James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem to Open a Wine Bar in Brooklyn

When a prominent chef heard that James Murphy had decided to open a wine bar in Brooklyn, he nudged Mr. Murphy to compose an online journal about the process.

Mr. Murphy mulled it over, at least for a moment.

“I thought I would call it ‘the Worst Idea Ever,’ ” he said the other day with a flick of the self-effacement that became his hallmark as the brain behind the dance-punk band LCD Soundsystem.

No pearls of prose ever materialized, though.

“I’ve never done it because I’m overwhelmed,” he said.

That wine bar, the Four Horsemen, is scheduled to open in early June at 295 Grand Street in Williamsburg, and it turns out that hosting a nightly party in a room with about 40 seats can be as much of a logistical ordeal as hosting one in Madison Square Garden. (Mr. Murphy has actually done that.)

While he has toured the world, both at the front of his band, now retired, and as a globally on-demand D.J., his days now overflow with conversations about slow-moving contractors, stringent health-department regulations and the mysteries of a grease trap. To borrow the title of one of his most popular songs, “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.”

At 45, Mr. Murphy likes to joke that he drifted away from spinning records because “I need something with really low margins, high risk, brutal hours and which I have no experience at.”

Beneath the man’s comic laments, though, lies a deep wellspring of enthusiasm. Mr. Murphy has evolved into a true gastronome, a restless seeker of food and wine who rattles off precise lists of his favorite haunts in Copenhagen and Paris and London and Tokyo. For those who squander a lot of time in restaurants in New York and elsewhere, his meaty frame and stubbled mug have become a familiar sight. He has befriended chefs like David Chang and René Redzepi, and for a while he said he was so accustomed to eating “like a 14th-century noble” that he acquired gout — “far and away the most painful thing I’ve ever had.”

So it was probably only a matter of time before he made a fateful leap into the hospitality business.

“We’ve been talking about this for years,” said Justin Chearno, a wine consultant and friend of Mr. Murphy who is helping to map out the selections for the bar. It has a strong emphasis on natural wines, which are ideally allowed to ferment with minimal human manipulation.

“There’s kind of a limitless amount of things I want to do, and when the path seems to open, that’s when I try to do a thing,” Mr. Murphy said, sipping a flat white at Sweatshop, a cafe and design studio a short walk from the Four Horsemen.

One partner in the wine bar is his Danish-born wife, Christina Topsoe, 34, who is due to give birth any day now. The general manager will be Katrina Birchmeier, a natural-wine advocate from Australia.

“We wanted somebody from outside,” he said. “Because she doesn’t think things are impossible yet.”

After years as a drinker of bourbon and beer, Mr. Murphy had his palate turned upside-down one afternoon in 2008 at Racines, a wine-obsessed spot in Paris where Mr. Chearno, his vinous Yoda, helped introduce him to a bottle of a Sicilian orange wine called Frank Cornelissen MunJebel Bianco No. 3, “which was so crazy,” Mr. Murphy said. “In my memory, there were leaves and twigs floating in it.”

A few sips were enough to convert him into a superfan.

“It was absolutely mind-blowing,” he said. “This was much more radical than I’d expected.”

There will be similarly radical sips among the 160 or so choices (and eventually 350) at the Four Horsemen, though there will be more traditional options, too.

“We’re not dogmatic,” he said. “Like, we don’t want to be part of an argument. If I opened a record store, it wouldn’t be all punk rock and esoterica.”

There will be something else, as well: food, with both snacks and larger dishes conjured up by Nick Curtola, a veteran of Franny’s in Brooklyn.

“His steak tartare is remarkable,” Mr. Murphy said. “It’s got crunch to it.”

These days, New York has a fair bounty of wine-fixated spots that happen to serve good food (including Charlie Bird, Pearl & Ash, the Camlin and Aldo Sohm Wine Bar), but Mr. Murphy and his team seem to strategically play down their ambitions without scaling them back.

“We keep calling it a wine bar because we want to underpromise and overdeliver,” he said. “It has to be economically sustainable. It’s not a vanity project.”

Clearly, Mr. Murphy’s crew knows a lot about wine, but there’s no denying that his cool-musician cachet will be a major draw.

“People are going to go to that wine bar just to see James Murphy, let’s be honest about it,” said Paul Grieco, the grape fanatic behind the Terroir wine bars in TriBeCa and at the High Line. “And if James can contribute to the conversation, to get other people to come to the table and enjoy wine as much as we do, I’m thrilled.”

Not too thrilled, though.

“I do want him to fail, nonetheless,” Mr. Grieco said, somewhat sarcastically, adding that the chances of failure for even a high-profile wine bar have intensified as restaurants all over the city bring legitimacy and adventure to their by-the-glass lists.

Did Mr. Grieco have any advice for Mr. Murphy? “Really?” he asked. “My advice is he should not open a wine bar.”

Mr. Murphy is quick to stress that he’s still intensely active in music. He created the score for Noah Baumbach’s latest film, “While We’re Young,” and he was a producer of the last Arcade Fire album, “Reflektor.” (Coincidentally, two core members of Arcade Fire recently announced their plans to open a restaurant in Montreal.)

As a songwriter, Mr. Murphy is perhaps best known for “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s breakthrough single in which a graying narrator expresses his generational anxiety about obsolescence (“the kids are coming up from behind”). But with the Four Horsemen, Mr. Murphy does not express the slightest twinge of regret about being a full-fledged grown-up.

“We’re going to do reservations, because I don’t want to go to a restaurant anymore and be told, ‘Three hours,’ ” he said. “I love reservations.”

He is an obsessive audiophile (one of his pet projects involves a proposal to collaborate with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to change the turnstile beep at subway stations into something more beautiful than grating) and has paid close attention to “tuning” the acoustics of the Four Horsemen as if it were a recording studio, mounting noise-soaking burlap on the walls and cedar slats and sound-absorption panels along the ceiling so that conversations can proceed at a civilized cadence.

“That’s why it doesn’t sound cavernous,” he said. “All people will know is that they’re happy. They’ll not feel the unpleasantness.”

Out on Grand Street, in front of the bar, he spoke about how cedar is much softer than oak, from a sound standpoint. Then he stopped himself and smiled.

“Nerd stuff,” he said. “Total nerd stuff.”