With Elevated Music, Bill Haggerty has taken his music production work to another level.
The Surrey-based record producer, audio engineer and musician has opened a record store under that name as well.
In Cloverdale, the shop buys and sells vinyl, CDs, cassettes, some clothing and “culture,” as Haggerty calls it.
Elevated Music opened last August on 57th Avenue, a few blocks from where the Urban Safari store has become Redrum Records, on 176th Street.
“When I was a kid,” Haggerty recalled, “I always thought it’d be cool to have a record store like this, and as my career started to grow with the production side of things, I was collecting (records). I’d always been a collector from way back, and it got to the point where I didn’t need five copies of Dark Side of the Moon anymore.”
The store became Haggerty’s pandemic project, at a time when more people are spending days and nights at home.
“People come in here and tell me they’re playing music more and digging through their collections, because they have time for it,” he noted. “It’s vinyl or whatever they have, and they’re selling it and also buying it too.”
Raised in Newton, the 34-year-old Haggerty was a drummer before he got into producing music. He went to school at Harbourside Institute of Technology (now SAE) in North Van before creating Elevated in 2011 as a vehicle for his work.
“A decade ago I was setting up shows and recruiting musicians and rappers from the area and putting together community shows, charging a bit at the door and providing an opportunity for guys to perform,” Haggerty recalled. “A lot of them were happening at Olympia Pizza, the place in Whalley. And we did a tour up to Kamloops, some of the Interior towns, and after that I pretty much disbanded doing the live shows and focused more on production work and honed in on that craft as a music producer.”
Along the way he began collecting more and more records, now sold in the store.
“This is just another branch of Elevated, and I’m still active on the production side – everything is building up,” Haggerty said.
“With this, we didn’t hire contractors, we did all the work ourselves, designed and built all the record racks, the CD racks, the layout, everything,” he added. “We conceptualized it and just made it happen, all during the pandemic. I’d been looking for a place to do this for the past couple of years, and nothing ever came to fruition. I just jumped in and pivoted to this the best I could.”
The store is online at elevatedmusic.ca/the-record-shop and also facebook.com/ElevatedMusicOfficial.
Meantime, Redrum Records stores can now be found in Cloverdale, White Rock, Aldergrove and New Westminster.
“We are an old-school record shop, with thousands of vintage albums, alongside tons of new pressings, and perhaps the largest collection of Japanese pressings in the province,” boasts a post on redrumrecords.ca. “We buy vintage records every day, and we order in new pressings every week, so there is always something new. Plus, we are happy to try and find any new pressing for you from our distributors: just fill out our “Gimme Gimme I want” form in the store, or shoot us an email at contact@redrumrecords.ca, and we will see if we can get it for you.”
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