The Elements of Listening: Notes 4 — Depth

By Rafi Mercer

There is always more beneath the surface. Depth is the dimension that separates sound from noise, listening from hearing, immersion from distraction. It is the quality that reveals itself only when we give music time, silence, and space. Without depth, everything feels flat. With it, the smallest phrase, the lightest note, can open into vast landscapes. To listen deeply is to enter those landscapes, to surrender to the layers that unfold the longer we stay.

I first became aware of this on a rainy night in Dublin, where a bar known more for its whiskey than its music had one of the most carefully tuned systems I have ever encountered. The selector dropped a record I had heard hundreds of times before, something so familiar it might have dissolved into background in any other setting. But here, on this night, in this room, it opened. The piano sat forward, its keys sharp with resonance, while the bass hovered just behind, steady but distinct. Cymbals shimmered like light refracted through glass. Each instrument occupied its own layer, and together they formed a depth I had never noticed. The record had always contained this, but it had never been revealed to me. That was the night I realised that depth is not given by the music alone — it is conjured by how we listen.

Depth begins in the grooves themselves. A vinyl record is not a flat disc but a landscape of ridges and valleys, spirals carved into wax. The stylus traces those canyons, decoding detail too small for the eye but vast to the ear. Every hiss, every scrape, every subtle inflection is stored in those lines. The digital age made music infinitely accessible, but it also flattened its terrain, compressing what once had topography into something uniform and smooth. Vinyl insists on texture. It insists on depth. To hold a record is to hold a map of sound’s dimensions, waiting to be unfolded.

But depth is not only technical, it is emotional. A melody carries not just notes but histories, associations, feelings that layer themselves invisibly into the experience. The gravity of Coltrane’s tone, the ache in Billie Holiday’s phrasing, the weight of a dub echo stretching across space — these are not surface effects but depths that draw us in. They come from lived experience, from choices made in the moment of creation, from something in the grain of the voice or the touch of a hand on strings. To listen deeply is to hear not only the sound but the life within it.

The listening bar exists to reveal these depths. Its systems are tuned not for show but for separation, for clarity, for balance. The goal is not loudness but immersion. The selector chooses records not to skim across moods but to draw the room deeper and deeper, each side a descent into another layer. In these spaces, music is not flat but three-dimensional. It occupies width, height, and depth, unfolding around you until you feel less like a listener and more like a participant inside the structure of sound.

Depth is also what distinguishes the casual listener from the devotee. To dip into a track, to hum a chorus, to skip at will — this is surface. To sit with an album, to let it reveal details with each repetition, to notice new textures in familiar songs — this is depth. The longer you stay, the more you discover. A bassline you never noticed. A phrase that alters meaning. A harmony that changes shape the closer you attend. Music is not fixed; it is a depth chart, and your ear grows more sensitive the further you dive.

I think of depth too in terms of memory. A record is not only sound but sediment. Each listen layers itself on top of the last, building strata of experience. When you hear a song years later, you don’t hear it alone; you hear every time you have heard it before, each context echoing through it. Depth is cumulative. It grows with us. It reminds us that listening is never neutral, that we bring ourselves to the record, and in return the record grows thicker with our presence.

There is a Japanese word, yūgen, that gestures towards a kind of depth beyond words — the mysterious, the profound, the sense that something lies hidden just beyond perception. Listening deeply is to encounter yūgen. It is to sense that within the crackle of a vinyl groove, or the echo of a trumpet in a tuned room, lies a vastness we cannot fully measure. The listening bar is built to protect this experience, to frame it, to make it possible for us to step beyond surface distraction into something deeper.

To live with depth is to resist the culture of the skim. We are trained to scroll, to skip, to consume music as fragments. But depth asks the opposite. It asks for patience, for stillness, for attention. It asks us to put on one record and stay with it, even when it resists us. Especially when it resists us. Depth is often hidden beneath difficulty. It is what rewards persistence, what reveals itself only after the surface sheen has worn off.

I remember the first time I truly listened to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. At first it felt impenetrable, chaotic, almost hostile. But I kept returning, guided by friends who insisted on its worth. Slowly the layers became clear. What once was noise became texture, what once was confusion became architecture. The depth was not immediate, but once discovered, it became inexhaustible. This is the lesson: depth is rarely easy, but it is always worth the dive.

The bar is the perfect environment for this. Its silence holds the frame, its architecture sculpts the sound, its ritual slows the pace. It is here that depth is revealed, layer by layer, until you are immersed. And once you have felt it, you cannot go back. Surface listening feels insufficient, like skimming a photograph when you could step inside the scene. Depth changes not only how we hear but how we live.

Because in the end, depth is not only a musical principle. It is a way of being. To live deeply is to resist distraction, to pay attention, to notice detail, to value what lies beneath. It is to take time with people, with places, with experiences, rather than skimming across their surfaces. The listening bar teaches us this discipline through music, but its lesson extends into life.

When I think of the Elements of Listening, depth feels like the natural culmination of the earlier notes. Silence is the frame. Waiting is the discipline. Space is the architecture. Depth is the result. Together they form a foundation for a way of listening that is richer, slower, more attentive. They invite us to hear not just music but the world differently.

Today, I invite you to choose one record you think you already know. Play it in silence. Sit with it fully. Notice what lies beneath the familiar. Follow the bassline deeper, notice the texture of the voice, listen to the way instruments inhabit space. Let memory and detail accumulate. See how depth reveals itself not in a rush but in layers, patiently, insistently, endlessly.

This is the fourth note of listening. Not surface, not skim, not distraction. But depth — the hidden dimension that makes sound inexhaustible. Once you learn to listen for it, you will never again mistake music for background. You will hear it as it is: a world to be entered, an ocean to be dived, a depth that waits for you to surrender.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.