A Disjointed Kind of Friday

By Rafi Mercer

It’s Friday morning, 6:25am. The house is still, the city half awake, and I’m here — caught between the day job and Tracks & Tales, brain trying to split itself in two. Too early for whisky, too late for silence. I put my noise-cancelling headphones on and wonder: should I listen to nothing, give myself the gift of absence? Should I put on jazz, something cool, classic, familiar enough to hold me steady? Or should I reach for something else entirely?

That’s when I land on Crush by Floating Points. Maybe it was the name — I liked the idea of balance, of fragments aligning. Maybe it was the instinct that disorientation sometimes needs music that is itself a little disorienting. So I press play.

The first sounds arrive and they don’t soothe; they scatter. Synths dart across the stereo field like birds startled into flight, beats stutter and reassemble, melodies hover just beyond reach. It’s not comfort music. It’s a kind of beautiful discombobulation, as though my own distracted state has been given rhythm. And strangely, it helps.

Crush doesn’t try to calm. It doesn’t try to resolve. It mirrors the pace of a mind juggling too much, pulling you through sudden cuts and eruptions, then leaving you floating in passages of pure air. It’s part electronica, part classical architecture, part jazz phrasing — the seams showing in the best possible way. The record sounds like a city just before it wakes, systems flickering into life, patterns forming out of static.

At 6:25 on a Friday morning, this is exactly what I need. Not a lullaby, not a hymn, but something that carries my restless thoughts forward without pretending they aren’t there. Floating Points gives me shape where I had only scatter. The music builds a framework out of uncertainty.

That’s the beauty of listening at the wrong time, or maybe the right time. You stumble into an album not because it suits the moment but because it refracts it. Crush won’t be everyone’s morning record. But today, for me, it is perfect — because it sounds like being awake too early, working on one thing while thinking about another, watching the day gather speed before you’re ready for it.

Listening, in the end, is not always about escape. Sometimes it’s about recognition. The right record doesn’t fix your state of mind; it reflects it back in sharper focus. That’s what Crush has done for me this morning.

So here I am, Friday at 6:25am, awake when I’d rather not be, caught between silence, jazz, and everything else. And here is Crush, filling the air, disjointed but alive. It feels like a beginning.

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