There will soon be another place to buy vinyl along Queen West when Antikka – The Vinyl Cafe opens in mid-September.
Located at 960 Queen West next to Oliver Spencer and Fred Perry, the combination coffee/record shop will offer rock, blues and jazz bin-flipping plus an old Armenian tradition of making coffee over hot sand (apparently the first of its kind in Toronto).
According to owner Razmik Tchakmak, a record collector and session musician, Antikka will also feature live music on the patio starting next summer. “I have visions of Antikka becoming a hub for all sorts of artists across the Toronto area,” he says.
In other Toronto record store news, there has been a major change-up at a beloved Parkdale music shop.
Headbangers of Toronto were surely nervous when record store Parkdale Platters closed up at the end of July. It’s always sad to lose a record store, but what about the other record store inside it, Stained Class Records, the city’s only heavy metal specialty shop?
As it turns out, the bins at Stained Class won’t be empty for long. Though the shop has been closed for a couple of weeks, it will reopen in the same space at 1614 Queen West. Only now it will be a record-store-within-a-vintage-shop, as Black Diamond Vintage is set to move in. The store promises “rock and roll goods outta Toronto,” which seems like as good a fit as any. Stained Class is teasing a late August opening date.
If your record needle is getting antsy, you can always get your fix at the Toronto Public Library. After the vinyl revival reached a fever pitch last year, the TPL decided to renew their old collection of over 15,000 records, the largest collection of any public library in Canada. Librarian Beau Levitt had the honour of buying 100 new records for the Toronto Reference Library collection, the first albums added since the late-80s.
He took to Reddit last month to show off the haul, which includes classics like The Band’s Music From The Big Pink and Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, while modernizing the selection with everything from Wu-Tang to Kaytranada.
richardt@nowtoronto.com | @trapunski
