Hi-Fi Disco Bar Chaos — Maruyamacho's Permission to Dance
A second-floor room in Maruyamacho where the Loft's no-mixing creed arrives wrapped in orange, and nobody asks you to sit still.
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Hi-Fi Disco Bar Chaos
Address: 2F NEXUS MARUYAMA, 9-3 Maruyamacho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0044, Japan
Instagram: @hifi_disco_bar_chaos
Maruyamacho climbs. Walk west out of Shibuya and the ground lifts you through a district that has spent decades in the business of discretion, love hotels shoulder to shoulder, their signage designed to be read quickly and then forgotten. Seven minutes on foot from the station. A building called NEXUS MARUYAMA. Stairs to the second floor. Nothing about the approach prepares you for the colour.
Inside, vivid oranges and reds, space-age curves, mid-century shapes — a room built by drawing on Stanley Kubrick's films of the 1970s. The floor pattern takes its cue from the hotel tiles in The Shining. Mirrored ceiling. Red light. Geometry underfoot. The chairs and the record sleeves displayed across the walls are one-off vintage pieces, gathered gradually from vintage shops, antique dealers and flea-market apps across two years of planning. Among the sleeves: rare Warhol designs, and records that defined particular moments in disco.
It opened in April 2026, the third room from the team behind RECORD BAR analog and MUSIC BAR BOUNCE. The initials run A, B, C — the sides of a record, in order. The C-side needed a name, and the owner, Takahiro Shokaku, found one in an old flat near Ebisu station, close enough to hear the Yamanote chime, crammed with clothes and records while he was running the Shibuya club VISION. Friends came constantly. Someone started calling it chaos.
The sound tells you what the room is actually for. JBL 4350s are set into the wall either side of the DJ booth, positioned as though they were part of the architecture rather than equipment placed in front of it — a late-seventies model that gives you something enveloping rather than sharp. Turntables are Technics SL-1200G alongside a vintage Garrard 301. The mixer is a Bozak CMA-10-2DL, the first commercial mixer ever made, still maintained and still working; Shokaku believes no other venue currently runs one. That last detail is not trivia. It is the physical object at the root of the thing everyone else only cites.
The lineage he names is David Mancuso — the DJ who didn't mix, who let each record at The Loft play through whole and gave every one the room it needed. Shokaku wanted the same lift that late-seventies New York had. He is unsentimental about why analogue, in an age when the mixing can be done automatically: the records carry more, and when the needle skips, the accident becomes part of the night.
Here is where Chaos parts company with most of the category. The expectation around a record bar is reverence — a serious room, everyone facing the speakers. Chaos wants the opposite. Flash photography is fine. Conversation is welcome, as long as it doesn't climb. Guests stand up, move, and dance when the record asks for it. Shokaku's stated aim is that house and disco make people happy, and that someone might leave the room ready to face tomorrow. The fidelity is not there to be admired. It is there to work on you.
The drinks follow the same period logic. Collins glasses, fruit-forward builds, the Meron Ball made with Midori that became a fixture at Studio 54, and Larry's Horn for Larry Levan. The menu is designed to look like a record. Staff select from the house collection through most of the night, with DJ parties on occasion. There is a music charge of ¥1,000, and the room runs late — past midnight and on into the small hours.
The crowd arrives from both directions: people in their twenties who found it through a phone, and people in their fifties who were there the first time. Asked for one record, Shokaku reached without hesitating for Tears — Frankie Knuckles presents Satoshi Tomiie, released in New York in 1989 — naming Tomiie as the person who shaped him most.
A room like this could only have been built by someone who already knew what the hill outside was for. Maruyamacho has always trafficked in rooms you enter for a few hours and leave changed, or at least lighter. Chaos simply put a Bozak in one of them.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
