Influenced by the long-gone Fallout Records, Hex Enduction has become a paragon of community-building. by Dave Segal In music retail, trying to be all things to all people usually consigns businesses to history's dustbin. The owners of Lake City's Hex Enduction Records & Books figured that out a while ago. And now they're celebrating five years of peddling exactly what they want to avid music and literature fans who seek out niche art. Owners Dean Whitmore, Gabi Page-Fort, and Tom Ojendyk have discovered that a retailer—if their aesthetics are righteous enough—can thrive simply by selling goods in which they 100% believe. What a concept. But beyond being one of Seattle's most interesting music and literature retailers, Hex Enduction is a full-fledged multimedia empire, albeit on an underground scale. It has expanded its reach to include publishing books and a quarterly zine, releasing records, hosting live music and readings/author interviews (I had the pleasure of interviewing Mudhoney's Steve Turner and New Zealand indie-rock expert Matthew Goody at one of the latter), and serving as a gallery for local artists. Influenced by the long-gone Fallout Records, Hex Enduction has become a paragon of community-building. You could witness the gratitude the shop's inspired over the last half decade at its anniversary party held at neighboring Turntables & Trails on November 9, as a dozens of aesthetes took in sets by the Fall-Outs, Kurt Bloch's "No" 3, and Martin Bland of La Paire D'or.  If Hex's owners don't like it, they don't sell it. BILLIE WINTER The Stranger's interview with Hex Enduction's principals on their home turf occurred on November 6. Shellshocked by the election, I asked them if they're going to move the shop to Canada. True to form, Page-Fort—who oversees the book section and is also an editor at HarperCollins—said, "I pulled this out," holding up a copy of Jackie Wang's poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void. Hex Enduction ain't going anywhere, thankfully.  Whitmore—who put in 20 years at Sub Pop in the retail sales department—notes that Hex Enduction's "progression has always been going upwards, but it's at a really slow pace. I'm not spending all of the money, so we act a bit like a real business." Ojendyk adds that the store "feels more established and known." While 10-15% of Hex's sales occur on Discogs.com, its bosses prefer in-store exchanges. "One, you make more money, because you don't have all the fees associated with Discogs transactions," Ojendyk says. "There's also the normal interaction with the customer, which is cooler. It's also more fun to see someone get a record that they're psyched about than getting a new record in and mailing it off to wherever." Whitmore concurs that engaging patrons in conversations about the stuff they're buying is a fringe benefit. Thus, Hex forges strong bonds and its customers look forward to returning to the site of such rewarding encounters. Soulless capitalism has no place here.  Soulless capitalism has no place at Hex. BILLIE WINTER After signing the lease in July 2019, Hex's owners only had a few months to stock it—mostly with vinyl, although cassettes and CDs occupy some space. Over the years, they've added bins and figured out ways to optimize its minuscule square footage. "Initially, the books were a third of what they are now," says Ojendyk, who also works in business operations at Razorfish. "We've nearly doubled the stock of records since we opened. We also expanded a lot of the genres. When we opened, we didn't really have any hip-hop. Reggae, we only had a handful of titles, but certainly not a devoted section."  "We just carry what we're interested in," Whitmore says. "I'm on a total jazz bender, so the jazz section has been growing and growing. But there is some learning involved. Some things that you think are the end-all be-all records... maybe everyone who wants those records already has them. You learn about what doesn't make sense to carry. Also, it used to be when something sold, I immediately wanted it back in. Now, I really don't care. As long as you've got new, cool stuff coming in, that's all that matters." Page-Fort says, "On the books front, I thought that the poetry and the fiction in translation, which is what I most like, would be a hard sell. Actually, they're the most [popular] section. People especially care about Japanese novels [in translation]. We get a pretty good scene of younger readers coming in, and they're excited by the poetry and international stuff."  "People are coming in for the good stuff!" says Hex co-owner Gabi Page-Fort. BILLIE WINTER Hex sells new books, too. "I thought it was going to be more of a cheap paperbacks used business, but I'm impressed that everybody's just as impressed with the new stuff as I am," Page-Fort says. "New hardcover fiction has been tough, because it's expensive. But as soon as things are in paperback, if I think they're exciting, other people seem to, as well. We have a lot of indie and small-press stuff that is hard to find.  