other music hyperbole? or are they all that

Never liked this place, and amazed they held on this long. Kim's were assholes too, but that store had its heart in the right place (especially Mondo Kims). I saw a good OM in-store by Richard Davies and another by Junior Boys, and that's about all the good things I can say. I liked Rockit Scientist: he was like the 20-something who lived in his parents' basement in the suburbs of NJ and turned everyone on to Floyd and Zep and weed. Other Music was like the 20-something guy who lived with roommates in Williamsburg and tried to turn everyone on to...oh god, what was that horrible OM related band that was trying to be the Residents. It's gone completely out of my mind now.

I think the point of the Cambridge, MA store was that it was also across the street from a Tower Records.

Pre-mp3s/ILM/youtube/streaming, OM gave me access to a lot of underground stuff I would only read about but never find. I am grateful to them for that. I definitely owe my early Kompakt records obsession to them.

i owe my Kompakt love to ILM! thanks again, guys. i owe you one.

although you can have the junior boys back. and also that avalanches CD you made me buy. you did fool me there, ILM!

Mink Lungs! Jesus, I thought I was going to have to go through my entire CD collection.

I saw Junior Boys before I read about them on ILM. The difference between some perfectly nice young people singing some nice songs in front of a tiny audience, vs. the ILM thread, was fairly illuminating. I love Richard Davies to death, his show was generally ok, but the high points were amazing. Mink Lungs, Jesus...

Was it Josh Madell who was the sex symbol sales dude at OM, or do I have that wrong? It's been a long time...

The memories are coming back. My favorite OM moment: David Peel walking in an bugging the crap out of everyone there (none of whom had any idea who he was). Is he still alive/doing that?

he bugs the crap out of people in heaven now.

i don't actually know if he's alive or dead to be honest...

You'd think he'd be dead, but Wikipedia says differently (possibly in error). I like to think that he's out there tracking down various former Other Music workers and annoying them.

I think for a lot of us this is like grandma dies and on the one hand you're rightfully sad and on the other hand feel pretty guilty that you barely visited her in the home over the last ten years.

Josh is one of the co-owners and indeed he is very handsome. He has played the drooms with antietam for many years as well.

I always felt like he was going to steal my armoire.

I mean, I feel guilty that I barely visited but neither feeling guilty nor not visiting places is really out of character

Anyone remember the extremely short-lived Boston Other Music? I think it lasted six months or something back in the early aughts? Funny how the NYC place held on so long but Boston could not support one for a hot minute.

Yep, mentioned it upthread. It was less that Boston couldn't support an OM than that Boston already supported Twisted Village (which outlasted the Cambridge OM by years).

man, some serious hand-wringing on facebook, am i right, tarfumes? about the state of "esoterica" in the face of a homogenized something or other. was this the only place to get weird CDs in NYC?

No but this is happening right on the heels of apple deleting people's rare mp3s, replacing them with more mainstream tracks of the same name

to be fair, i do live in in a la la land of experimental avant garde music and every weekend i can go buy some of thurston and byron's record collection if i want, so i do feel for the deprived denizens of a backwoods new york city.

also, all you impoverished new yorkers can now take a train DIRECTLY to greenfield, ma and visit my wall of wonder. happy to have you.

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13139341_10154752754147137_874679473244737154_n.jpg?oh=92b2f03be66073c20a835a9b00d86af7&oe=57DA2436

I think it's like you mentioned on the Things I Don't Care About thread: lots of nostalgia, probably many people bought their first "weird" records/CDs at OM, even if they haven't gone there in years. There's also nostalgia for the circuit of stores one could just about walk to: Kim's, OM, Downtown Music Gallery, and Tower, and now DMG is the last one left in Manhattan.

New Yorks hella mainstream

In Living Stereo is only 1 street south, Good Music is only 1.5 blocks away, the downtown Academy is east of that, uptown Academy is north of Union Square, Generation below Washington Sq park. There's still stores in Manhattan but Other Music was always the most notable for new releases of new/indie stuff.

maria has rented the second floor of the building my store is in because she was sick of working at home. 2000 square feet...700 dollars a month.

(perfect for shows too. i'm thinking an evening of tarfumes/rambutan/parashi would sound sweet up there...)

but the pizza here sucks.

