There’s something enduringly romantic about art that ends on a full stop. Some might argue a record shop should not be considered art, but in the creative juxtapositioning of specific elements to create a particular sensory whole, it can be an act of collage as much as layering up samples or sticking bits of paper together. A lot of record shops, steered by sensible people with long term plans, attempt to operate as growth-driven businesses, thus compromising any creative intention, and plenty have limped along from golden ages to ignominious ends. Low Company is safely past the point of fading into irrelevance or financial ruin, having been chopped down in its prime to be forever remembered full of youthful vitality. 

Kiran Sande founded Low Company at the Hackney Downs Studios in East London along with full time staff members Sanjay and Kenny in 2017. He’d returned from Berlin for that purpose as his imperious label Blackest Ever Black was entering its final stages, and wanted to indulge a long held fantasy of running a record shop. Sande has worked in music for a long time – once upon a time he was Deputy Editor at Fact Magazine – but he’s beholden to his own whimsical desires and infatuations about music rather than any kind of careerist aims. Hence he decided from the outset Low Company would be a totally indulgent, finite endeavour dedicated to the ephemera of underground music culture.

It turns out by late 2019 Low Company became successful despite the bloody-minded best efforts of the team, and the pen was literally hovering over a contract for a new lease on premises that would have tied them in for at least three years, over-shooting Sande’s firm five-year plan. Then Coronavirus came along to force a tough decision, and Sande scrapped the new lease and called time on the physical shop before it could descend into the tedium of undulating lockdowns, social distancing measures and an uncertain future. As his home slowly fills up with boxes of vinyl, Low Company lives on as a record label and distribution operation for a small clutch of artists and labels Sande has drawn in post-Blackest, but the shop is no more.

In the wake of the announcement Low Company was closing, I invited to Sande to reflect on the motivations behind opening a shop for such a short period of time, the charm and tradition of record shops in general, and the people and music that orbited Low Company when it was housed in bricks and mortar.    

Let's start with the most obvious question. Why did you decide to open a record shop in 2017?

It was probably 2016 I started thinking seriously about it. Four years wasn't that long ago, but I think, because of 2020’s strange character, it feels like a decade's happened.

At the time I was living in Berlin, and there's such a high density of record shops - not just the renowned really good ones, but just bizarre, crap little ones run by chain smoking old German prog or jazz bachelors, not selling anything good. All of these different shops from the good to the bad and indifferent in Berlin put me in touch with a very appealing idea of the record shop as the extension of your living room; your weird private dominion, where you sell what you want to sell, for you and your friends. I'd go to a record shop and buy records and end up chatting to the person who ran it, having a beer or a cup of coffee, and the whole thing was quite a contrast to what I felt was a slightly more high pressure environment in England. The whole economic underpinning of record shops in England requires them to be a bit more brisk and businesslike. So, as ridiculous and twee as that sounds, I think a strange part of me wanted to bring a little bit of that DIY shop mentality back to England. That sounds very full of myself and suggests no one else is doing anything similar, it's not really what I'm driving at...

It's a romantic ideal of what a record shop should be. And it's a shame that economics sets this tone for the way they are in the UK, because they should be treated more like vital community centres or lounge spaces.

Exactly. It's second only to the pub as the place for chatting shit and exchanging information. Having said that, I also knew I was moving back to England, and I was thinking about how I would fit back into England. I really liked the idea of having a physical anchor. In Berlin, when I was doing Blackest, I was able to rent a tiny little office, and that set me on the path to realising how nice it is, and occasionally what a nightmare it is, to have a physical space where people can drop by. The only other thing was, I knew I was getting a bit bored of Blackest and I wanted to take on something that was sufficiently absorbing and hard work that it took over my life a bit.

I'd always grown up with this deep-seated respect for record shops. They inspired awe and curiosity in me when I was younger. In the same way since I was a teenager I'd harboured a vague fantasy to run a record label, I harboured a vague fantasy to run a shop. And events conspired, and it just seemed like a good moment to think about doing something like that. I knew that within a few months of moving back to England such idealistic, ambitious notions would soon get ground to dust. It almost didn't happen. I nearly gave up. Just at the point that I was starting to flag trying to find a suitable premises, Sanjay picked me up and helped me find the place we ended up in. So from the outset I knew I definitely didn't have it in me for it to be a solo endeavour, it was always going to be a team effort.

