We head all the way to the beautiful Baltics, to chew the fat with Allan Mastov, owner of the carefully curated Uperkuut Records, to talk music, vinyl, and not letting fear get in the way of a good thing.
The small yet perfectly formed Uperkuut Records store sits in the vibrant Balti Jaama Market, in Tallinn - slinging out a wide variety of records, from Estonian Jazz, to George Michael. The owner, Allan Mastov, is creating a space for artists, musicians and community to come together under the banner of music.
Allan, thank you so much for sharing your time with us! To get things started, could you give us an overview of Uperkuut Records – what is your history, how did you start?
I actually didn't have a plan to start a record shop because of all the calculations I have done. Of course, I thought about starting a record shop. But all the calculations I have done to start a record shop in a city that's only 400,000 people...it's quite difficult. I made a couple of Excel sheets but it always turned red and never turned green. One day I was visiting Balti Jaama Market. Somebody I know from the board of the market approached me and said that they know that I'm into vinyl, so maybe I know somebody who could be interested in starting a record shop. So I said I will definitely find somebody who is interested because it was a great location in Tallinn for a record shop. I went home and I talked to my wife and she said "why are you not doing it yourself’? If you are not doing it right now, then you are never gonna do it". And, I always listening to my wife. So I did it. I started it. From the idea to the opening of the shop took something like a month.
That's a really quick turn around. That feels like a real convergence of your desires and fate coming together to make that happen. Did it happen so quickly that you didn't have time to doubt yourself or doubt the process?
That actually did help! You have a lot to do because you're doing it alone. There are all the agreements you have to sign. That starts with internet connections. That ends with the rent agreements. You have to buy a stock of records. You have to make all the contracts with the distributors and so on. So it's quite a lot of jobs and if you do it quite quickly, you don't have time to worry about it.
Perfect. We like that way of working. Sometimes we think that's helpful - to not let fear creep in and to interrupt the process.
Yeah, exactly. The main thing to think about is - 'Am I gonna do it or am I gonna not do it?' And if you decide that you are gonna do it, then you have to do it and then see what happens.
We really like the boldness and that really fits with kind of the ethos of TheNeverZine. What do you think makes a great record shop?
I'm a record digger and record buyer myself as well so I know what kind of a shop I would like. I really like the small shops that are curated, where you can speak to the owner. And that's also a very important thing for me if I go on my trips, I always visit the record shops and I talk to the shop owners and I like to buy local music. So that was the main idea, to talk about the music, to see people face to face, to recommend some music, to get some recommendations from the visitor. That's something that you can't do online. In online shops you do the work by yourself. You find the music, you listen to it, you are sure you want it, then you buy it. Then you wait a week and then it arrives. I understand it's comfortable and it's convenient and to some people who are not very social, they like that kind of approach. I can't compete with the big record shops online, who have some half a million records and they have definitely better prices than I have in my physical shop. I wanted it to be a meeting place and a place to listen to vinyls and to talk about music.
That's cool because you have beautifully described our visit to your store. We love the ability of a good record store like yours to expand the musical spider web, to break us out of the algorithmic musical bubble we can easily get trapped in.
I very much like Estonian music. As a very small nation, we have done a lot of great music and we are pressing a lot of great records right now. So also my idea is to get a lot of Estonian musicians and their vinyls into my shop so I can recommend them to the people who come to visit Estonia. This is exactly what I did with you and I do with other customers as well. Somebody came from the Netherlands - he was a radio DJ, so he put together a show based only on Estonian music. And I listened to that and it was superb. I didn't understand what they were talking about, but I understood the music, and I think he had a great selection that was based on my recommendations and the things that we listened to. So that's really important for me as well. So I take Estonian artists' records always into my shop to sell them.
We have recently had a dive into the Spotify playlists that your store curates alongside some guest curators which displays the wide range of music coming out of Estonia right now. How useful are those Spotify playlists for spreading the word?
We speak about music, we recommend music. That's a community I'm trying to build around the record shop. So there are lots of musicians, and people who are interested in music, I ask them to make playlists for my record shop and everybody is very eager to do it. So that's helping in building the community and to bring something to the physical record shop that's also doable via online. It helps to spread the word.
Speaking about the community - how important do you feel independent record stores such as Uperkuut Records are for the communities that they serve?
I think they are very, very important. I think that the cities that have record shops, the more they have, it's like bookshops - it means that the community is intelligent and the people in the city, if they listen to music and they read books, they are definitely engaged, and that's a great city to visit. When I travel, even the big record shops are curating. So you can get a taste of that country and you can feel what they do.
We're always so excited to find any kind of new music and we're aware that we can get trapped in our bubble of music and sometimes it can get hard to break free from it. This sounds like an amazing benefit to running a record store - that you have to listen to the more ‘mainstream’ music or listen to things that maybe you wouldn't be otherwise inclined to listen to immediately.
Exactly. You said it perfectly. People are too comfortable listening to the music that they listen to, sometimes. They have listened to it when they were 18 and 23, and they're still listening to that music and they're not evolving. You can't read the same book every week. But sometimes people think that they can listen to Nevermind album all day. I understand that kind of nostalgia - when you were young and you were sexy and you were cool, all that comes to mind. I think that the most interesting thing about music is that you go on and you go on and you discover the new things and you discover the old things and you discover some other genres that you have never listened to before. And that's the most interesting part, the journey of listening to music.
So we talked about working with and being a part of the local community. How do you find yourself supporting independent artists? You've talked about stocking lots of Estonian records, could you tell us a little bit more about how you support independent artists and how you tap into the local community to find artists to work with?
Estonia is such a small country that everybody knows everybody. If you don't know everybody then you know somebody that knows everybody. I listen to a lot of music and I am aware of what's coming up and I speak to the musicians. What are their plans and when are they going to release something? I always tell them to bring the records, especially the records I really like, to my shop and I try to sell them. As I understand, they are very happy that their records have made it to London, Birmingham, Amsterdam, New York. They are very happy that people take them with them and they listen to it abroad.
To wrap things up, and in the spirit of Uperkuut Records and expanding the musical bubble - do you have any musical recommendations for our readers?
My pleasure! In fact, I put this playlist together...enjoy!
We're constantly on the look out for new artists, creatives and initiatives to feature in TheNeverZine - so if you are, or know someone who is going their own way and doing their own thing on their own terms and would be a good fit to feature please smash that button below and get in contact. By talking to each other, and sharing our journeys, ideas and insights on creativity, art, mental health and resilience we can all create, share and thrive together. Nice thought that.
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