Some of Hex's bestsellers include Val Wilmer's As Serious as Your Life and Marcus O'Dair's Robert Wyatt biography, Different Every Time. "People are coming in for the good stuff!" Page-Fort enthuses. "The Brandi Carlile autobiography left eventually, but these guys have trained me fully on the 'don't buy it unless you want to look at it in a year' rule. Some of the best used buys that come in are from a handful of older readers in the neighborhood whom I adore. I've made some very cool new friends because of the books that they sell." Page-Fort encourages you to sell your books at Hex, but do know that she's selective and not in the shop that often, so it may take a few days to finalize deals. Hex isn't where you score platters by Beyoncé, Sabrina Carpenter, and other mainstream acts. Rather, it's where you go when you need to plug in crucial gaps in your classic-rock and canonical-jazz collections. It's where you can pick up essentials in the soul, funk, psych, krautrock, soundtrack, experimental, reggae, hip-hop, and "world" genres. (Knowledgeable part-time clerk Matt Olsen handles orders for indie-rock staples released by strongholds such as Matador, Merge, and Drag City.) Hex Enduction: Not afraid to get weird. BILLIE WINTER  Take it from someone who's haunted record stores for five decades: Hex is acutely tuned in to the zenith of all these musical styles. You can glimpse their expertise on a daily basis through the shop's Instagram feed. I could easily spend hundreds of dollars a week there, were my budget unlimited.  Whitmore breaks down the Hex ethos: "Do we like it? Are we interested? Do we respect it? Then you just let the chips fall where they may. We've taken a few chances on things that are a slight stretch and people don't like to buy them here. Like, when we got a used Harry Styles record, that sat in here forever. That fuckin' Ryan Adams record was staring me in the face... Not only do we not like it and not want to have it in here, but people don't want to buy it here. So it works out nicely." Hex's used bins frequently receive out-of-print exclusives from prominent underground musicians, which makes digging here an extra-special treat. "The caliber of [people] selling their old shit here is part of the story," Page-Fort says.  Hex's customers intuitively sense that the owners operate not to maximize profits so much as to present them with the coolest musical and literary artifacts. Perhaps Whitmore and Page-Fort being musicians themselves in the prog-punk group Tissue lends them deeper insights into what will appeal to their clientele. Their retail success has spread to extracurricular activities: Hex Enduction Records' 2022 expanded reissue of Seattle garage-punks the Fall-Outs' 1986 debut album, retitled Fine Young Men, is down to its last five copies out of 400. "As soon as we announced that record, everybody bought it," Page-Fort says. The label's second release, La Paire D'or's Travelogue, ventures into synth-heavy, propulsive space rock, about which I raved about it on Slog earlier this year.  The first two books Hex has published—musician Philip Frobos's novel Vague Enough to Satisfy and Jensen Tjhung's poetry collection Old Fashioned Superstition—have sold well, thanks in part to support from Elliott Bay Book Co. and other independents. The third, Felicia Howe's recently released philosophical-botanical study, Sibyl of the Flora, promises to reveal "the intricate connections between flowers, healing, and spirituality." Hex's bosses are all pleasantly surprised at these books' sales figures.  The 16th edition of the Hex Enduction Quarterly zine just dropped, and it's another little bundle of fascinating surprises: essays, photos, music and literary criticism, interviews, poetry, comics, advice, esoterica, and Whitmore's amusing peeks behind the music-retail biz. "People who read the zine because they grab it here want to be in it," Page-Fort says. "It's consistently checking in with what people want to be making anyway and sharing around. It's a present-tense magic that it captures. You feel inspired that there are all these people doing interesting art.  "This quarter we have Tom on the Angel Face reissue and the revivification of Lucky Records. He's incredible on the opaque corners of the universe. It's also fun to shine a light on the new Red Ribbon record and the new J.R.C.G. record and other people we think are making rad stuff."  Currently hanging on Hex's wall is Bridget Beorse's art. It's yet another way Hex's staff champion local artists. "It's nice to see how [their] folks come around to support them," Page-Fort says. "We've met a lot of interesting people through the events."  Co-owner Dean Whitmore says of the Hex ethos: "Do we like it? Are we interested? Do we respect it? Then you just let the chips fall where they may." BILLIE WINTER Lest you think Hex's customer base is strictly the domain of older folks who can't quit their analog-loving habits, it's more diverse than you'd think. "Obviously there are a lot of older men," Ojendyk observes. "But a lot of younger people come in, people of different backgrounds. This is one of the more diverse neighborhoods in Seattle." "Last week an Ethiopian couple came in and slapped their injera up on the CDs and did their shopping, which seemed pretty cool to me," Whitmore says. "They bought a bunch of Mulatu Astatke records."  Granted, America and the world now seem to be in a more peril than ever, but Hex Enduction's tiny corner of the cultureverse keeps on chugging. "We're never in a complete 'oh my god, what are we going to do?' state," Whitmore says. "The racks are always full of records, we're always paying our bills. But we're definitely modest about how we go about doing it. We like being [in Lake City] because our rent is so cheap. It enables us to have the kind of store that we want to have. If we were to move to Capitol Hill or something, there would just be that pressure. We'd have to change what we carry."    Does Hex's braintrust feel like the stock is getting to be too much for the amount of space they have, though? Page-Fort replies, "That limiting factor is magic."