(perfect for shows too. i'm thinking an evening of tarfumes/rambutan/parashi would sound sweet up there...)

I'M IN.

Yeah, WMass pizza leaves a lot to be desired...but coming from Chicago, pretty much all east-coast pizza tastes like cardboard to me.

Remember the prior label that they were involved in, Omplatten?

YES! Mutantes reissues and Bjorn Olsson records are amazing.

And The Monks too, Five Something Americans.

Upstart

Yeah, WMass pizza leaves a lot to be desired...but coming from Chicago, pretty much all east-coast pizza tastes like cardboard to me.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Tuesday, May 10, 2016 10:16 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd be happy to recommend some NYC spots, but I like fancy pizzas in particular.

the most humble of new york street pizza is better than anything here.

always meaning to take a trip back down to new haven. still dream about modern a pizza there.....mmmmmmmmmmm............

(did find a nice spot in middletown, ct that has opened up and i think i might do the next wesleyan record show just to go there again...)

hey tarfumes you should just drive down to new haven to get pizza

other music are one of the few stores that stocks new release weird CDs. i hate paying absurd lifestyle accessory prices for new vinyl but i like physical media and also purchasing shit in a store. so other music is great. sorry to interrupt the faux naif fuck new york party.

new york can take it. we all heart new york.

scott, do you have used CDs?

yup.

i got rid of most of my used books and filled the shelves with CDs. i do better that way. books grow on trees around here.

I sell a lot of CDs to people who don't drive. They have nowhere else to go since the FYE chain store closed. They have to go to Newbury Comics in Northampton or Barnes & Noble in Hadley for new CDs. or a Walmart somewhere. feel kinda bad about that even though i didn't love the FYE store. it was pit that sold a lot of video games. but even i bought DVDs there.

i went to other a lot, but didn't buy that much there in the past few years. recently i've been buying more used CDs, but at other they charged $8 for a lot of them, which seems like a lot.

As many of you know, I was a part of Other Music's team for nearly ten years, both behind the scenes and quite prominently at the front of it-- I still see my face and voice pop up when OM is mentioned or referenced in articles and the media, which is both surreal and bittersweet.

As a willfully stubborn and strongly idealistic personality, I often found (and honestly still do find) myself at odds with the seismic shift in how we as a society consume and digest culture and media. Other Music was a lifeline for me as a ravenous youth in the mid-90s, helping to expose me to new sounds and to both feed and encourage my unceasing appetite for the undiscovered. I befriended a number of staffers there as I grew older-- some of whom remain close with me today-- and those friendships in turn helped bridge connections that led me on a great number of (mis)adventures both socially and creatively, opening many doors for me in regards to career and artistic expression... for which I'll forever be grateful.

As a teen, I had countless conversations with T** C******** about the kaleidoscopic eclectica emerging from Tokyo's underground, and spent many visits as a young adult dissecting the rhythmic weight of funk, soul, and psychedelic classics with D**** H*******. G***** H****** helped feed my hunger for post-punk and French pop, while D***** M******** Givens and M****** K******* assisted in my desire to more greatly explore the worlds of free jazz and the avant garde. During a fledgling lifetime of independent research and development (occurring concurrently with the birth of the internet as we now know it- before Wikipedia, the AllMusic guide, Amazon, and blog culture existed to "help" us all), these people were invaluable sources of inspiration and encouragement, helping to signpost new tributaries as my obsessions and passions continued to expand.

I began writing for the weekly OM Update while simultaneously running the mail order department of Downtown Music Gallery, another central hub of more niche-oriented avant garde musical esoterica (whose staff were also equally helpful and encouraging), and in time I ended up working in OM's physical storefront, hanging on with a white-knuckled grip to that same fevered passion for helping to educate and inspire listeners much in the way the shop's halcyon days so greatly helped me. During those years, I befriended more wonderful people and was able to provide support to a wonderful coterie of individuals who were creators and curators, some of whom have become my most beloved friends and peers. But the shift was already in place; OM had begun around the rise of the CD boom, a period when record companies still had money to invest in quite risky endeavors and signings-- it wouldn't be long before the digital "revolution" severely shifted our views on both the disposability and literal worth of music as a recorded entity and a tangible, physical product.

