"I started Tracks & Tales to answer a simple question: where does music actually sound right? Not where it's loudest. Not where it's trendiest. Where sound is treated with care — rooms designed for listening, systems tuned with intention, music given the time it deserves. Think of it as the Michelin Guide to Listening — if such a thing existed. A guide to cities, bars, and places to stay, chosen for how they sound. The rest is the map, and it's yours to explore." — Rafi Mercer, Founder
Leeds built its music in rooms — art-school basements, community centres, working men's clubs — and half a century later those rooms shaped everything from post-punk to the sound of...
Leeds built its music in rooms — art-school basements, community centres, working men's clubs — and half a century later those rooms shaped everything from post-punk to the sound of...
Wakefield's music has always travelled further than its name — Pretenders debuts, Northern Soul nights, and a studio session that helped shape downtempo forever. A small Yorkshire city with the...
Wakefield's music has always travelled further than its name — Pretenders debuts, Northern Soul nights, and a studio session that helped shape downtempo forever. A small Yorkshire city with the...
Twenty miles south of Nashville, Franklin is where Music City's musicians go home. A Victorian Main Street, a restored 1937 theatre, and a town that measures itself in preservation —...
Twenty miles south of Nashville, Franklin is where Music City's musicians go home. A Victorian Main Street, a restored 1937 theatre, and a town that measures itself in preservation —...
St. Louis is where American music learned to travel — blues, ragtime and jazz all moved through the city on their way to everywhere else. Discover why its listening culture...
St. Louis is where American music learned to travel — blues, ragtime and jazz all moved through the city on their way to everywhere else. Discover why its listening culture...
Downey is more than a Los Angeles suburb. It is aerospace memory, roadside history and California evening light — a city waiting for its own listening room.
Downey is more than a Los Angeles suburb. It is aerospace memory, roadside history and California evening light — a city waiting for its own listening room.
Athens is one of those rare cities where music feels woven into everyday life. Long before visitors arrived looking for famous venues or legendary bands, sound was already part of...
Athens is one of those rare cities where music feels woven into everyday life. Long before visitors arrived looking for famous venues or legendary bands, sound was already part of...
Goodyear sits on the western edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area, where the city begins to dissolve into desert. It is a place defined by openness. Wide roads. Expansive skies....
Goodyear sits on the western edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area, where the city begins to dissolve into desert. It is a place defined by openness. Wide roads. Expansive skies....
Durham is a city that understands reinvention. Once defined by tobacco warehouses, rail lines, and manufacturing, it has spent the last generation transforming itself into one of the most creative...
Durham is a city that understands reinvention. Once defined by tobacco warehouses, rail lines, and manufacturing, it has spent the last generation transforming itself into one of the most creative...
We traded our attention for convenience.
Endless playlists. Infinite skipping. Music became something that happens while we do something else.
The Listening Club is a quiet rebellion against that.
One album a month. All the way through. Together.
Founding membership is capped at 200 members worldwide. When the places are taken, this tier closes permanently.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.
Made in a twenty-mile triangle of Yorkshire studios and sounding like everywhere warm on earth, Smokers Delight is the record that taught a generation how to slow down. Built on inherited soul — its opening track answers a Quincy Jones a...
Frahm's first live album from a single evening — ten pieces recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris in March 2024, with nothing rescued and nothing hidden. An album that documents an audience as much as a performance.
Recorded in a Manhattan recital hall in 1959, Nina Simone at Town Hall captures the exact moment a classically trained pianist became one of the great performers of the century. A live album built not on applause, but on silence.
Caribou's Suddenly is an album that refuses to stay in one place. Moving effortlessly between house, soul, electronica and psychedelia, it captures the beautifully unpredictable rhythm of modern life.
Coltrane Jazz captures John Coltrane at the exact moment he steps out from the shadow of Kind of Blue and begins the remarkable journey towards becoming jazz's greatest explorer. It is an album about curiosity, evolution and the courage ...
Some records belong to winter rooms and late nights. Barrington Levy's Here I Come belongs to open windows. Forty years on, its grooves still carry the feeling of possibility — not nostalgia, but the sense that something good might be ab...
By Rafi Mercer
What Sade understood about absence, trust, and the quiet courage to disappear.
By Rafi Mercer
Not the loudest records, nor the fastest risers, but the albums readers returned to with intent this June — a chart shaped by curiosity, slow listening, and the quiet pull of lasting sound.
I cannot remember exactly where I bought my Technics 1210s or how every other record deck entered my life. But perhaps that is half the story. Some objects remain when...
I cannot remember exactly where I bought my Technics 1210s or how every other record deck entered my life. But perhaps that is half the story. Some objects remain when...
This week I sat with a question the dashboards can't answer: what am I actually building, and how does it improve anyone's life? A note written for myself, shared as...
This week I sat with a question the dashboards can't answer: what am I actually building, and how does it improve anyone's life? A note written for myself, shared as...
The biggest ideas rarely feel comfortable at first. They challenge assumptions, invite doubt and ask us to imagine a future that doesn't yet exist. Looking to the lives of great...
The biggest ideas rarely feel comfortable at first. They challenge assumptions, invite doubt and ask us to imagine a future that doesn't yet exist. Looking to the lives of great...
Something happens when you land somewhere new — a bar, low music, good speakers — and you think: this is what I was looking for. Then you go home. But...
Something happens when you land somewhere new — a bar, low music, good speakers — and you think: this is what I was looking for. Then you go home. But...
