Looking Up

On finding the beginning long after you've started

By Rafi Mercer

In The Luxury of Listening I wrote about looking up to hear a city. Above the traffic and the shopfronts, where sound gathers and turns, is where a place tells you what it is.

I wrote that believing it was something I'd learned along the way. In listening bars, in other people's cities, over years of paying attention.

This week I found out it was older than that.

A member's note about James Brown at the Royal Albert Hall in 1971 sent me back to a building I'd been in more times than I can count. I was a boy, at the Proms, with my family somewhere close. What I remember isn't the music. It's looking up, at the odd shapes hanging from the roof, and running round the top gallery while the sound rose from below.

Those shapes were acoustic diffusers, hung in 1969 to cure an echo the Hall had carried since the day it opened. I was staring at a building's attempt to make sound arrive properly. I just didn't have the words for it yet.

It's a strange thing to find your beginning so long after you've started. Years into building Tracks & Tales, after all the rooms and cities and records, the first lesson had been there the whole time. Not in a book. Above my head.

You don't always learn something new. Sometimes you just recognise what you already knew.

Look up.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. If this resonated, subscribe.

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