"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
Stylus Soundlounge in Charlotte, NC — a disco-noir listening room at The Pass built around a collector's vintage analogue system, with Host Selectors Wednesday to Saturday. A Tracks & Tales...
Stylus Soundlounge in Charlotte, NC — a disco-noir listening room at The Pass built around a collector's vintage analogue system, with Host Selectors Wednesday to Saturday. A Tracks & Tales...
Bonsai HiFi is a small bar de escucha on Calle 2 in Cali, Colombia — vinyl, deep house and melodic techno in the world's salsa capital. A Tracks & Tales...
Bonsai HiFi is a small bar de escucha on Calle 2 in Cali, Colombia — vinyl, deep house and melodic techno in the world's salsa capital. A Tracks & Tales...
Baroke in Grant Road is Mumbai's first vinyl-only listening bar — over 200 records, Klipsch La Scala II speakers, and no digital fallback. A Tracks & Tales venue listing.
Baroke in Grant Road is Mumbai's first vinyl-only listening bar — over 200 records, Klipsch La Scala II speakers, and no digital fallback. A Tracks & Tales venue listing.
Tooker Alley was a short lane off Dearborn Street in Chicago's Near North Side, and for most of the 1920s the loudest room on it was a converted stable where...
Tooker Alley was a short lane off Dearborn Street in Chicago's Near North Side, and for most of the 1920s the loudest room on it was a converted stable where...
The SoundBar OKC — Oklahoma City's vinyl lounge on N Broadway Ave, with a serious sound system, drink-and-record pairings, and 12,000 albums to browse and buy.
The SoundBar OKC — Oklahoma City's vinyl lounge on N Broadway Ave, with a serious sound system, drink-and-record pairings, and 12,000 albums to browse and buy.
Memphis Listening Lab at Crosstown Concourse — a free public listening library with 75,000 recordings, a reference-grade SoundRoom, and regular listening events. The T&T guide to Memphis's civic listening room.
Memphis Listening Lab at Crosstown Concourse — a free public listening library with 75,000 recordings, a reference-grade SoundRoom, and regular listening events. The T&T guide to Memphis's civic listening room.
TRACKS & TALES
This book doesn't tell you what to listen to. It teaches you how to listen again.
New orders ship daily worldwide.
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.
Grace Jones's Nightclubbing is remembered as one of the great album covers and heard far less often than it is seen. Take the image away and what's left is a rhythm section record built at Compass Point by Sly and Robbie, mixed for peopl...
Ezra Collective's third album was recorded at Abbey Road in the days after Notting Hill Carnival, with friends and family filling the studio so the band wouldn't have to play alone. Nineteen tracks, built as a single night out. A record ...
Recorded eight weeks before the towers and released a year after, Le Pas du Chat Noir is a Tunisian oud player's chamber music for piano and accordion — the least likely trio in Europe, made at exactly the moment Europe stopped wanting t...
Meitei's first record, self-released in early 2018 and almost entirely unheard at the time. Five pieces, eighteen minutes, built from field recordings he made himself and pushed through tape — the seed of everything the "lost Japanese mo...
Much of Jon Hopkins' third album began as a score for a Wayne McGregor dance piece, and it shows — not in the sound but in the breathing. Every heavy passage on Insides is bracketed by something that lets the air back into the room.
Recorded across two decades and eight countries, the ninth Gorillaz album is built around grief — and around voices that were already on tape when the people who made them were gone.
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 September— a chart shaped by curiosity, slow listening, and the quiet pull of lasting sound.
A letter arrived a few days before Christmas, at the end of twelve years at Virgin, and it went into a drawer. Forty-two weeks ago I started writing letters of...
A letter arrived a few days before Christmas, at the end of twelve years at Virgin, and it went into a drawer. Forty-two weeks ago I started writing letters of...
Five sessions in, the growth has been gentle and the feedback unnervingly consistent. Two things keep coming back, and neither was on the list: people learn something, and they find...
Five sessions in, the growth has been gentle and the feedback unnervingly consistent. Two things keep coming back, and neither was on the list: people learn something, and they find...
You never know what you think of a record while it's still playing. You find out in the silence after it, in whether your hand moves toward the shelf or...
You never know what you think of a record while it's still playing. You find out in the silence after it, in whether your hand moves toward the shelf or...
