The Retro-Future is now: What the great wave of Listening Bars says about us

By Amel Mukhtar

While the inspiration for hi-fi listening bars is rooted in the past, the shift toward analogue listening transmits a message about our present and future. Amel Mukhtar delves into its history, beginning in 1950s Japan, and analyses its sudden popularity over the past decade.

It’s difficult not to notice a significant value shift being broadcast when you consider that over the last decade, a great wave of hi-fi listening bars have cropped up across the world at a rapidly accelerating pace. While they are a phenomenon revived from origins in fifties Japan, they are often the most exciting and talked-about new bars in cities across Europe and the Americas. So when did going analogue start feeling so new – future-forward, even? And having, quote unquote, transcended the need for physical records, or the human beings selecting them, why do we seem to be running back as fast as we can?

This phenomenon evolved out of Japanese kissa culture in the 1950s-60s – a time in which coffee shops exploded in popularity over traditional tea houses as a result of the post-WWII influence of the West. A bunch of the relaxed, intimate spots would source hard-to-find records and share them through cutting-edge audio systems. There, people would often gather and listen in silence — a shrine to music. Most often, jazz would be playing. Their reverence meant that when the African-American players would come to tour Japan, they were venerated, experiencing a lauded, loving treatment worlds away from their second-class status in the USA.

So there’s a beautiful symmetry in some of the latest listening bars in London, like Moko in Tottenham or Jumbi in Peckham, both created by Bradley Zero and Nathanael Williams, which find inspiration in that Japanese model but host a majority Black clientele to dance to sounds from across the diaspora: whether it’s a jam to the Robert Glasper Experiment; live performances by Yazmin Lacey or Dennis Bovell; or sing-a-longs to N.E.R.D. and Lauryn Hill. While vinyl bars are dying out in Japan, their resurgence across the ponds shows a high level of reverence for the originators: paying homage to the copycat displays of endless vinyl, tasteful minimalism, and the best hi-fi systems.

Take Berlin’s Bar Neiro, which opened April last year to an immediate cult following, where LPs like Sun Ra’s Cosmo Earth Fantasy or When Spaceships Appear are played front-to-back on a custom hi-fi made with vintage components (including Altec A5 speakers, Garrard 301 turntables and a Shindo amplifier) used in the 1950s sound systems of Japanese cinemas. Devon Turnbull led the design of the sound systems in Brooklyn’s Public Records, which use Altec speakers to present Japanese psych-rock band Teke::Teke and lo-fi rapper YUNGMORPHEUS alike. New wave speaker design, Friendly Pressure, creates the custom sound systems for Bambi and Space Talk, influenced by vintage Tannoy, Altec, JBL and Klipsch designs.

But how they diverge from the original kissa model today is just as telling: while these bars still centre around a premiere listening experience, instead of places to sit quietly, they are encouraged as places to socialise. A honeypot for aesthetes, offering a sensory experience that is so much more immersive and elevated from your standard build-a-bar, they’re a ready excuse to actually leave the house and meet someone, in an automated and automatic era that presents us with less need to all the time. Take the Charlotte Taylor-designed Space Talk, which, with all its chrome features and off-beat minimalism, feels like it could be a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey: a cosmic vision of the future rooted in the past. There, while the DJ booth takes pride of place in the centre, it’s sunken in a way that somehow shrouds it no matter where you sit, shifting the focus to the music or the person in front of you. Or, hi-fi spots like São Paulo’s Matiz (also opened last year), where DJs like Mochakk, Ron Trent, and Chloe Caillet get the party started. Retro disco balls are a common motif, like in brilliant corners, where everyone orbits its shimmering light and gets swept up in the beat. They’re breaths of fresh air from the scuzzy spots that had metastasized in places like Shoreditch, full of neon platitudes or saturated tropical colours begging for someone to Instagram them. In Space Talk, you’re asked not to take pictures. Rather than a place for you to be seen, it’s a place that begs to be heard and felt.

In a moment where it feels like we’re hurtling into a cartoonishly sci-fi idea of the future: robot helpers, cyber-trucks, the metaverse, brain chips, AI art, all combo-punching us without giving pause for us to consider the repercussions or whether this would be a world we really want to live in, these listening bars present an analogue alternative. Communal spaces where you listen to records or live music by a tastemaker in the room – someone you can speak to! – with tracks or albums played all the way through. It’s a sharp contrast from the way we’re more often exposed to music today, through 15-second snippets or tracklisted by faceless algorithms. These spaces feel like a public reevaluation of our values, desires, the climates we are able to create; all we have at stake to lose in a tech rush to remove humanity – remove the soul – from the equation. In the fifties, what might have seemed a dream far in the future — racial equality and mutual respect — helped by its listening bars, Japan jumpfrogged into a nourishing vision of it that was possible right now. Today’s listening bars aim for the same, but over a different battleground that has been more quietly placing screens between us.

Photos courtesy of the individual listening bars.

Published November 04, 2024.