Photos and interview by Stacie Joy
From his record shop on Second Street to East Village Radio's storefront studio on First Avenue, Adrian Rew spends a lot of time introducing people to music they may not have heard before.
The owner of Ergot Records, one of the city's most adventurous record shops, hosts a weekly Thursday-night (8-10) program on East Village Radio featuring new releases, reissues and deep catalog discoveries.
We asked him about the show, the East Village record scene and a recent broadcast devoted to the music of legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm.
What’s the vibe of your Thursday night show? How does it reflect what’s happening at Ergot Records right now?
The Ergot Records show is all about highlighting great music that is currently available at our shop. Usually, this means we play all new records we have multiple copies of, covering both brand-new music and newly reissued recordings from the past.
Since new releases officially come out on Fridays and the show airs on Thursday nights, it can sometimes serve as a sneak peek at new music that listeners can purchase the following day.
We have pretty eclectic taste, so any given program could feature a more focused aesthetic, or a range of sound that might include spoken word, minimal music of various stripes, subterranean pop, dub, experimental music, jazz, house, techno, field recordings, medieval music, industrial music, and folk music from around the world.
For special occasions, we’ll take deeper dives into artists' discographies. This has included two-hour sets examining the work of Timo Van Luijk and Christoph Heemann, both broadcasts programmed in anticipation of live appearances we’ve organized for the artists.
We recently highlighted the work of Umm Kulthūm in a program that I'll elaborate more upon. Whenever possible, we also invite local artists whose records we've been enjoying to join as guests for interviews about their work.
Downtown New York, and the East Village specifically, feels like the nucleus of NYC, accessible to residents from all five boroughs as well as people from the broader tri-state area. This means that we get a real heterogeneous mix of customers from all walks of life at our shop, a diversity we seek to reflect in our inventory and thus — to an extent — in the music that we play on our show.
It doesn’t hurt that the East Village has what might be the densest concentration of record shops in the country—with Academy, A-1, Stranded, Limited To One, and Manhattan45 all located within a six-block radius.
The neighborhood has changed a lot, even in just over the decade I've been working in it, but it undeniably remains NYC’s record Mecca, and we’ve met many of the artists we’ve played and hosted on the show in part thanks to our location.
You’re known for digging up overlooked gems. What's something you've been playing lately that deserves more attention?
We do have a penchant for seeking out deadstock; original copies of records from the past that remained unsold and tucked away for decades, in our case, usually because they were too strange or ahead of their time for there to have been much of a market for them upon release.
We did a two-hour deadstock special on East Village Radio a few months back and have another one planned for a yet-to-be-determined slow-release week in the not-so-distant future. A personal favorite from that last show was Mexican minimal synth trio Vistas Fijas' sole release, an eponymous 1985 7" EP of beautiful, wistfully optimistic early electronic music that we still have a handful of copies of.
Can you speak a bit about the Umm Kulthūm show on April 30?
A couple of years ago, we had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase a large collection of about 200 records by legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm, undeniably the most beloved musical artist of the 20th-century Arab world.
It was a rather overwhelming amount of records for someone like myself with—at the time—only a cursory knowledge of her music and life to engage with, so they kind of sat around in boxes for a while. Finally, I set myself a deadline of what would have been her 122nd birthday to process everything.
In anticipation of making the collection available to the public, I invited two of our customers with strong connections to Umm Kulthūm to join me for a two-hour special on her music, during which we played selections from the collection that wound up in the shop’s bins on her birthday.
Egyptian musician and filmmaker Andrew Kamel [below, middle], who grew up with parents who regularly listened to Umm Kulthūm, was a no-brainer, and he truly carried the show with his knowledge and selections (plus he brought his oud to play along with).
I also invited Gary Sullivan [bottom right] — host of the WFMU show Bodega Pop as well as the compiler of last year's Sublime Frequencies LP Born In The City Of Tanta: Lower Egyptian Urban Folklore And Bedouin Shaabi From Libya's Bourini Records 1968-75—whose first exposure to Arabic music was to Umm Kulthūm's “Hazihi Laylati” 30 years ago!
Check out the East Village Radio website for info on the station's dozens (and dozens) of eclectic shows.