Low Company can't escape being connected or compared with what you've done with Blackest Ever Black, but it felt like there was a distinction in the sound world the shop seemed to align itself with. I had this idea there's almost a creative aesthetic around the particular music that was represented, that almost felt as considered as a DJ set or some other form of expression.

I think that's probably true to some extent. Obviously, it was conscious to some degree, because there was always a desire to represent stuff that was interesting to us, and in a crowded field it makes sense to focus on what maybe makes you different to other people. I don't know if I'd say it's like a DJ set, but there was definitely an element of picking and choosing things from often quite different genres and trying to make it work as something which made sense in its totality. A lot of the time as well, we were just trying to cover our arse and the fact we had so little stock to begin with, because we couldn't afford any.

It's possibly not considered enough, how much the specific stocking decisions of a record shop inform the identity of that shop, and therefore the kind of people that will go there, the general atmosphere of the place.

I definitely always saw it as a finite project. It wasn't something I was trying to build into a large and sustainable business, because, if you're trying to build a large and sustainable business, then, A, don't open a record shop, and B, if you do, record shops that have longevity may have unique things, but they also have no qualms about stocking a Four Tet record or something they're going to sell 100 copies of.

Because I didn't see it as a long-term thing, there was definitely a strong element of actively avoiding stocking anything that we didn’t fully stand behind, and often that was a stupid and suicidal thing to do. But, it sometimes worked to our advantage as well.

It's an anti-business kind of approach, which again ties into this idea of the record shop as an artistic expression...

I've spent most of my life nerdily reading about record shops, going to record shops, devouring every last anecdote about shops... it never ends well. It doesn't matter whether you leave a tiny mark or no mark at all, or make some big difference to things, it always ends in financial ruin and friendships ending, so I went into it completely with my eyes open, and I could see this sort of working for three years minimum, five years at best.

Although we closed this year, I don't think it was because of Coronavirus. I think it was just more that Coronavirus interfered with that timeline I had in mind, and I found it depressing to imagine toughing out the next year or two, which we could have done, to still only be at the point we'd been after three years. I wanted to reach a certain point with it quite quickly, and then stop. When I saw what a struggle it was going to be, to keep it going and overcoming that, and being like, 'Right, we're done,' would have felt a bit strange.

I could name two-dozen other people with shops that have endured a lot and will endure long into the future. And that's because the people running them are fully invested in that. That is something they want to be doing indefinitely, and they're really good at it, and those people will survive anything because they have longevity in mind. If nothing else, COVID made starkly apparent to me what I was conscious of when I first opened the shop, that I wanted to treat it as a finite project and I didn't want it to dominate my life for the next 10-15 years.

Without the COVID interference, at this point in time would you be still thinking consciously about the five-year limit? Or do you think it would be careering along without you worrying too much about it? 

The five-year limit wasn't set in stone. Apart from anything else, it was just what I told my wife so she'd let me do it. It should be said, Coronavirus notwithstanding, running a business does become easier the longer you do it, in some respects. Obviously there were all kinds of unforeseen challenges, which can come out of nowhere, but after three years it was starting to look after itself a little.

We were on this rolling annual contract in the place where we were, and it was a very nice setup, but they were incrementally putting the rent up every year, so it was sleepwalking towards becoming prohibitively expensive and overpriced. We'd found new premises last November we planned to move into. We put in an offer and there were a lot of delays at that end, and come March we suddenly got the contract through, and lockdown was still a little way off but I was already a bit spooked by what I was beginning to see with Coronavirus and people's reaction to it, and I couldn't bring myself to sign the contract. I just put it in a drawer and didn't think about it for a few weeks, and by that time the true lockdown happened and obviously it just seemed absurd to sign a contract for new premises when I didn't even know if we'd be able to trade. If we'd gone ahead with that, it was an eight-year contract.

