![]() ![]() ![]() I had begun thinking about such larger connections and their stakes in my own life, and what writing could and could not do. The combined practices of listening and reflecting in this kind of space made me think of the rooms as miniature cathedrals, places where anybody could enter and connect with a larger force through sound. I didn’t know then what it cost to outfit a listening room, but it was obviously not a budget undertaking. The owner of the system is sometimes there, perched on a couch. You see enormous home stereo setups in these photos, gear from another era piled high in living rooms. ![]() “Listening rooms” are essentially residential jazz cafés, though they are agnostic as to genre. Our modest stereo would have been no better than a midrange system back in the Nineties, when it was new.Ī friend who knew of my obsession told me about another Instagram account, Someone was posting photo spreads from what seemed to be mostly Japanese audiophile magazines and translating the accompanying text. We definitely didn’t have any of this gear, though. What little we could control was right in front of us. Silence and sound at the same time appealed to me. Their choices emphasized an experience that would be both communal and quiet. The proprietors had made decisions about what mattered and what could be done with the limited space. I imagined that the stereos produced an otherworldly sound, and it did not seem unreasonable to think that these small spaces and our East Village safe haven were linked. If there is ever a human figure in Kusunose’s photographs, it is a man, usually older, laying a phonograph needle on a record or standing behind a pour-over coffee setup. ![]() There’s generally lots of wood, rarely any chrome or aluminum. Sometimes the aquamarine glow of a McIntosh amp’s front panel is the only accent. A speculative leap, but I needed it.ĭim, atmospheric lights are not uncommon in jazz cafés, though most don’t look like our LED string. Their audio gear generally looks older, and, even though I knew nothing about it, I decided it all sounded exquisite. The average jazz café is small, about the size of our living room, though a few are big enough to accommodate perhaps fifty people. Kusunose has been photographing these places since 2014, and his pictures became a ballast for me. There are around six hundred such cafés in Japan-a number Kusunose and a few other fans carefully tabulated a few years ago, and which he believes has not significantly changed. Patrons of jazz kissas (cafés) typically drink coffee or alcohol and keep their voices low, sometimes reading books or comics as they listen. Right before the holidays, I discovered an Instagram account called run by a photographer and music fan named Katsumasa Kusunose. In the absence of company, vibe was all we had. Before we stopped having people over, friends would comment on the vibe in our house. In the small East Village living room that became our world, it was a good trick. As 2020 unfolded and we binged shows like Le Bureau, the lights made for a cheerful horizon. They were LEDs that slowly flashed different colors, hung along a copper wire that stretched above our windows. My wife, Heidi, and I put up a string of Christmas lights early in the pandemic. ![]()
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