unknown but some established,
The 83-minute fi lm never lags despite its
very specifi c focus on the one shop. And it
does a good job of conveying the changing
face of the Village and the loss of local
shops, without being too heavy-handed.
The changes wrought by the Internet on
PHOTO BY ROB HATCH-MILLER
as well. The fi rst performance was by
Yo La Tengo, and Mogwai also performed
in the tiny shop.
The doc explores every angle of the
shop, including how staffers could occasionally
be snobby or elitist, the love
it got from the local music scene and
bands like Interpol and the Yeah Yeah
Yeahs, its having a refreshingly high
number of female staff members, and
its attempts to adapt to the Internet
which you might not have
found at a store like Tower Records,
which was just across the street on the
same block.
Directors Puloma Basu and Rob
Hatch-Miller were able to make
the documentary thanks to raising
$75,000 through Kickstarter.
The fi lm details the shop’s history,
including how its three co-founders,
Josh Madell, Chris Vanderloo and Jeff
Gibson, met as employees at Kim’s
Underground, the Bleecker St. video
store where they started a music section
before leaving to launch Other
Music.
But the documentary also effectively
explores the soul of the shop and what
made it special for so many die-hard
music lovers who were looking for
something different, and perhaps the
chance of stumbling upon the next big
thing.
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music stores and how people consume
music can’t be ignored, though, and
they aren’t.
Tower Records closed in 2006. Other
Music remarkably was able to hang
on another 10 years.
“Before the Internet or social media,”
an Other Music staff member
says in the fi lm, “people trusted each
other.”
A fi nal public screening as part of
the Tribeca Film Festival is scheduled
for Sun., May 5, at 8:45 p.m., at Village
East Cinema, at 181 Second Ave.
A second round of funds was raised
on Kickstarter before the Tribeca premiere.
The additional $25,000 was
used to make fi nal edits and launch the
fi lm at the festival and beyond.
Part of the fundraising page reads, “After
the world premiere at Tribeca we’ll be
taking Other Musicto other fi lm festivals
across the US and around the world, and
looking for distribution partners to bring
the movie to an even wider audience.”
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