High Culture in Low Country

From music and books to antiques and art, Dave Henderson offers a curated collection of culture at Azio Media in Shallotte.

“I always like to quote the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Dave Henderson tells me as I browse through the records in his shop. “He said that art is how we decorate space, and music is how we decorate time.”

Azio Media, which Henderson has owned and operated in Shallotte since 2003, exists to help people decorate in precisely these dimensions. The multi-faceted media store sells used and new books and vinyl records as well as cassette tapes, select antiques, custom-made art and photography, and even chic old magazines. Henderson is fascinated by culture in all its different forms, and he has an obvious passion for getting something interesting into the hands of his customers.

Such as an old hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland, for instance. Henderson pulls it out from the display case by the cash register to show me.

“This was printed to give to guests of the Hotel Taft in New York City,” he says. “If you were a collector of Lewis Carroll books, this is one you might want to have.”

Embossed on the front cover is a stylized image of the hotel, which was built in 1926 and looks like absolutely nothing in Lewis Carroll’s famously nonsensical children’s tale. It’s slightly absurd and therefore clearly worth adding to a collection.

The wares for sale in Azio Media are tastefully curated. There are classic used books priced at a steal, like a volume of Herman Melville’s complete short stories, irresistible at only $3. There are old records that have been carefully graded for their condition and priced accordingly, like the “very good plus” copy of the 1976 KISS album Destroyer.

There are shelves in the store for new books on cooking and gardening, fantasy and philosophy.

Then there are the things that are created rather than curated. Henderson partners with a local artisan to craft and sell items jig-sawed out of old vinyl records. Some of these are functional, like handy bookmarks and drink coasters.

Others are strictly decorative, like the records that have been cut into silhouettes of musicians or band iconography, and then framed together with the LP sleeve of the record they were cut from. These pieces are a bit more expensive, but worth it because they are unique and handmade. Not to mention, they are works of art literally hewn out of music, so they decorate space and time all at once— a great two-for-one deal in the eyes of Mr. Basquiat.

Henderson’s love of literature, art and music is not newfound. After growing up in the rural Brunswick County community of Ash, he bopped around the country for a while (Washington, D.C., upstate New York, Wrightsville Beach) before enrolling at Bennington College in Vermont, where he got a degree in fine arts.

After college he moved to Prague to soak up the culture and energy of the ancient Czech capital.

“There’s a rich history of literature and the arts in Prague,” Henderson says. “And every kind of architecture you could think of: Baroque, Roman, Gothic, medieval, modern.”

Henderson arrived in Prague in 1996, just a few short years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of Eastern Europe was rousing from the slumber of drab, monotonous communism, and the media landscape was just beginning to feel the changes of a little thing called the internet.

“I fell in love with the place, because it wasn’t long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolution,” he says. “It was an exciting place to be.”

Before leaving in 2003, he helped make Prague even more exciting by teaming up with friends to open the city’s first English-language internet café.

Henderson did something similar for Shallotte soon after moving home in 2003. The community had an antiquarian-shaped hole in the local market, and Henderson — with his diverse cultural tastes, European experiences and respect for old things — was just the entrepreneur to fill it.

After spending its first 18 years over on Smith Avenue, Azio Media moved to its current location on Holden Beach Road in 2021, where it continues to thrive.

“We do get a bump during different seasons,” Henderson says of the summer rush, “but we have a lot of local support. More and more people are finding out about us and choosing to put down the phone and pick up a book or get cozy with an album.”

Despite our talk of art and history and high culture, there is nothing at all pretentious about Henderson. Like Azio Media itself, he is laid back and approachable, the kind of guy who would fit in equally well at an art gallery or at a Brunswick County pig pickin’. Among the books he sells are countless volumes on North Carolina, from coastal pirate tales and local ghost stories to field guides for treasure hunters wanting to navigate the Cape Fear River. When I ask him about local writers, he flashes a grin.

“The hot new book we have is on that top shelf, My Right Hand to Goodness: The Life & Times of Crazy Dale Varnum,” he says. “It’s all about Dale Varnam, and life in the ’70s and ’80s. They were smuggling drugs around here, Varnamtown.”

Now there’s some down-home culture, I think to myself. Brunswick County locals also know a thing or two about decorating space and time.

CURATE YOUR COLLECTION
Azio Media Books, Music & More
280 Holden Beach Road SW, The Gingerbread House,
Shallotte
(910) 755-3322
aziomedia.com