Tower Records Reopens! Kind of: Never Can Say Goodbye Revives NYC Downtown Icon On January 16

EAST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN: On January 16th, NYC music lovers will witness a very welcome sight: the Tower Records on Broadway and 4th Street will be open once again. There will be an important twist, however: CDs (remember those?) will not be on sale, customers will not jam the aisles, and cash registers will not be ringing.

So what’s going on? As it turns out, the downtown Tower — which for many years was a symbolic center of NYC music commerce — is as closed for business as it has been since shutting its doors in 2006. But a new nonprofit organization called No Longer Empty (NLE) is bringing it back to life for nearly a month with an ambitious new multimedia show called “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

“No Longer Empty is a curatorial-led organization,” explains Founder/Curator Manon Slome of NLE, whose mission is to transform empty storefronts into temporary public art exhibitions. “Not only is it artists putting their work in a storefront, but each show we do is curated, and each show is site-specific, meaning we take into account the history of the space, the neighborhood and more.”

Featuring custom space/music/memory experiences by visual artists including Ted Riederer and Siebren Versteeg, plus an eight-boom-box hip hop installation by Ryan Brennan, “Never Can Say Goodbye” is a creative audio/visual experience. A host of live performances are on the docket as well, with appearances by bands including Broken Mirrors with John Miller, The Metropolis Ensemble, Azita, and Disco Monkeys, a Sacred Bones Records showcase, and more. Visit http://www.nolongerempty.org for full visual and music artist lineup.

Irony, nostalgia and futurethink abound via the show’s setting within Tower’s vast expanse, where almost every NYC musician, music pro and fan bought at least one CD, record or magazine before iTunes relegated record stores to near-total obscurity.

“We want to re-create the excitement that was Tower Records,” Slome says. “People spent so much of their youth there. This was where bands came together. But we also have to take into account why Tower is no longer in existence: the whole change in distribution and listening habits due to downloading from the Internet. So we’re celebrating what was, but also what has changed.”

Additional light will be shed on these topics and more on Tuesday January 26th at 7pm, with a panel discussion From Disc to Downloads: New Directions In The Music Industry. An elite industry panel (including SonicScoop Co-Founder/Co-Editor David Weiss) will discuss how technology, contemporary gadgets and the Internet have impacted twenty-first century music production, listening and consumption.

With NYC simultaneously serving as an engine of artistic/commercial change, and also being the most impacted when these changes gather steam, it’s no wonder our fair city holds endless inspiration for No Longer Empty. “So much creativity happens in NYC — it’s such a central place in the world for music, for art, for culture,” notes Slome. “As fashion and art go hand-in-hand, music and art go hand-in-hand in a way that it never has before.

“That’s a very symbiotic relationship which I got even more tapped into by doing ‘Never Can Say Goodbye.’ The number of artists in bands is enormous — almost everyone in this show is both a musician and visual artist. I think the energy that vibrates back and forth between the two mediums is very, very powerful.” — David Weiss

“Never Can Say Goodbye” runs at the former Tower Record Store, 4th street and Broadway, January 16- February 13, 2010. Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 7pm.

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