Hemlock Bazaar

Hemlock Bazaar carries the Analog Revolution story into Ellijay: part coffee shop, part bookstore, part record shop, and part Appalachian creative hub. Andrew's answers trace the line from a Marietta all-ages venue and zine culture to North Georgia records, hi-fi gear, studio work, local releases, toys, coffee, and self-hosted TV.

Interview with Hemlock Bazaar

Analog Revolution went from "an ass-kickin' record store" in Marietta to slinging records inside Hemlock Bazaar up in Ellijay — a coffee-book-record Appalachian marketplace. How did that move and mash-up come together?

This is a long story. Sorry.

I opened Analog Revolution with my buddy Ryan Storyer in 2014 (I think? It's been a long time.) He was a student at Kennesaw State University at the time. We met working at Sweet Melissa Records on the Marietta Square (Jim and Melissa are great, by the way. Their shop is incredible.) While we were working there, I learned a lot about how to pick, how to buy, how to grade, and I got a world class education in how to run a business. This was from 2009 to 2011 or so, through the first couple of Record Store Days.

I left the store to start doing professional web development, but I stayed in touch with Ryan.

In 2012 or so, Ryan and I decided we wanted to open a record store of our own, but we didn't have any money. We were living through the recovery from the '08 collapse. We were in our early 20s, and we were broke.

So we planned, a lot. Like, multiple hours a week of just gameplaning and working through how we wanted the store to run, and scheming on what we could make ourselves. (Around this time we did some real wacky stuff like resin casting records, I can get into more detail if you want.) Ultimately, we built a plan to raise money to open the store.

First, we started writing a zine about local music, and then we started designing and manufacturing speakers. I went down a rabbit hole learning about sound reproduction, and designed a pair of speakers that we could manufacture and sell for fifty bucks. They were barebones as all hell, but they sounded great and we sold a bunch of them.

And, in the mean time, we started writing about local music. We got real involved in the metro-atlanta scene, and got to know a lot of the players.

We raised a little money, we built a huge network of volunteers, and we put the things we'd learned working at Sweet Melissa Records to work, building a huge collection of great but not especially well known music that we could buy cheap and sell cheap.

We rented the spare room inside a little sketchy all ages concert venue called Swayze's. The owner and operator of Swayze's was going through some stuff at the time, and the venue was barely functional. So we stepped in and booked shows, sold records, made merch (including the first CDs for Michael Cera Palin (and half a dozen other bands), cassettes, t-shirts, and posters.) We had some cheap, crappy recording equipment and turned what had been the "green room" at the venue into a wild little lo-fi recording studio, taping live shows to 4 track cassette or 8 track digital (or both!)

Some of that stuff ended up on youtube, some of it ended up on bandcamp, some of it only lives on my harddrive. Some of the folks from KSU did a short documentary about vinyl in general and Ryan and I feature pretty heavilly in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdRxbdpoCY

In 2016, we closed the shop. It was supposed to be temporary. Ryan was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. My (now) wife and I were trying to find a stand alone location for us to move the store to, so that we didn't have to continue to share a space with the venue. The plan was to re-open in the fall.

And then my wife got a job in DC, and Ryan hurt himself and bailed on the AT, and ... well, the three of us moved to DC. We tried to figure out how to open a record store up there, but things in that area were so expensive, and ... well, 2016 was complicated and difficult for a lot of people.

A couple of years passed, and in that time Ryan and I kept the magazine going, kept making hifi gear, kept making CDs and tapes, but we didn't have a record store and so we went back to planning. And those plans eventually became the Ellijay Makerspace. My mom got sick, and Ellijay was half way between where she lived and where my dad was living. My wife and I bought a place in the area, got to know the locals, fell in love with the local coffee shop.

My mom eventually passed away, and a job opportunity took me back to DC, but we kept our house in Ellijay and spent some time in the area every year. Ryan ended up in Asheville and things were kind of dark for a while. And then March 2020 happened. The owners of the coffee shop emailed me to let me know they were closing for shelter-in-place and wouldn't be re-openning, and so I got on the phone with my boss, and started trying to figure out how we could get back to GA full time and take over the space.

