For years, Shane Kingsland had wanted to open a shop devoted to his passion, heavy metal.
In the past, he managed a heavy metal record store in Madison, Wis. “Well, a few bumps in the road (and years later), my wife and I finally got around to doing it now" in St. Paul, he says via email.
Into the Void Records, a 650-square-foot shop that specializes in heavy metal records, opened last month in a historic building in downtown St. Paul.
It’s the sister store to the first
Into the Void Records shop in Dublin, Ireland, which debuted in 2010.
Kingsland has close ties to the Dublin outfit, which is a collective of Irish record labels. Kingsland, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Ireland, imports the releases for distribution in the U.S. He claims that Into the Void is one of the first transatlantic metal store chains.
The shop carries “Minnesota’s deepest selection of True Metal,” according to online shop information. This includes Heavy, Power, Death, and Black metal genres and some “outer-fringe genres” like Ambient, Darkwave, and Neo-Folk.
It’s a good fit for the location, he says.
The store is in the same historic building as
Capitol Guitars, an instrument store that he describes as metal-friendly. Into the Void is also within blocks of
Station 4, a venue that “hosts most of the major metal tours that come through the area,” he says.
Revamping the space was mainly a matter of bringing in custom-built racks for LPs, CDs, T-shirts, and more, along with a counter and display case. As for the aesthetic, “I tried to go for a combination of inner-city music store and heavy metal 'man cave' with posters covering a majority of the walls,” he says. “I don't know of any other shop similar in the Cities.”
He hopes the shop reflects the local community’s needs and wants: “We’ve had a very community-oriented game plan from the get-go, with a special interest in getting feedback from the local scene in an effort to really meet their music and metal needs,” he says. “Metal has many subdivisions and sub-genres, and not all of them flourish locally," he explains.
But he also wants to give people "the opportunity to be exposed to new and obscure artists” from around the world, he says.
Source: Shane Kingsland, owner, Into the Void Records
Writer: Anna Pratt