Fluxblog 548: Other Music retrospective 2000-2004
3 playlists covering staff picks from the iconic ultra-cool NYC record shop
Other Music opened 30 years ago on West 4th Street in Manhattan, and was a key part of the New York City music ecosystem until it closed in June 2016.
Other Music was a highly curated shop with an emphasis on electronic music, artsy indie rock, experimental music, alternative hip-hop, assorted oddities, and obscure reissues. I can’t overstate how important this store was to my development as a young music fan, particularly during the stretch of time covered in these playlists that coincided with when I was studying art at the nearby Parsons School of Design. In retrospect, given the direction my life would take, this store is where I got my real education.
The selections in this series of 3 playlists were sourced from Other Music’s archive of weekly newsletters, which is still available on their site and features a lot of truly outstanding writing about music. For example, here’s Duane Harriott and Robin Edgerton’s blurb about Daft Punk’s Discovery from March 2001. I’m so impressed by how clearly they saw Daft Punk back then, and time definitely showed them to be correct about their whole deal.
If you’re young, if you’re not from New York City, or if you never shopped at Other Music, the important thing for you to know about theses playlists is that they’re a treasure trove of incredible, and in some cases, largely forgotten music. The odds are good you won’t be familiar with a lot of it. I feel that they’re a very accurate snapshot of what would be considered the pinnacle of cool taste at
the dawn of the 21st century, so there’s a lot of anthropological value in that too.
Volume 1: 2000-2001
This playlist includes music by Animal Collective, Fischerspooner, Broadcast, Daft Punk, Clinic, Tortoise, Boards of Canada, Cat Power, The Moldy Peaches, Sigur Ros, The Avalanches, Stereolab, Peaches Ladytron, Matmos, Silver Mt Zion, cLOUDDEAD, Cannibal Ox, Blonde Redhead, Aphex Twin, Phoenix, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Le Tigre, Thievery Corporation, etc.
🟠Spotify
🔵 Apple Music
🟠YouTube
Volume 2: 2002-2003
This includes songs by !!!, The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, Madlib, Prefuse 73, Caribou, Colder, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dntel, Goldfrapp, TV on the Radio, Dizzee Rascal, Superpitcher, Spoon, Autechre, The Black Heart Procession, Black Dice, Ladytron, The Nitwits, Enon, RJD2, The Unicorns, The New Pornographers, Slum Village, Erase Errata, Sufjan Stevens, etc.
🔵 Spotify
🟠Apple Music
🔵 YouTube
Volume 3: 2004
This features M83, Liars, Keren Ann, MF Doom, Lali Puna, Junior Boys, M.I.A., Air, Wagon Christ, Camera Obscura, Ellen Allien, Arcade Fire, Electrelane, Björk, Devendra Banhart, Iron & Wine, Fennesz, Four Tet, Squarepusher, Franz Ferdinand, CocoRosie, Kings of Convenience, Destroyer, Bloc Party, Oneida, Madvillain, The National, and if you’re listening to the Apple or YouTube versions, you get Joanna Newsom, who was a pretty big deal at Other Music at the time.
🟠Spotify
🔵 Apple Music
🟠YouTube
If you were an Other Music customer, what were your favorite records that you discovered there? Or if you weren’t, what’s your favorite music you found through these playlists?
If you have any contacts with the people who might maintain the rights to these newsletters, a curated and annotated collection in book form would both (1) be an amazing resource about this era of music, and (2) do silly numbers among us increasingly nostalgic millennials.
I’ve been reading these for an hour and I might make my way through the whole collection.
It was a swelteringly hot, magical day in the late 90s when my brother and I both picked up the first Os Mutantes album on cd at OM.