A guide to cities, bars, experiences, and places to stay chosen for how they sound. “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. But where sound is treated with care — rooms designed to listen, systems tuned with intention, and music given the time it deserves. Think of it as the Michelin Guide to Listening — if such a thing existed. I travel, listen, return, and write. The rest is the map you can now explore.” Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here. — Rafi Mercer, Founder of Tracks & Tales
"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
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.
There is an old truth about record shops that the best ones have always understood: the shop is not really selling records. It is selling the moment before ownership —...
There is an old truth about record shops that the best ones have always understood: the shop is not really selling records. It is selling the moment before ownership —...
There are certain corners of Milan where the city seems to exhale. The pace softens. The sharp lines of business, fashion and commerce loosen into something more conversational.
There are certain corners of Milan where the city seems to exhale. The pace softens. The sharp lines of business, fashion and commerce loosen into something more conversational.
A city like Milan thrives on intersections: fashion and design, food and culture, tradition and reinvention. Gesto feels like a product of that same instinct. The records matter, but so...
A city like Milan thrives on intersections: fashion and design, food and culture, tradition and reinvention. Gesto feels like a product of that same instinct. The records matter, but so...
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.
Phosphorescent's Muchacho (2013) was written in an off-grid hut in Tulum after Matthew Houck lost his home, his relationship and his studio. Its centrepiece, "Song for Zula", holds four chords for six minutes without a chorus — a record ...
Three afternoons at Century Sound in 1968, a group of jazz musicians who had never heard the songs, and a twenty-three-year-old in an isolation booth who barely spoke to them. What came out was a record about a Belfast street, made four ...
Radiohead followed the guitar record of the decade by putting the guitars down — a Rhodes piano, an instrument invented in 1928 that almost nobody plays, and a hole in the middle of the album where nothing happens at all. It was called c...
The Beastie Boys had every reason to repeat themselves and chose instead to dismantle the version of themselves that worked. Paul's Boutique is what happened next: over a hundred records playing at once, a jazz drummer from New Orleans h...
In Vietnam, "the World" meant home. Curtis Mayfield released Back to the World in May 1973, weeks after the last men came back — and wrote not about the war but about the arrival. Plush strings, congas, and the bleakest lyrics in America...
You could walk past it. That is the point. On Jalan Labuansait, the road that carries everyone down towards Bingin and the surf, The Analog sits between a surf shop and a Pilates studio with nothing out front to announce itself.
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.
The part nobody sees takes the longest — not the session, but the weeks spent deciding what plays between the tracks. On the arrival of annual membership, and what a...
The part nobody sees takes the longest — not the session, but the weeks spent deciding what plays between the tracks. On the arrival of annual membership, and what a...
A figure in a tab I don't open often has quietly passed three thousand. As a digit it does nothing. As a room — the Vanguard filled twenty-five times over,...
A figure in a tab I don't open often has quietly passed three thousand. As a digit it does nothing. As a room — the Vanguard filled twenty-five times over,...
No drum, no bass, no voice — three minutes and forty-two seconds of processed guitar, sitting at the dead centre of the album that followed the most admired rock record...
No drum, no bass, no voice — three minutes and forty-two seconds of processed guitar, sitting at the dead centre of the album that followed the most admired rock record...
