Rafi Mercer: A Self-Portrait in Sound

By Rafi Mercer

I’ve never been especially good at doing things the acceptable way. Even now, there’s a part of me that enjoys walking slightly off-beat, listening for the rhythms other people miss. Not loudly, not to provoke — just quietly, instinctively, because that’s where I feel most alive.

That streak was already there when I stepped into the Virgin Games store at 100 Oxford Street, a young man with too much curiosity and not enough patience. The shop was perched above the 100 Club, where the ghosts of last night’s music still lingered in the floorboards — brass, sweat, beer, and freedom. You could smell it in the morning, a faint reminder that sound leaves a trace long after it fades.

I didn’t stay long upstairs. The pull of the Virgin Megastore at the Tottenham Court Road end was irresistible — that cathedral of noise and energy where ideas, genres, and people collided. It was chaos, the kind Richard Branson seemed to cultivate deliberately. But it felt right. I’ve always been at ease in well-timed disorder — in places that hum with possibility.

Those early years taught me that listening is both internal and external. It’s not just hearing; it’s decoding. It’s understanding why one track moves you and another doesn’t. My mind works quickly — always has — but I’ve learned to pair that speed with patience. To think fast, but listen slow. To stay with a sound long enough to find its truth.

Then came the second act — digital, start-ups, global platforms, IPOs — the kind of chapters that move at jet speed. I helped build ideas that scaled across continents, where culture met commerce in real time. I learnt how success sounds when it’s amplified — bright, metallic, efficient — and how, if you listen carefully, you can hear the hum of exhaustion beneath it.

Those experiences sharpened my conviction: every venture, from the corner record store to a multinational, lives or dies by its ability to listen. Strategy, scale, growth — they’re all acoustics. The moment you stop listening, you lose tone, you lose truth.

Now, looking back, I realise Tracks & Tales is, in many ways, an autobiography told through the lens of listening to a world. Every city I write about, every bar or record label I chronicle, is part memoir, part mirror — fragments of a life tuned to sound. What began as observation has become reflection: a record of how listening shaped not just my work, but my way of being.

People often measure success in noise — in visibility, in proof, in the echo of applause. I’ve learnt to measure it in resonance. My rewards are internal now — the quiet satisfaction of having built something that sounds like me.

So yes, I’m successful — but in a slower, deeper way. Tracks & Tales is my rebellion dressed in refinement: elegant on the surface, radical underneath. It’s proof that you can move through the world gently and still leave a mark.

I’m calm about it all now — calm about the noise, calm about the climb, calm about what’s next. Everything I do is a voice for those who feel deeply and listen well, for those who sense there’s something larger vibrating just beneath the surface of things.

That’s where I live: between jazz and silence, between defiance and grace — a listener tracing the echo of a world learning, finally, to hear itself again.

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