Session Two — What Actually Goes Into a Listening Club Session
This is an investment in listening.
By Rafi Mercer
People probably imagine the Listening Club sessions happen quickly. Put a few records together. Press play. Upload the file.
The reality is very very different.
Session Two is almost ready now, and I've been thinking a lot about what actually goes into building one of these things properly. Because the truth is, they take weeks. Sometimes more than a month. Not because I want them to take that long, but because there's really no shortcut to listening carefully.
The first thing is finding the origin album.
That sounds simple until you realise what the album actually has to do. It has to carry its own story. It needs emotional depth. It needs influence. It needs to have pushed something forward. But it also has to carry backwards gravity too. You have to hear what came before inside it — the jazz lineage, the soul lineage, the electronic lineage, the studio experiments, the human fingerprints. Great records rarely appear from nowhere. The best albums are conversations across time.
So the search starts there.
Sometimes I'll spend days listening before I even know if an album is right for a session. And once the origin album reveals itself, the real work begins.
From there, it becomes about building a listening arc.
Not a playlist. A listening arc.
Every track between the album cuts has to feel like a conversation with the origin record. Not too obvious. Not too distant either. The sound has to move naturally, emotionally, almost architecturally. You are trying to guide people through a space without them noticing the walls.
The challenge is that the origin album is always played in full.
That part matters deeply to me.
But between each track on the album, another track enters the room. A response. An interval. A sideways glance from another era or another city. Sometimes it's influence. Sometimes contrast. Sometimes tension. Sometimes release. The session slowly becomes something larger than the album itself.
And that process takes time.
Usually somewhere between 20 and 40 days of listening, reading, researching, buying records, changing decisions, and starting again. Because once I find maybe seven or nine possible albums to pull from, I then have to listen to all of those records fully too. Not just once. Repeatedly. Searching for the exact track that fits within the emotional geometry of the session.
One wrong track can collapse the atmosphere completely.
And then there's the physical side of all this.
The records themselves.
A lot of the albums needed for these sessions aren't sitting in my collection already. Some have to be tracked down second-hand. Some are expensive. Sometimes you spend far more than feels sensible for one track you may only play once during a session.
But that's also part of what gives the sessions their weight.
There's investment inside them. Time inside them. Searching inside them. You can feel when something has been assembled carefully instead of generated quickly.
Then eventually, after weeks of preparation, comes the recording.
By that point I've got two turntables ready, mixer connected, amplifier running, streaming camera setup, microphone checked, tripod balanced. It sounds organised now, but Session One definitely wasn't.
The first recording attempt ended after about twenty minutes because my iPhone storage completely filled up.
Delete files. Try again.
Forty minutes later, exactly the same thing happened.
Delete more. Try again.
Eventually I worked out how much storage I actually needed and finally managed to capture the full session properly. Then came exporting, uploading, writing descriptions for YouTube and SoundCloud, preparing the private Listening Club links, and writing the email for members.
And honestly, that's the part people never really see.
The sessions might feel calm when you listen to them, but underneath them is a huge amount of invisible attention. Careful listening. Careful sequencing. Technical problem solving. Financial investment. Emotional investment too.
But maybe that's the point.
We live in a world where almost everything is immediate now. Fast content. Fast music. Fast reactions. Fast algorithms.
These sessions are deliberately built differently.
Slowly. Carefully. Track by track. Record by record.
The Listening Club exists for exactly this reason. One album a month, played in full, with the listening arc built around it. If that sounds like something worth sitting with, membership is open now.
And now, finally, after weeks of listening and shaping and rebuilding, Session Two is nearly ready.
I think it carries real gravity this time.
Quick questions
What is The Listening Club?
A monthly session built around one album, played in full on vinyl. Between each track, carefully chosen records enter the room — influences, echoes, sideways glances from other eras. It's not a playlist. It's a listening arc, assembled over weeks and shared with members worldwide. You can join here.
How often do sessions come out?
Once a month. That's deliberate. Each session takes between three and six weeks to build properly — finding the right album, sourcing the vinyl, sequencing the interludes, recording and editing the final thing. The pace is part of the point.
Where do I listen once I'm a member?
Sessions are hosted privately for members. Once you join, you receive access via email — no algorithm, no feed, no noise. Just the record, when it's ready.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
