Other Music makes a sweet little cameo in Landline, the Jenny Slate rom-com opening next month, but for those of us who spent hours cruising its crates, that just isn’t gonna cut it. Luckily, the store will be back on the big screen via a documentary that just launched its trailer and Kickstarter campaign.
Filmmakers Rob Hatch-Miller and Puloma Basu, who’ve done music videos for the likes of Aimee Mann and Sharon Jones, started shooting shortly after the beloved East Village record store announced that it would close after 20 years. (Sunday was the first anniversary of its last day.) They even got footage of the jazz funeral down the Bowery. At the time, Josh Madell, who co-founded the store in 1995, told us that the cost of doing business in New York City was rising and vinyl shops were “no longer the heart of how we consume music.”
You’ll surely hear more of those ruminations when the documentary comes out, although that probably won’t be until 2019, according to the Kickstarter spiel. The filmmakers first need to raise $70,000 in order to hire an editor and other crew members. To encourage contributions, they’re offering sweet perks like a framed Times crossword puzzle half-done by Stephin Merritt (the Magnetic Fields frontman also appears in the trailer) and a setlist autographed by The Breeders (the filmmakers have gotten their hot little hands on VHS recordings of in-store performances by Mogwai, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples in Stereo, and others.) You can even snag one of the plastic dividers with artists’ names on them, though there’s no guarantee you’ll get the Glenn Branca one.
Also appearing in the trailer are Jason Swartzman, Daniel Kessler of Interpol, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and some former clerks.
Hatch-Miller was himself a former staffer, and his wife, Basu, was a longtime customer. “Through our ties to Other Music we met each other, got married, and became filmmaking partners,” they write. “We are so honored to be able to tell the story of a place that was so special to us and to our life in New York City, as it was to so many other people around the world.”