The Voice That Hangs in the Air

By Rafi Mercer

Some voices are not voices at all, they are tones that hang in the memory long after the words dissolve. Yesterday I found myself haunted by one of those tones. I had been listening to The Spoils, the 2006 Massive Attack EP that has lived with me since the first time I heard it. It reminded me of a red-eye from Paris to London years ago, the hour when dawn hasn’t decided what to do yet, and the taxi rolls quiet through streets that feel half-dreamed. That tune floated back into my head and refused to leave.

And as the day went on, I caught myself thinking: how would this sound in a listening bar? On a Living Voice system tuned with care, or on a pair of Friendly Pressure bespoke loudspeakers built to carry weight without strain? The kind of setup where tone is not just heard but felt. Good systems do this: they push you past melody and lyric into something older, deeper. They reveal the body behind the voice.

It took me most of the day to recognise what I was really hearing. It wasn’t just Massive Attack. It was the ghost of Terry Callier. A friend of mine, Alistair Watts, introduced me to Callier over twenty years ago. At the time I didn’t understand how rare he was. Chicago soul, folk and jazz tangled into one voice that felt both rooted and restless. You could mistake him for a singer, but really he was a storyteller with a guitar, a poet with a pulse.

Callier actually worked with Massive Attack on an EP in 2006, which might explain the association my ear made yesterday. But his tone predates all of it. Think back to The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, recorded in 1968. Sparse, patient, almost austere, but filled with a resonance that feels eternal. Or What Color Is Love from 1972, where soul and jazz stretch into something cinematic, lush and searching. If you’ve ever sat in a quiet bar and heard a record that stops you mid-sip, you know what I mean. The voice doesn’t just fill the room, it re-arranges it.

Here’s the part that excites me. The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier is being reissued and remastered this October. And it feels timely. Almost as if the people who chose the date knew the world needed to hear that tone again. Not nostalgia, but necessity. We live in a loud moment. A voice like Callier’s reminds us of what music can still do when it is gentle yet unyielding.

Imagine it: a winter night, a dimly lit bar in Tokyo or Lisbon. The stylus drops, and Callier’s voice floats out of the speakers. Not belted, not forced, but placed in the air with care. The room slows. Time bends. You hear the roots of folk and the stretch of jazz, but more than that, you hear humanity unpolished, direct. In a world of compressed sound and disposable playlists, that tone feels like a form of resistance.

When I think of the albums I return to, they are rarely the loudest or the cleverest. They are the ones that leave space around the notes. Callier’s records have that space. You can step inside them. You can live there for a side, maybe longer. Played through the right system, they don’t just sound good, they sound inevitable.

And maybe that’s why the connection to Massive Attack lingered in my mind yesterday. Because their best work does the same thing: builds a space, opens a tone, holds a mood that feels necessary. When The Spoils played through my headphones years ago, it was Callier’s spirit I was hearing, even if I didn’t know it.

So as October approaches, I’m waiting. Waiting to lower the needle on that remaster. Waiting to hear whether the tone has been sharpened, deepened, clarified. Waiting to sit in silence as the first line lands and the room shifts. The reissue is more than a release. It is a reminder. That voices like Callier’s are not bound by time, they are bound by need.

And perhaps that is the story worth telling today. That sometimes music waits for the right moment to return. That a tone can outlast decades. That in the hands of the right selector, in the right room, on the right system, a song from 1968 can feel like tomorrow.

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