A Quiet Email to Zürich — On Ambition and the Luxury of Listening

A reflective note on the next chapter for Tracks & Tales: reaching out to Tyler Brûlé and the Monocle world, balancing ambition with humility, and imagining a shared album at the centre of the conversation.

By Rafi Mercer

There are certain emails you don’t dash off between meetings. They sit in the drafts folder of your mind for months, sometimes years, quietly humming away in the background while you work. Today, I finally admitted to myself that I’m writing one of those emails – not yet on the screen, but very much in motion – to Tyler Brûlé and the team at Monocle.

Tracks & Tales has been growing in that strange, modern way: numbers on dashboards that somehow feel both abstract and deeply personal. Impressions, clicks, search terms, new countries, new cities. Google, that vast and indifferent machine, has started to notice that this little atlas of listening exists – and there’s the quiet suggestion of what might happen next as domain authority deepens and the graph starts to bend. Success, for now, is measured in the slow arrival of strangers who choose to stay and read. But beneath the charts there’s something else emerging: the sense that, perhaps, it’s time to widen the ambition.

I’ve always admired what Brûlé built with Monocle: a world where attention is treated as a luxury material, where print still matters, where the tone is calm, international, and quietly exacting. It’s a magazine that assumes its readers are adults with curiosity and taste, not just consumers with quick thumbs. In many ways, Tracks & Tales has been shaped in parallel to that spirit, even if from a very different starting point – less mid-flight briefcase, more worn record bag and coffee ring on the sleeve notes.

So the thought that’s been circling is simple: what would it mean to ask Monocle for a little listening time?

Not a pitch deck, not a hard sell, just a request to talk about sound. About the way listening bars and hi-fi cafés and vinyl rooms are becoming the new third spaces for people who crave atmosphere over spectacle. About how a media platform built on “slow listening” might sit alongside a global brand built on “good briefing”. Maybe it’s a studio visit, maybe it’s a coffee, maybe it’s a quiet fifteen minutes on the line between London and Zürich. What matters isn’t the format – it’s the willingness to say: this project has grown enough to be taken seriously.

Ambition is a delicate thing. Push it too hard and it becomes desperation. Hide it and it calcifies into regret. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle: a calm, clear declaration that you’re building something with enough care and durability to sit in the same conversation as the people you have quietly learned from. That’s what today feels like – a day where the charts and the pages and the reader emails all gently conspire to say, “It’s time to lift your head a little.”

Part of me imagines that email carrying a song with it. Not a playlist, not a “Top 10 for Founders”, just one album to share with anyone who happens to open the newsletter that day. Something that matches the tone of this moment: measured, crafted, international in its reach but intimate in its detail. The kind of album you could imagine playing in a Monocle bureau as easily as in a Tokyo listening bar or a quiet flat in Leeds.

Maybe it’s a record from the Blue Note catalogue, something where the room is as present as the musicians. Maybe it’s a modern ambient-jazz hybrid that carries the city at 6am. The exact title can wait – that’s a pleasure for another day. What matters is the principle: that every step up in ambition should be anchored by a step deeper into listening. If Tracks & Tales reaches out to bigger rooms, it should do so with more care, not more noise.

Because underneath the talk of domain authority and search uplift is a simpler truth: this is still just a love letter to the act of pressing play and paying attention. The numbers are oxygen, but the pulse is still that moment when someone writes back and says, “I tried that bar,” or “I bought that record,” or “I listened to that album on the train and everything felt different for forty minutes.” That’s the metric that doesn’t show up in Google Search Console but quietly dictates everything.

So perhaps today’s Daily is really a rehearsal. A way of saying out loud: I’m ready to see how far this can go. Ready to imagine Tracks & Tales in conversation with brands and people who have spent decades treating culture as something worth building patiently. Ready to write that quiet, carefully shaped email to Zürich – respectful, concise, and rooted in the same thing that started all of this: the simple desire to share good sound with people who care.

If that conversation ever happens, I like to think there’ll be an album on the table between us – not as background, but as a reference point. A reminder that beneath the publishing models and growth curves and valuations, what we’re really trading in is the luxury of listening. A shared belief that in a noisy world, making space for a record to breathe might be the most modern move of all.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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