Singapore's Newest Record Store Comes From the Man Behind Darker Than Wax

A third-floor shophouse on Lorong Telok now holds crates of vinyl stacked to the window ledge, a pair of Technics decks wired into a homemade amp box, and a guy behind the counter who's spent the better part of two decades running Darker Than Wax's radio show under the name Dexter Colt. The shop is called Lifted Trax, it opened its doors on August 5, and it's the first dedicated record store its founder has ever run.

Address: 25 Lorong Telok, #03-01, Singapore 049037 / Hours: Wed-Thu 12-7pm, Fri-Sat 12-8pm, Sun 12-6pm, closed Mon-Tue / Online: liftedtrax.com, ships across Asia

From Darker Than Wax to a Shop of His Own

Jordan Glick is Canadian, but he's lived in Singapore for 20 years, long enough that most of the scene here only knows him as Dexter Colt, one of the people who keeps Darker Than Wax running and a co-founder of the Super Enjoy collective. He left a corporate music-industry job to open Lifted Trax, and he says the idea crystallised on a digging trip to Japan in May 2025, where shops like Revelation Time in Osaka, Mole Music in Nara and Ella Records in Tokyo showed him what a specialist store could look like when it's built around a point of view instead of trying to stock everything.

That point of view shows in the sticker collage stuck to the plywood behind the decks, a wall of names from record shops and labels Glick has crossed paths with over the years. "I get most excited when records sourced from an older DJ's collection get picked up by a younger DJ," he told Bandwagon Asia around the opening. It's a small line, but it's the actual business model: secondhand crates doing as much work as anything new on the shelf.

What's Actually On the Shelves

The genre spread is wide on paper, dance and electronic, ambient and new age, reggae and dancehall, jazz, soul, disco and rare groove, but the curation is tight rather than a crate-digging free-for-all. The secondhand side is where the depth is; the new-release wall is built specifically around Asian artists and labels, alongside independent dance music coming out of North America and Europe. Alongside the records: vinyl care products, turntable accessories, zines, incense, the usual furniture of a shop built for people who take the format seriously. Everything ships out to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong and beyond for anyone who can't make the third-floor climb.

It lands a few weeks after Loopliner's own survey of Southeast Asia's record stores, which is really the point: this is a region where a shop like this is still rare enough to be news, and where a DJ with Glick's reach opening one changes what's findable on a shelf, not just what's playable in a set.

The First Party Is Already Booked

Lifted Trax throws its first in-store event on August 29, with sets from kindergarchy, Dhoby Digital and Koonz. Glick says club nights and in-house label releases are next, which would put the shop on a path a lot of the best record stores eventually take: from selling other people's records to putting out a few of their own.

Cover and figure photos: Hizuan Zailani, via Bandwagon Asia.