Oxygène and the Mind That Listens
A morning spent with Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène, exploring how memory, music, and daily discipline intertwine in the growing rhythm of Tracks & Tales.
By Rafi Mercer
I’m never quite sure how my mind works — not really. But to build Tracks & Tales, I’ve learned one small discipline that keeps me tethered: write every day. Five, maybe ten articles, each one a short act of listening. I sit, I think about sound, I remember albums that never left me and others that slipped through without saying goodbye. Somewhere in the mix of habit and chance, a thought becomes a thread, and a thread becomes a story.
This morning, the thread was Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygène.” Don’t ask me why — I woke with it already playing in my head, as though some inner frequency had dialled itself to 1976. That’s the strange thing about the listening mind. You don’t control it. You follow it.
The album’s a curious one — born at a time when synthesisers still felt like the future, when a single note could feel like an event. Oxygène isn’t about melody as much as it’s about atmosphere. It’s air turned into sound. Every sweep and pulse feels like breath finding form, every phase shift a thought dissolving into another. When I listen now, it still feels both alien and deeply human — a sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere.
I can’t remember when I first heard it. Maybe in the background of a film, or on late-night radio when stations still experimented with mood instead of metrics. Or maybe I heard it by accident, flipping through vinyl in a store, that familiar cover — the Earth’s skin peeled back to reveal a skull — catching my eye. However it arrived, it stayed. Some albums do that. They enter quietly, linger indefinitely.
There’s something profoundly spatial about Oxygène. It doesn’t unfold like a story; it expands like air in a room. You don’t just listen — you breathe it. That’s why it belongs in the lexicon of listening bars and the culture of slow sound. Jarre wasn’t composing for dancefloors or radio rotations; he was sculpting stillness, letting texture become tempo.
It reminds me how sound can rewire time. Every morning I sit here, trying to keep up with my own project — pages to publish, venues to catalogue, stats to monitor — yet what keeps me going isn’t the numbers. It’s the way music collapses decades in a heartbeat. The way one sound from nearly fifty years ago can still feel new, vital, and completely relevant.
The discipline, if there is one, is to stay open. To let the mind wander and trust it knows where it’s going. Writing five or ten pieces a day isn’t really about output; it’s about listening to the echoes. When a record like Oxygène appears out of nowhere, I’ve learned not to question it. The subconscious has better taste than the algorithm.
I think that’s what Tracks & Tales is teaching me: the act of listening is never just about music. It’s about awareness — to time, to emotion, to the inner weather of the day. One moment you’re thinking about whisky glassware, the next you’re back in 1976 surrounded by analog synthesisers and tape hiss.
There’s comfort in that kind of time travel. The mind may be unpredictable, but it’s always honest. It plays what you need, even if you don’t yet know why.
Maybe that’s why Oxygène surfaced today — a reminder to breathe. To slow the noise. To return to the idea that listening, at its core, is oxygen for the soul.
And so the work continues. The pages stack, the map expands — 91 countries, 1,274 cities and counting — and each small entry joins a larger rhythm. A rhythm of rooms, of people, of quiet devotion to sound.
But before all of that, there’s always a moment like this — coffee cooling, record turning in my head, wondering how it all connects. The answer, as always, is in the listening.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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