It took a few months, but we pulled it off, and Ryan followed shortly behind us. We took over the coffee shop, and pulled the remaining inventory from our original record store out of storage and started selling records in the shop, and slowly made the shop our own, bringing in toys and roasting our own coffee and eventually changing the name and adding a full bookstore. Along the way, we openned our makerspace (wtih a full recording studio) and started putting out vinyl LPs with Physical Music Production out of Nashville, and we launched a television network. (https://newellijay.tv)

And, finally, I quit my job and left the tech industry because I couldn't stand what AI was doing to it, and started making toys and TV full time.

You don't just sell records — you build hi-fi gear, run a label and studio, and put out North Georgia artists like Doctor Deathray and Eli Pop. How do all those pieces fit under one roof?

There are ... three roofs. The cofee shop, book store, and record store are on main street. The makerspace is up the road where we run the recording studio, television studio, pottery studio, and coffee roasting, and all of those things trickle back through the shop. And then there's our little workshop where I make toys and cartoons.

Ellijay's in Apple Country near Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Trail — who comes through Hemlock Bazaar, and what's the North Georgia scene like?

The appalachian trail looms large in our personal mythology. My co-founder Ryan is a throughhiker who started on the Appalachian trail, and has since hiked ... lots, the PCT, the great divide, a bunch of trails that only other through hikers know.

The north GA scene... in some ways it's just the overlap between Chattanooga and Metro-atlanta, but in other ways it's much weirder than that. We get country, southern rock, and folk musicians here in greater density than we did closer to the city. The audience at our concerts tends to skew a little older up here than it did when we were in the metro (that makes sense, we have a lot of retirees in the mountains) but they still show up and throw down for Doctor Deathray and Red Hot Empty. We also have a huge LGBTQ+ community, which was a pleasant surprise to me. We're still running our little punk zine, and it's more political than ever, and that tends to help us attract a whole cadre of weirdos.

You carry new and vintage vinyl and you buy and sell — when a collection comes in, what are you looking for?

Personally? Psych and garage, anything on Mainstream or the weirder GNP crescendo releases. Beyond that, I always get excited for punk, early metal, and all kinds of Jazz. But those are the kinds of things that rarely walk through the door. (I say that... I just put out a bunch of early SST stuff, and a couple of records from The Seeds that walked in off the street.)

But, for the shop, I'm looking for Guitars. I'm looking for the kind of record that folks might not know, but that turns heads when I play it. This mostly means bands that were big in their day but haven't stayed in the zeitgeist. Anything super guitar forward tends to move pretty quickly. I'm especially interested in bands like Mountain that have one ore two songs people know and 4 or 5 albums that I can consistently sell by playing a track or two. Any John Mayall album tends to fall in that bucket too.

What's the most valuable or surprising record that's come through the door?

I bought a collection last year with two second state butcher covers and a bunch of beatles bootlegs, that was fun. Beyond that, the SST stuff that came in a few weeks ago was nice. But, honestly, I'm kind of over rare and expensive, and way more interested in rare and weird, or local stuff.

Years ago I got an album called The Entertaining World of Floyd Robbinson. Floyd was a one hit wonder country singer who's most well known song was called "Making Love". The record was odd, half of it was just the most boring pop/country, the other half was these crazy looping instrumental covers of contry standards. They went wild, almost into dub territory.

I got a box like twenty copies of a record by Cy Timmons called The World's Greatest Unknown. Cy was a metro-atlanta performer, a staple of the 70s scene. This is a private press record that was usually packaged in hand made denim sleeves. It's got this kind of weird psych-folk vibe. (Someone uploaded the record to youtube a few years back https://youtu.be/-0XI8plX6xI?si=jjLs5sDz8NaNqg2A&t=733 )

I get excited about things like that, but I get equally excited about modern indie releases.

Building hi-fi gear yourself, you hear records at their best — what condition problems hurt a record most, and should sellers clean them or leave it to you?

