Paradise Bound

I have been attending and purchasing records for about 25 years and never felt uncomfortable in one. Until now.
This is still a decent store. I guess the online ordering is the owners priority.
…everyone has douchenozzle days.

Know the owner Coyote for years. Very knowledgeable and friendly. Small record store located in the heart of Kensington Market. I have been to many record store but this one truly feels like home.

If you enjoy record hunting, this is the place to go. You won’t find the new releases and reissues that most places carry. You will, however, find a business owner who loves music and can make on-​point recommendations.
Digging through the converted wine crates that Coyote has stored his collection in is always exciting. Not only will you find cool and interesting items at every visit, but most importantly, the man checks over every record for any undue pops and scuffs, and cleans each record carefully. I once purchased a copy of Hawkwind’s Doremi Faso Latido for $ 3, because it may skip. Turns out it played fairly well, with no scratches. Definitely a steal.
The pricing is fair, and the selection is broad.
Have records to sell? Take them there. You’ll get a fair price, and you have the comfort of knowing your records are likely going to a fellow record nerd who will appreciate that his first Canadian pressing of Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast plays so well (I.e. me).
In addition to the wonderful record shopping experience, the Japanese art on offer is fantastic. Coyote has a genuine connection to the art he curates, and it shows. His knowledge of the works and the artists is mind-​blowing. If you’re interested in investing in some brilliant art on a budget, he has contemporary artists’ works for very reasonable prices.
Best of all, he runs it with passion. He loves what he does, and it really makes a difference when a person puts their essence into their work.
So, if you have an awesome collection you need to thin out, bring it to Paradise Bound. If you need to expand your collection? Go there.

smartly and so as to invoke only pleasure, does Paradise Bound, pipe lovely tunes into the street for curious passersby to become enchanted. speakers attached to the outer building (which if youll permit me, fittingly resembles a large old-​style jukebox), send out music to reel you in beyond their simple sandwich box out front.
(the extravagant pleasure of this music reminds me of a similar time when i lived in nyc and awoke to sounds of a jazz band playing on the flatbed of a truck outside my first floor apartment window. people in the neighbourhood gathered around with lawn chairs, sitting on stoops, swaying the the melodies. it was lovely.)
take a walk up a flight of stairs and slink into a corridor of a space which combines mostly vinyl records and books and then some cds, dvds and vhs as its wares. at the back of the store youll find a few shelves of books forming an arc around what visually appears to be the centrepiece of the the archives which is its turntable.
it is at this turntable where you can, as has become the custom, listen to a record of your choosing before you buy it. i am a newcomer, of sorts, to records, in that i, like many other people of my age and older, left the cumbersome size of records for the more compact tape and its successors that came. so i grew up listening to records, damning a scratch on my favorite songs, terrorizing my mother when i was two to play the same sesame street fever record over and over and over again and probably discovering music in general through my parents collection.
so it was with that history that i approached the guy at the front to ask him why people have stuck with and are slowly flocking back to the vinyl experience. though i still would have lots of research to do to fully understand the mechanics, he parlayed the fact that there is much more detail recorded onto records and the transferring of that original sound loses some of that detail along the way. it has sparked an itch in me to be sure.
for the time being though, i enjoyed snapping photos of cool album covers that adorned the wall or the wooden cases of port that now held all the records for sale. i challenged myself with purchasing the largest compact book ive ever touched (the count of monte cristo).
god help me for being so bold.