Four Tet, Time, and Strange Listening
A Day That Stretches and Contracts
By Rafi Mercer
There are days when time feels unreliable. It moves quickly, then halts, then folds back on itself as if rewinding. Lately, I’ve had that sensation often — as though the pace of life is at once accelerating and slowing, carrying both urgency and calm. Tracks & Tales is growing, people are finding us from cities I have not yet walked through, and yet I also feel the drag of memory, the sense that all of this has happened before.
This morning I put on Four Tet, and suddenly the strangeness of time felt mapped in sound. His records are not jazz, but they share jazz’s spirit of improvisation, of taking fragments and pushing them forward until they form their own geometry. Beats scatter, melodies repeat and mutate, samples loop like thoughts returning uninvited. It’s not linear. It’s circular, elastic, full of sudden detours. It reminds me of how the mind works when it can’t quite decide what pace to keep.
Listening to Four Tet is like walking through a city where every corner carries a memory. One street moves you forward, the next folds you into the past. A single track can feel as though it belongs to the present moment and to a night years ago, layered together like transparent pages. There is comfort in that confusion. It feels closer to how life actually unfolds, messy and unresolved but charged with pattern.
Jazz has long been described as the sound of surprise, but Four Tet carries a similar principle. He has always understood that repetition is not stasis but variation. A single note, repeated, becomes a measure of time; shift it slightly, and time itself seems to change speed. In that sense, his music is as philosophical as it is physical. It is asking: how do we measure moments, and what happens when we let them slip?
I find myself thinking about how listening bars embody the same paradox. A night inside one of these rooms feels both endless and fleeting. Hours collapse into the weight of a record side. A song from decades ago can suddenly feel sharper than anything new. The whisky in your glass makes the moment heavier, while the sound makes it lighter. Time is no longer the strict, ordered line of a clock. It becomes fluid, subjective, bent by sound.
Perhaps that is what keeps me returning to music every day. It refuses to obey time. A record from 1968, remastered and played today, doesn’t sound old. It sounds present, alive, necessary. A track made last week can carry the pulse of memory, reminding you of nights you thought forgotten. Four Tet’s tracks, jazz records, ambient pieces — they all remind me that time is not one thing but many. It rushes, it pauses, it echoes.
So yes, things are going well. The site grows, new readers arrive, venues continue to tune themselves into focus. But beneath it all there is that sensation of time behaving strangely, speeding up and slowing down together. Perhaps that’s why today belongs to Four Tet, a soundtrack for a mind bouncing in multiple directions yet somehow finding coherence.
If you’ve had a day like this, lean into it. Let the music shape the pace. Let repetition feel like comfort. Let surprise feel like release. Jazz or not, it is all the same lesson: listening teaches us that time is not fixed, it is flexible. And sometimes the best thing you can do is follow its bend.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here, or click here to read more.
