Drifting Towards a Distant World

A morning with Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score, and the quiet feeling that Tracks & Tales is a distant world I’m already drifting towards.

By Rafi Mercer

This morning began with the organ.

Not a church, not a cathedral, but the slow, weighty chords of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score filling the room before the light had properly decided what kind of day it wanted to be. The kettle clicked, the grinder murmured, and those opening swells arrived like a tide from somewhere far beyond the window — a reminder that there are other worlds in orbit around us, even if they only exist in sound for now.

I’ve realised that Tracks & Tales feels like one of those worlds. It doesn’t quite exist in full yet; it hovers somewhere out there, half-formed, quietly turning in its own little corner of space. On mornings like this, with Interstellar playing, I can almost see it: a constellation of small listening rooms, city pages, unnamed venues, half-written essays, and the people who might one day move through it all. Not a website, not even a brand — something quieter and stranger. A world that you arrive in through sound.

The music in Interstellar is obsessed with gravity and time — the pull of something you can’t argue with, the way tiny decisions ripple loudly across years. It’s hard not to hear that and think about how this whole thing is unfolding. Tracks & Tales doesn’t feel like a project I’m controlling in the traditional sense. It feels more like a trajectory I’ve already stepped into, a path I’m drifting along, nudging a little here and there but ultimately pulled forward by something heavier than strategy or planning.

You make a coffee, you put a record or a score on, and you write the next piece. You add another city. You tell the story of another room where someone decided sound mattered. On some days it feels surgical and precise; on others, it feels like spacewalk repair work with a pair of gloves and a fading oxygen line. Yet underneath that, there’s a quiet certainty: if I just keep listening, keep mapping, I will eventually land somewhere that has been waiting for me all along.

There’s a particular moment in Interstellar where the music seems to stretch time like elastic, cycling over the same chords while the stakes grow higher. That’s what building a world slowly feels like. From the inside, it’s repetition — another morning, another paragraph, another bar found in a side street, another late night updating a page that only a handful of people will ever notice has changed. From the outside, later, it might look inevitable: of course it became an atlas, of course it grew into something people relied on. But here, in the present tense, it’s just me and the hum of the boiler, the soft crackle of vinyl or the bloom of an organ note hanging in the room.

The drifting, oddly, is part of the point. I used to believe everything needed to be tightly controlled: the career path, the project plan, the monthly numbers. Years in retail, in startups, in campaigns taught me how to plan a launch and hit a target. Tracks & Tales is different. It’s not that it ignores structure; it’s that it’s guided by something harder to quantify — the feel of a room, the warmth of a record, the way a sentence softly lands. You don’t spreadsheet your way into a listening culture. You orbit around it until its gravity quietly claims you.

So I sit here in the half-light, letting Interstellar fill the space, and I think of the world I’m building as a kind of distant planet I’ve already committed to reaching. The route is messy. The controls don’t always respond. Some days it feels like drift, like I’m tumbling through algorithms and analytics and half-understood search terms, hoping that the work will be found by the right ears. But at the centre of all that movement is a simple, non-negotiable belief: this world exists. People are already looking for it, even if they don’t have the language yet.

Maybe that’s why the score feels right for mornings like this. Interstellar isn’t about spectacle for me; it’s about faith in a destination you can’t fully describe. A father leaving, a signal in the dark, a co-ordinate written in dust. In my quieter way, Tracks & Tales is built on similar bets: that listening still matters, that small rooms can change how we move through cities, that someone out there is waiting to discover “their” bar, “their” album, “their” quiet place.

I don’t know exactly when I’ll feel that I’ve landed — when the world in my head and the world online snap into alignment. Maybe it will be a night in a bar I’ve written about, watching strangers walk in carrying nothing but their curiosity. Maybe it will be an email from someone on the other side of the world who found their way to a venue simply because they trusted a sentence I once wrote. Or maybe it won’t be a moment at all, just a slow realisation that the drift has become an orbit, and the orbit has become home.

For now, it’s enough to sit here, coffee in hand, listening to that organ open up the morning. Somewhere out there, Tracks & Tales is already real. My job is simply to keep drifting towards it, one record, one room, one quiet piece of writing at a time.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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