I... am probably more forgiving than most audiophiles when it comes to a rough record. If it plays through, and the noise floor isn't too high, I don't really care. What hurts the most, for me, is when I find a clean good looking record that sounds like garbage because someone played it to death with a ceramic cartridge and too much tracking force. A bad scratch or a dirty record will sound bad, but it's obvious at a glance. Deep groove wear from cheap record players is invisible, and it breaks my heart.

I usually clean what we sell. I play test most of what we sell, but I also clean most of what I buy for myself and I'm not particular about if they've been cleaned before.

Between the vintage bins and your own label pressings, do 45s and the smaller formats still move for you, and where does the value hide?

I love a 10". If I could do 10" releases cheaper than 12" releases, I'd gladly release all 10" 33s.

I haven't done much with 45s in the last 10 years. I love them, personally, but I don't come across them much anymore. We got an incredible collection in once, years ago, with a bunch of northern soul and psych and very early rock and R&B, and in spite of the fact that these were exceptionally rare records that we were selling pretty cheaply, I couldn't move them. So, after two years, I kept everything that was left.

I seek out Jazz 10"s, and any pre 1960 rockabilly, rock and roll, and R&B 45s. I love that shit, but I mostly keep it for myself. We don't carry 45s in the shop right now.

What's a record, a release, or a moment at the shop that best captures what Analog Revolution is about?

This video: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/b5U2WgLeGinUYfQnrWagTE

This was the day they started manufacturing our first vinyl release. I took a video camera from 1970, nearly a decade before the first VHS camcorder, and did a live stream of a concert with it. The concert featured Hurly Burly and the Volcanic Fallout, The New Clear Lawn Chairs, and Crosstalk.

Hurly Burly and the Volcanic Fallout hadn't played a show together since the grand opening of Analog Revolution in 2014, and hadn't played a show prior to that since like 2010 or so? But that was Ryan's highschool band, and they got back together and recorded an EP in our studio, and then we put it out on vinyl. We launched the pre-orders for those records the day of the show. (HBATVF just recorded the theme song for our upcoming cartoon Kumiai-Ki The Mighty Labor Union Mech)

The New Clear Lawn Chairs had played their last show in 2016 (aside from a single track reunion at the grand openning of the makerspace.) We interviewed them, when they were 15 or 16 years old, for the first or second issue of the Analog Revolution magazine. Their EP was the first CD/Cassette we released, and we re-released it as the other side of our first vinyl LP (split with Hurly Burly.) In this incarnation, they brough along a bunch of extra members and practiced once (which, to be fair, was more times than the original incarnation of the chairs practiced.)

Crosstalk is a band made up of a bunch of folks we knew from back in the early Analog Revolution days. For various reasons, we'd never actually managed to book them on a show, but I couldn't think of a better group to round out this very throwback show.

So we took all of these bands that had been instrumental to getting us to where we are now, and we stuck them all up on one stage, and we taped it with a camera from 1970 and we streamed it live to people all over the internet. (We had a bunch of folks in NZ and Sweden watching it live, and all the students at a clown school in PA, because we exist in a weird little pocket of very niche indie internet fame.)

This show was also filmed with nicer cameras: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/5tgjdocrFmgPQBHwAPQYUx, and it's also up on youtube, but live streaming on a camera from 1970 through a weird open source self-hosted video streaming platform very much captures what we're about.

--

So that was a lot. Lemme know if it was helpful.

FAQ

Does Hemlock Bazaar buy used records?

Yes. Andrew mentions buying and selling new and vintage vinyl, with interest in psych, garage, punk, early metal, jazz, and guitar-forward records that move in the shop.

Does Hemlock Bazaar carry 45s?

Not currently. Andrew loves 45s personally, especially early rock and R&B, but says the shop does not carry them right now.

Last updated: 2026-08-14

Store owners

Add a VinylPackman badge

Use this small badge on a Press, About, Links, or News page to point visitors back to the feature.

Show badge code

Need to fix store details?

Owner or staff? Send a correction for review.

Correct this listing