I think it was a four-year-break clause, but I saw a future opening up where I suddenly was 50 years old and still doing the shop. I don't want to talk about it in quite those terms, because running a shop is a real pleasure. It's more that it's a long time to be looking at new release schedules and worrying about what new records are coming out. The nicest thing about stopping is following and consuming music at my own pace, rather than a pace dictated by the need to have a fully stocked shop and keep up with everyone else.

As you equally well know from your days as a music journalist, it's not always easy to listen to music as a ‘normal’ listener.  

I might complain about the idea I can't listen to music for its own sake, but in a weird way, I don't really want to listen to music for its own sake. It's like I've broken the mechanism which allows me just to listen to something and that be its own thing. It's not like since I stopped doing the shop I now just listen to music in this idyllic vacuum. I always enjoy music for its own sake, but I'm always thinking about an angle on things, or where it could go or where it might lead, or what would happen if people who hadn't heard this thing heard it.

Underlining everything I've done in my life up to this point with music, whether it's journalism, doing a label, shop or distribution, is that impulse, that 'what if?' mentality.

Would you struggle to leave music alone entirely?

This is a debate I was having with my wife this morning, actually. She turned around to me like, ‘there's a lot of boxes of records arriving to the house at the moment. I thought you were starting to wind that down a bit...’

I grew Blackest to the fullest extent that I could without it becoming truly horrible to me. I'm sure a smarter person could have maybe done more with it. But having done that, I didn't have any desire to try and replicate that kind of label. In doing Blackest, I realised the potential of having that kind of platform, but I also saw the limitation of it. I think I reached a point where there were artists I wanted to work with, or records I wanted to put out, but I felt like they would be smothered by being on Blackest, if that makes sense – this realisation certain things should exist on their own, they don't need to be subsumed into a label identity.

With the shop, that's something I found myself doing. There might be someone I wanted to work with, or someone whose record I liked, and instead of saying, ‘I've got a label, should we put your record out?’ it became more like, ‘You've made this thing. You should put it out as a record. Do you want help? Just do a release as an interesting little underground thing. I can pretty much guarantee you will be able to sell it and you'll get some money back, and that's it, end of.’ And that's something I've done with quite a few people now. In some cases it is more like a proper label, the artist's label, and I'm doing the manufacturing and distribution for them. With some stuff, it's a little bit more collaborative like, ‘I think these tracks you've done would make a really good 12”. You come up with how you want to present it and I'll help you make it.’

Obviously, there's also the Low Company label, which is more like a label in the conventional sense, but again, there's no grand concept to it. The only criteria for the label was, I only ever put out stuff I wanted to put out, and I didn't let the others [Sanjay and Kenny] participate in what the releases were, but I had to believe it was something I knew they would like, and they would feel good being associated with. Even now I'm back to being a solo operation, I still have Kenny and Sanjay in mind when I'm thinking about new releases.

Then the last thing I'll say, which actually addresses the first question you asked about why you would start a shop in the first place, I just wanted to be able to put out and sell records without having to be part of the global conversation. I didn't want to have to think about things like press. I wanted to create a bit of a closed world to some degree. What's really interesting to me now is, with Low Company and associated labels, I can do a record and sell 500 or 1000 copies, to all intents and purposes a success, but it can at the same time remain totally invisible outside of that little world you've made.

To me that whole vibe of Low Company feels so intriguing, where the things you're offering all feel so alien and mysterious to me. It was like when I was a kid going into Rough Trade or the early days of surfing on Boomkat and just having no idea about all the exotic music on offer.

Those two words that you use are exactly the words that I would use. What I'm looking for in things is alien and mysterious. Mystique is quite hard to come by. Most of the artists and musicians I respect most are the ones that to this day still have no social media profile whatsoever.  

The other great elephant in the room when you're talking about record shops now is that records are not how people enjoy and consume music. It's quite hard trying to find an accommodation between Spotify and Bandcamp and being a record shop selling records, so we gravitated towards stuff that tended to be weird vinyl-only new releases or what have you, because that was the stuff you could get excited about and get people excited about. It's much harder to get people excited about something available in every format, and to stream, in full, for free, now.

