What is a listening session? Inside Chennai’s growing album-listening culture

Chennai needs to listen to more music. Vinyl & Brew, the community cafe built around music on vinyl records and speciality coffee becomes one of the spaces where people gather to do so. But now, more than coffee is brewing.

“I was really bored of watching bands perform in Chennai. Everything sounded the same. In Australia, Indonesia and other places I travelled to I discovered a lot of music. I love doing that,” says, composer-producer Tenma, who is also co-founder of the indie band The Casteless Collective. “Through the years when I was mentoring others, I realised that the problem is that they don’t listen to music a lot; we are in a time of creating short-form content,” he adds. 

The response, for Tenma, was to change how people approach music. That impulse took shape as a listening session in Chennai, which eventually became a series. The idea is not new. Listening sessions have existed elsewhere for years. What felt urgent, however, was the absence of such a culture in Chennai, especially at a time when albums were being replaced by singles, and attention was being shaped by algorithms rather than intent.

A vinyl record being played
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

For arts manager and creative director Mukesh Amaran, the question initially was not about format, but audience. “We were constantly asking ourselves — do we have an audience in Chennai for something like this?” he says. The answer, they decided, would not come from surveys or speculation, but from exposure. 

That idea aligned closely with Mother Tongue Music, a label Tenma and Mukesh have been developing. It foregrounds marginalised voices, Dalit music, and collaborations that sit deliberately outside the mainstream. The listening sessions, even before the label’s formal launch, became a way to begin building that ecosystem. A slow, deliberate community rather than a ready-made market.

The first session set the tone. Centred on The Ancestral Well — a collaborative album created for the Sharjah Biennial it featured musicians from across the world. It was unapologetically obscure, and yet the response was immediate. “The interactions were very emotional,” Tenma recalls. “It felt like they were doing deep listening.”

Encouraged, they followed it up with a second session built around Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85–92, a record that resists melody-led listening and demands patience. Attendance grew. So did the conversations.

 Each session is shaped by the album itself. Some records invite track-by-track pauses; others are allowed to unfold in longer stretches. “If it’s electronic music, it won’t be nice to pull people out after every track. So we listen to three or four tracks together, then talk,” says Mukesh. The discussions shift between artiste, process and context, and more inward responses: what a track evokes, and how it lingers once the music stops.

At the heart of it is a quiet resistance to passive consumption. “At the end of the day, we want people to become more conscious listeners,” says Mukesh. Not just to hear more music, but to understand how it moves them and why. For musicians in the room, that awareness has practical consequences. “Only when you’ve tasted what’s available, are you able to decide what kind of music you want to make,” he . says

The choice of album to listen in each session comes from what has inspired Tenma and Mukesh. There are no restrictions on genres or even languages. “We have been wanting to do even a Tamil album, and will ge to it one of these days,” says Mukesh.

The next listening session will be held on January 10 at Vinyl & Brew from 6.30pm onwards. The album playing is Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Tickets on @tenmamakesmusic on Instagram starting ₹550.