A Century in Sound

Nicholas Dwyer & Tu Neill / Japan & New Zealand / 2024 / World Premiere / 101 min

Japan has a unique tradition of specialised listening cafés. Cafés where you can come in, sit down and completely surrender to a certain type of music while drinking a cup of coffee, reading the newspaper or staring into space. The listening cafes, or Onagku Kissa, the local term for music cafes, are a cultural meeting place where locals have been coming for decades to reminisce and reverently listen to music they love. With a Japanese sense of specific and well-executed craftsmanship and immense dedication, it is of course the sound that is the meticulous focus of the various cafes. One place has dropped food service because cutlery on plates could potentially be too noisy, while others have spent years honing sound systems and turntables to optimise the sound as absolutely as possible. In three marvellous, well-composed episodes, ‘A Century of Sound’ focuses on three cafés that play jazz, Japanese rock and city-pop, and classical music respectively. The owners, their stories and cats are introduced. What all three cafés have in common is that they offer a meditative break from the endless chaos of Tokyo – and the rest of the world. A stylish time capsule of memories and the past amidst the hustle and bustle. 

The three episodes are part of a series of six in total, and are presented here as a single film.