Three floors, six residents and its own radio: Rio de Janeiro is opening the listening bar ESCUTA

Rio de Janeiro opens ESCUTA in September — a three-floor listening bar on Rua General Polidoro in the Botafogo district.

The opening was reported by Resident Advisor.

Each floor has its own purpose: a cocktail bar downstairs, a listening room with a DJ booth on the second floor, and an open rooftop terrace above.

A library assembled by six people

The centre of it is not the bar but the record library: six resident selectors shape it, and the records can be not only played on site but bought.

Separately, the venue is launching an in-house radio station named after the bar itself. That is by now the familiar logic of listening bars: the room works by day and by evening, while the stream holds the audience between visits.

Why listening bars are growing now

The format came from Tokyo and spread as an answer to fatigue with large venues: here you do not dance, you listen — on a good system, in quiet and without queues. Brazil is one of the last major scenes the format has reached, and Botafogo is a logical district for it.

Botafogo is a densely built district with a long musical tradition, where this format feels natural: it needs no large hall, only good acoustics and a few hundred records on the shelf.

As reported earlier by ONE//FM, new venues are opening this August beyond South America too — the open-air club SELVA has just started in Sicily.