Let's hear it for the new music bars

Mint

6 days ago

Akhila Srinivas recalls that the two things she associated with Bengaluru during her college days were beer and music. In the 1980s and 1990s, long before pub culture became mainstream in India, Bengaluru was a rock and jazz hot-spot, with bars like Pecos, Styx and Purple Haze serving up a heady mix of music and Kingfisher beer. So when a spot opened up at the Courtyard, a community space run by her within a repurposed old home that hosts a number of restaurants, cafés and bars in seemingly impossible nooks and crannies, she and her team zeroed in on recreating this, but doing something 'a bit unexpected" with it.
The result is the Middle Room, a music-forward bar inspired by Japanese kissas or listening rooms: intimate, dimly lit spaces where the focus is on listening to carefully curated music on vinyl records through high-end music systems. Along with Baroke and The Dimsum Room in Mumbai and Analogue in Goa, it is among a handful of new bar spaces in India that make playing music the old-fashioned way—on turntables and cassette players—the focus of your experience.
Articles on Japanese listening rooms, which have surged in popularity over the past decade, suggest that they evolved from Japan's music cafés (known as 'ongaku kissas') from the 1920s, with Tokyo listening rooms such as Ginza Music Bar and the Music Bar Cave Shibuya regularly featuring on the itineraries of audiophiles from all over the world. New listening rooms have emerged in cities like New York, London and Bangkok, blending serious audio-mania with craft cocktails and small bites.
The Middle Room faithfully recreates the vibe of these listening bars with its wood-panelled walls, low seating, table lamps that create warm pools of light, and a row of shelves displaying vinyls and other musical equipment. The sound is piped in through speakers from the audiophile-favourite Danley Sound Labs, which music consultant duo 'Murthovic and Thiruda" of Elsewhere in India, a transmedia music practice that creates music installations at museums and galleries, insisted on. Guests are encouraged to speak softly and turn their phones off.
'In the older Japanese music rooms, people were discouraged from talking at all, though most of them are more relaxed about it now," says Akhila, who made several research trips to Tokyo before opening Middle Room. 'We of course don't want to do that, and we want people to enjoy our food and drinks. But it is, first and foremost, a listening room." Signalling this is the fact that Middle Room charges a listening fee of ₹500—something that has come in for criticism on social media. 'This isn't set in stone—it's something we are experimenting with because we want people to come here for active listening instead of music being an ambient element," she says.
It is not such a reach when you consider that India's audiophile and vinyl communities are growing steadily. As a 2022 Lounge story noted, bars and cafés have been setting up turntables and welcoming the vinyl-curious to explore the medium's resurgence, and there are groups in every big Indian city that connect over their love of analogue music. Listening rooms are perhaps an extension of that culture—while the slightly older spaces like Bengaluru's The Record Room (temporarily closed, according to their Instagram page) and For The Record in Goa play vinyls, listening rooms take the game a step ahead by defining themselves within the parameters set by Japanese listening rooms.
It is somewhat of a rebranding, but a natural one, says Nehal Shah, founder of India Record Co., an online store selling vinyl and other analogue music and musical equipment. 'Creating a listening room is different from acquiring a bunch of records and playing them. It has to be done with focus and intention, and the music list should convey an experience. It's not background music," explains Shah, who is working as a music consultant for Bengaluru-based speciality coffee chain Kink Coffee, which is setting up a listening room in their new outlet on Church Street. 'It is definitely a trend today, and whether you serve cocktails or want to create a sober experience, the music is central to these spaces," she says.
Diners want fresh experiences all the time, says Mayank Bhatt, founder of All In Hospitality that runs The Dimsum Room in Mumbai's Kala Ghoda, which has a dedicated listening room within the larger space. Designed by Munro Acoustics, which has worked on the expansion and modernisation of the iconic Abbey Road Studios in London, it draws inspiration from vinyl lounges and bustling teahouses, layering jazz, ambient, and electronic music to create what Bhatt calls 'a multi-sensory experience."
'With this beautiful 100-year-old property in Kala Ghoda where we are located, we wanted to create a unique space, and with my background in creating music-forward spaces and events like Blue Frog and antiSOCIAL, the concept of starting a listening room emerged organically," says Bhatt. 'We want people to enjoy the food and drinks, and also be able to have a conversation at a normal decibel level." Unlike the Middle Room, Baroke and The Dimsum Room do not charge listening fees—at least, not yet. 'When we start dedicated programming around genres, we may do that, but not right now," says Bhatt.
It doesn't bother Sri Rama Murthy, aka Murthovic, that the Middle Room is not a 'pure music experience" and is, at the end of the day, a regular bar that serves dainty bar bites crafted by chef Adithya Kidambi along with draught beer and cocktails created by mixologist Arijit Bose. 'India is just a different culture from Japan, so you have to localise things without losing their essence. We are not purists in that sense. We do have a poster suggesting that people turn off their phones, but it's just a gentle suggestion," says Murthy, grinning.