Andy Breslau was browsing at Ergot Records a couple of years ago when he stopped short. The East Village shop had an entire section devoted to the relatively obscure folk singer Kath Bloom and her longtime guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors.

“I put out a record by these guys,” Breslau told the man behind the counter.

Breslau, who now runs communications at the Alliance for Downtown New York, is a lifelong music fan who ran the short-lived label Ambiguous Records in the early 1980s. Ambiguous had exactly three releases: an EP by the Young Snakes, an art-punk band featuring a then-unknown singer named Aimee Mann; an album by long-forgotten Boston new-wave band the Dark; and an LP by Bloom and Connors called “Sing the Children Over.”

Breslau had pressed 1,200 LPs back in 1982, but with little demand at the time, they went largely unsold. He had hundreds of leftover copies sitting in the basement of his second home in the tiny island town of Vinalhaven, Maine. They’d been untouched for decades.

Ergot’s proprietor Adrian Rew couldn’t believe the story he was hearing, and he offered to buy whatever records Breslau had left.

Rew is the kind of classic record store owner who can spot an overlooked piece of music that will delight his customers even if the rest of the world ignores it. When Gothamist spoke to him about the album, he used an extended Philip K. Dick analogy to explain why people like objects with a backstory.

“Those records are incredibly rare. ... I thought he had a box,” Rew said in a recent interview at the shop, a below-street-level sanctuary off the tacos-and-margs corridor of Second Avenue. “Turns out he had 500 copies.”

Breslau said he kept his copies “with some secret wish that one day the world would turn its attention to the intriguing beauty of the music.” Breslau had discovered Bloom and Connors through one of their home recordings.

“It was deeply moving and transfixing,” he said. “The combination of Loren’s freeform Blind Willie Johnson playing and Kath’s incredibly connected emotional vulnerability and songwriting just rocked me.”

Bloom, who was most active in the 1970s and ‘80s, was a lesser-known contemporary of singers like Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton and Judee Sill. But she’s perhaps best known from the key role her music plays in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film “Before Sunrise,” soundtracking a pivotal scene of the two main characters falling in love.

That soundtrack moment helped spark a late-career renaissance, with Bloom recording and touring again. (She’ll have copies of “Sing the Children” for sale with her on an upcoming tour.) But for those already in the know, her earlier work with Connors holds a distinct and haunting place in American folk music. Connors is an icon in his own right — his blues-inflected experimental guitar playing has been lauded by the likes of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and he’s enjoyed a prolific career with dozens of releases.

“Sing the Children Over” is half originals and half covers of traditional folk songs. It was recorded in a studio in Watertown, Massachusetts, but has the intimacy of a home recording. Songs like “The Breeze / My Baby Cries” have the same plaintive and emotional vocal that worked so well for Linklater’s film.

“This is music that’s foremost about a certain primacy of emotion and transparency and a commitment to a kind of radical empathy,” Breslau said of the record. “There’s nothing memeable about it. There’s nothing pop about it, there’s nothing necessarily easy."

After he and Rew worked out a deal for the remaining albums, Breslau shipped the records down to the city. But there was a problem: After some 40 years in storage, more than half of the vinyl was warped — bent out of shape to the point of being unplayable.

Luckily, Rew had a device known as a dewarping machine. He spent more than a year slowly restoring each vinyl, a process that took roughly five hours per record and involved heating it, reshaping it and cooling it back down.

Once he had enough in good shape, Rew put a short post on Ergot’s Instagram announcing the records for sale. Due to their scarcity, used copies of the album had been going for over $100; Rew was selling the deadstock for $30 apiece. “I sold 200 copies online in two hours,” he said. “Then I shut it down.”

He sold another 150 in person at a record fair and has held onto the rest for a few interested record shops around the world. Breslau sent some of the proceeds to Bloom and Connors, who were pleasantly surprised.

Jeremy Larson, a deputy director at Pitchfork who bought a copy of the record, said the album’s new life felt to him like fate. He’d long been wanting to dive into Bloom’s catalog.

“I wanted to get to the other folkies first,” Larson said. “So when I saw that this record was being sold, I was like, this seems like the universe telling me now is the time.”

The music itself — lo-fi and unadorned — caught him off guard. “It’s very human,” he said. “Not a lot of artifice there. Just two people in a room. … I love music that can bring me into their world.”

Rew said he wasn’t sure a discovery like this could be repeated.

“I mean, I hope it happens again,” he said. “But I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime find for me.”