"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
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...
Chicago has always understood the relationship between music and place. This is the city that gave the world house music. The city where blues travelled north and changed shape. The city...
Chicago has always understood the relationship between music and place. This is the city that gave the world house music. The city where blues travelled north and changed shape. The city...
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.
At twenty-five, Café del Mar skipped the retrospective. Three discs, nearly four hours, almost all new music from the bar's own independent label — smooth to a fault, honest to its purpose, and best understood not as an album but as a du...
Recorded in three spring weeks in 1977 with Ryuichi Sakamoto arranging and half of Japan's musical future in the room, Taeko Ohnuki's second album sold almost nothing — then waited forty years to become one of the most sought-after Japan...
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.
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 session is done — two Technics 1210s, a Linn Classik, nine records spanning 1939 to 2004, and one album at the centre I'm not naming until Sunday. The arc...
The session is done — two Technics 1210s, a Linn Classik, nine records spanning 1939 to 2004, and one album at the centre I'm not naming until Sunday. The arc...
A travel film, a lift from a stranger, and one line about Japan's emptying countryside that stopped me mid-set. It turned out to answer the question I'd been circling for...
A travel film, a lift from a stranger, and one line about Japan's emptying countryside that stopped me mid-set. It turned out to answer the question I'd been circling for...
A phone call from a member in North Georgia turned into something unexpected — an honest reckoning with what the Listening Club sessions actually take to make. Three sessions are...
A phone call from a member in North Georgia turned into something unexpected — an honest reckoning with what the Listening Club sessions actually take to make. Three sessions are...
