Let's hear it for the new music bars

Listening rooms inspired by Japanese 'kissas' are showing up in India, with a focus on intimate bar experiences

- Shrabonti Bagchi

Khila 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 she runs within a repurposed 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".

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.