Price points began to radically shift for the worse, and the concept of taking chances as a consumer seemed to diminish greatly; seldom would we see clientele take a chance on an album or single simply because it seemed interesting, was dressed in an intriguing sleeve, or was released by a label with a respected pedigree and reliable track record. Consumers instead want facts and hard evidence, to try before they buy, and this shift into a post-iTunes "preview mentality" meant that more listeners seemed to stop learning how to live with an album. Why grow and evolve with a complete piece of art when you could now dissect it and only take the parts which appealed to your personal needs and wants?

That same stubbornness and immovable belief in the ideology of what made Other Music such an important and respected cornerstone in both NYC's and my own personal music worlds led me in time to begin to unfortunately and ungracefully clash with those who surrounded me. Rather than attempt to roll with the punches, I still believe more strongly that we as a collective entity beyond Other Music need to stand up and fight, to vocally encourage that same unceasing curiosity and openness to explore the unknown that led me, along with countless others, down our own respective journeys.

One cannot forcefeed esoterica, however user-friendly it might be at a surface level, to unwanting minds-- it has to be presented in a context that is easily relatable to the everyman. No one's tastes, however "basic" they might be, are invalid; it is simply a matter of establishing trust and care between corporation and consumer in order to further educate and enlighten a mind toward the unknown. If you know that someone is a rabid fan of a band, find the contextual and experiential strands that bridge their knowledge with your own or that of a peer group. One has to casually slip the esoterica and the wildly "new" in through the backdoor subtly so as not to incite rejection. This was what I so often encouraged at OM, and it's a skill which I take some pride in possessing, but that skill is born from deep knowledge and a borderline obsession with details... things which increasingly seem to be fading in importance with each year in the new millennium. We are increasingly becoming a society of dilettantes, our arrogance tricking us into believing that we only need enough knowledge to get us by, and that once we possess said knowledge, we ourselves may consider ourselves experts worthy of dispensing information with authority.

This is why the record industry is failing us, and on a greater scale, why New York City and the world's metropolitan hubs at large as living, breathing urban ecosystems are also becoming pale facsimiles: we as a culture have lost our grasp and understanding of the powers of context and how it operates as a powerful educational tool. The nation's culture capitals are withering into faceless, indistinguishable clones of one another, and Other Music's closing is a lesson in what we are doing wrong as a culture. While it's unrealistic to assume that OM would last forever, or even for another ten years, it is disappointing to witness such an entity exit with a whisper rather than a scream.

We MUST emphasize the necessity to more greatly understand and experience culture beyond our comfort zones. No piece of technology, however convenient, is ever going to replace or replicate the invaluable experience of sharing a moment with a mind unlike your own. Other Music, like many record and book shops across the world, was a central hub for such meetings. Even a prickly and headstrong outlier like myself recognizes this indispensable need, so I humbly entreat:

Please do not let such concourses go extinct.

from an ex-OM staffer on facebook. i stole it and put it here. this is where i differ with this esoterica lover:

"One cannot forcefeed esoterica, however user-friendly it might be at a surface level, to unwanting minds-- it has to be presented in a context that is easily relatable to the everyman."

fuck everyman.

Ha, I just missed my chance to ask "was that Maria logged on as Skot?"

One has to casually slip the esoterica and the wildly "new" in through the backdoor subtly so as not to incite rejection.

sounds so condescending but i do this to my friends constantly.

speaking of esoterica, did you guys know that Focus made a record with P.J. Proby? what a weird world we live in.

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13102781_10154768458532137_4653451238411083435_n.jpg?oh=5f00512a44e0dcd92dcdef547b3117f4&oe=57E3F187

Yeah, WMass pizza leaves a lot to be desired...but coming from Chicago, pretty much all east-coast pizza tastes like cardboard to me.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Tuesday, May 10, 2016 10:16 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd be happy to recommend some NYC spots, but I like fancy pizzas in particular.

― Evan, Tuesday, May 10, 2016 9:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hate to drag this thread into the banal, but there is a lot of bad street pizza in NYC today -- I can see someone going into a typical place or even a Ray's and wondering what the fuss is about. You need to hit up a place like Joe's in the West Village for a genuinely good slice, and then there are also lots of great fancy/margherita pizza sit-down type places. The average level of pizza though is pretty bad. Still better than a lot of the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN1mKiQbi4g