A kissa is a listening bar, the sound system is the point, and talking over the music is not permitted
The Listening Room at MOI has thirty-eight reviews and a 4.9, charges twenty to eighty pounds, and it is a listening bar.
Thirty-eight is not a sample. But the format is worth the article, because it is one of the very few genuinely new ideas in London drinking and it is about a hundred years old.
The jazz kissa
It is Japanese, and it began in the 1920s and 30s, and it exists because records were unaffordable.
An imported American jazz record, in Tokyo, was a luxury item – and a hi-fi system capable of playing it properly was far beyond almost anybody.
So a man with a good system and a collection would open a small room, and charge for a coffee, and play the records.
You came to listen. That was the entire transaction.
The rules
And they are real, and they are enforced, and British visitors find them completely bewildering.
You do not talk over the music. In the stricter kissa you do not talk at all, or only in a low murmur between tracks.
You do not request records. The master chooses, and the choice is the art, and questioning it is a discourtesy.
You sit facing the speakers.
The Prat’s acoustic desk has assessed the whole of five postcodes and reports that the listening bar is the only venue type in the entire survey in which the customer is expected to pay attention to something.
Which is the opposite of everything else
We wrote at Nessa about the noise, and it is worth restating.
Sound levels in a great many London venues sit at a level where sustained conversation is genuinely effortful – and where anybody with hearing loss simply cannot participate.
And it is not an accident. Loud rooms feel busy. Busy rooms feel successful. And there is decent evidence that noise makes people drink faster and leave sooner, which is worth money.
The hard surfaces are cheaper, the turnover is quicker, and everybody wins except the person trying to hear their friend.
The listening bar has taken the noise, and made it the product, and then demanded silence around it.
The Piano Bar, again
Which we wrote about four articles ago, and which is the other end of the same idea.
Every pub in Britain used to have a piano and a man who could play it, and he was paid in beer, and nobody listened to him. The jukebox killed him because a machine was cheaper.
And now, seventy years later, we are paying eighty pounds a head to sit in silence in front of a very expensive record player.
Verdict
Thirty-eight reviews. Not a number. Almost certainly wonderful.
Go, sit down, and shut up. That is the offer and it is honestly stated.
What a good system actually does
Not loudness. The opposite.
A properly set-up system makes a recording quieter and clearer at the same time – it separates the instruments, it places them in a space, and it lets you hear the room the record was made in.
And the thing everybody notices first, in a genuinely good listening bar, is not the bass. It is the silence between the notes.
A cheap system fills the gaps with noise. An expensive one leaves them empty, and the emptiness is what you are paying for.
Which is, we would gently suggest, the whole argument of this magazine applied to a loudspeaker.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This reads like someone’s been quietly furious and finally documented it.