Again it's holding on to that idea of the mystique and the mysteriousness around this constant quest for the great undiscovered music, and that sense of walking into a place and knowing that the things you find will have some kind of rarity.

You don't have to go to a physical shop for that, but it can definitely send you off on pathways you might otherwise not have found, and there's a real value to that. It sounds a bit twee, but I've always been attracted to the idea that records are like doorways. I’ll gravitate towards a particular record, and it's a doorway to something else. And quite often, once I've walked through the door, the door itself doesn't hold as much interest to me, but that's what I love doing. For lots of people who are really into music, the journey is everything. You never reach the end point, but everything leads to something else. And that's what we can never really give up.

Let's talk a little bit about the rest of the team involved. I feel like they're deserving of a shout out in this thing.

Not just a shout out, because they massively shaped what the shop was, and even what it is in its strange label-distributor afterlife now. I still have them in my mind all the time, strangely, and I still annoy them with lots of questions on WhatsApp about how to do the stuff I used to make them do.

So I mentioned Sanjay before. He started working for me about eight years ago. He was Blackest Ever Black’s one and only employee in Berlin when I was first thinking about the shop and moving back to England. He's Australian, and he was young enough to not feel too rooted anywhere. And he said, ‘You're moving back to England, I'll move as well, and if you're opening a shop, I'll help you do it.’ I think he saw the potential in the idea early on and was quite encouraging, so he was the backbone of the thing.

There was always a running joke with Sanjay that he basically hates music, he's the last person who should be working in a record shop. Even more than he hates music, he hates people who are obsessed with music. So you never really know where you stand with him, which customers really loved. I honestly think nine out of 10 of our customers just came to the shop to talk to Sanjay - you could also guarantee he wouldn't talk to you about music, which again was one of the things that made me realise a record shop serves higher purposes. It was the sort of Cheers mentality… he was our Ted Danson. 

And then I met Kenny, who is a little bit younger, around the time I’d just moved back to England, was getting serious about finding a place for the shop. Again, we didn't talk about music. I just liked his vibe, or whatever you want to call it. I was just trying to think, ‘if there were three people doing this, can I imagine the three of us getting on and not killing each other?’

Kenny ended up a really significant driving force behind the shop, because Sanjay didn't care for all the petty fanboy, nerdy aspects of it that some of us live and breathe, whereas being proper about everything was really important to Kenny. So much of the decision making process for the shop was, ‘Will this embarrass Kenny?’ He was the necessary motivation I needed. Someone who I felt knew more than me, and was even more obsessive and had better taste than me. In some ways, he both worked for the shop, and he was the ideal customer. In the first year we were flailing around a little bit, because Kenny was more deferential to me, and I think the shop actually started to take flight a little bit when he became a bit more confident and assertive.

On top of that, Kenny and me wrote all the blurbs on the website. We almost imitated each other to the point where it becomes inseparable who's writing it. It was about trying to find this voice. I still had the residual music journalist in me being quite formal about the way we described things, and he liberated us from that by having more fun with it. It felt like we were writing them for each other's amusement and entertainment, and that was a really nice place to be.

If it sounds like I've given Kenny more credit then Sanjay, it's because Sanjay did all the jobs no one else was willing to do, and was thus infinitely more valuable. He was like our mum, keeping the wheels turning.

We also had Estelle who worked for us part time and Carla at the beginning, but again an important part of the conversation about everything. It really felt like we had a nice little balance there. And, when I did decide to stop doing the shop, needless to say, the saddest thing was knowing that era was over. It was hard to imagine us all sat around in masks, maintaining our distance. I'm sure we would have found a way, but we decided to quit while we were ahead.

I think we all already look back on it as this almost magical time in our lives. For all the faff and hassle involved, I'm really glad we did it when we did.

If we'd been serious about it being a long-term endeavour, we would have maybe started tightening it up and settling it down and being a bit less cavalier about things, but now it's done, I look back on it and think, it was a very enjoyable three years of being totally cavalier. And it's nice it ended when it ended.