Celebrating the first anniversary of Bengaluru's listening bar, The Middle Room Festival brings together musicians, vinyl selectors, DJs and collectors for a two-day exploration of sound on July 18 and 19. Spread across The Yard, The Room and the Conservatory, the festival features live performances, all-vinyl DJ sets, cassette-driven experiments, workshops and crate-digging sessions.
The Middle Room, a listening bar located in the heart of Bengaluru, was built around a deep irreverent love of music, all kinds of music and the act of listening. To celebrate a year of fostering curiosity and genuine intrigue in its visitors, the bar is hosting the Middle Room Festival, a two day event happening on the 18th and 19th of July, celebrating the space and the music that intrigues and sparks curiosity.
The festival is spread across three venues, each engaging with music in its own unique way while hosting a diverse range of acts. The first is The Yard, the open-air space at The Courtyard, where bands and vocalists come together to create an atmosphere that allows sound to travel freely. From Bengaluru-based jazz outfit Derek and the Cats to indie soft-rock singer Frizzell D'Souza, The Yard is the perfect place to spend a lazy weekend afternoon, listening to music that drifts through the warm Bengaluru air.
The Room, the heart and epicentre of the festival, will host solo performances and vinyl DJ sets, including performances by Zokhuma, known for blending heavy metal and dance music, and Vachan, a pioneer of Bengaluru's dance music scene who is celebrated for his eclectic open-format sets. The Room will also feature a cassette DJ set by Navendu, performed entirely using a custom LEGO-built cassette DJ controller that brings together sounds from the 1980s through the 2000s. Navendu will also conduct a workshop on the festival's second day, where participants can learn how to build their own MIDI controllers. Other artists performing in The Room across the two-day festival include Curtain Blue, Lush Lata and Raja Rani.
The festival's third venue, the Conservatory, is where Junket Collectors showcase collections that tell stories from across the world of music. From Sunil Hubli, a vinyl selector whose collection spans generations and genres, to DJ Devious Quest, who crafts all-vinyl, genre-fluid journeys through soul, psychedelia, '90s rave, dub and more, the Conservatory celebrates the sometimes painstaking but always rewarding art of crate digging
Across the two days, The Middle Room Festival urges its listeners to be fully tuned in to sounds of the festival. Created for the ‘sonically curious’, it creates an environment where music doesn’t have the space to remain one thing, it moves across genres, mediums and spaces effortlessly, without any hesitation, proving that music can never be contained or put into box.
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