Someone Asked If They Could Take It With Them

A new layer of The Listening Club, arriving this week

By Rafi Mercer

A message came in last week asking whether the sessions could exist without the video.

I assumed the reason was ordinary — trains, aeroplanes, the parts of a day that don't allow a screen. But it stayed with me longer than it should have, because the honest answer was yes, and had been yes for some time. It just hadn't occurred to me that anyone would want the thing I make in private.

Every session begins as a sequence on Spotify. Long before the room, before the pressings, before anything is bought, there is an order being tested. I sit with those sequences for hours. Move a track, hear what it does to the one behind it, move it back. Find the place where a room would drift and put weight there instead. Only once the shape holds do I go looking for the records — and the records are always the expensive part, so the sequence has to be right first.

That workbench has never been visible. It seemed too much like showing the pencil lines under a drawing.

But that is exactly what someone asked for, so from this week Listening Club members will have the sequences. Unmixed, in order, as they were built. Not the session — the session is the room, the needle, the fact that everyone is hearing it at once, and none of that travels. This is the thinking underneath it. The reading, the wrong turns, the tracks that nearly made it and the ones that finally did.

A back door into how the night was arrived at.

The room is still the point. But now you can carry the argument for it around with you.

What are the Listening Sequences?

The Spotify sequences behind each Listening Club session — the track order as it was designed, alongside the album at the centre of it. Members receive the links; the sessions themselves remain in the room.

Do the sequences replace the session?

No. A session is one album, in full, with other people, at the same time. The sequence is how that night was built — useful before it, and worth returning to afterwards.

How do I get access?

Sequences are shared with Listening Club members. One album a month, played all the way through, plus the guides and the archive around it.

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

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.