It started with one record.
Looking for shipping or FAQ? →deadwax is a two-person operation run out of Aotearoa by people who lived this music the first time around, and never quite got over it.
I was 14, in Wellington, when I got a copy of U.S.U.R.A's Open Your Mind. Blasting it on the family stereo, it rearranged something in my head. From then on, dance music was the centre of everything for me.
For years that was my whole world. Warehouses, flats, doofs in the bush. I hitched my way into The Gathering in Nelson and saw the new millennium in at g2000. I went to everything I could afford to go to.
I started making tracks under the name agentseven and put out a couple of CDs, selling my first lot on mp3.com, back when it felt like the internet might finally give unsigned artists a shot. I was never going to top the charts, and as a broke-ass student I couldn't afford the gear I wanted. Didn't matter. I loved the process, the sounds, the people.
Then life took over. Business and adulting took priority, I stopped wearing the clothes and going to raves, and I lost touch with the scene for years.
What brought it back was a fairly decent health scare. It has a way of making you ask who you actually are. My wife and I dug the records out, sorted a new turntable, and now most evenings end with something on the deck. Cushla wanted to do something like this for years, so she pushed on and created deadwax.
We bought a lot of vinyl getting here, and we ran through what the local shops had pretty fast. New Zealand has good vendors, but there's room for more tastes and more corners of the map. So we started deadwax, importing the stuff we love, the stuff we can't find and the stuff that takes us back.
These days it's family life and the two of us running the shop, and our daughter's getting into drum & bass all on her own.
What we're about
deadwax is deep, driving, non-commercial vinyl, and we keep it tight. No brostep, and we try to avoid the heavy commercialised stuff (but occasionally we sneak a bit of cheese in). We're after the deeper, more polarising stuff; the records that don't try to please everyone. Our taste runs across the genres — hit us up if you have any recs.
Every record is hand-picked by us and in stock right here in Hamilton, Aotearoa, ready to go. No six-week wait from an overseas warehouse.
If that's your frequency, you're among your people.