The Call from North Georgia
What a conversation about the Listening Club sessions revealed about the work nobody sees
By Rafi Mercer
The phone rang last night, and on the other end was Dave, calling from North Georgia. Five hours behind me, his afternoon still bright while my evening had already settled in. We talked for a long while, the way you do when the conversation has no agenda — records, rooms, the state of things. But it was one thread that stayed with me after the call ended, and it's the reason I'm writing this morning.
Dave is a new visitor to the platform He'd read the piece I wrote about the effort that goes into the Listening Club sessions. And he said something honest, which is the best thing anyone can say: he'd read it, but he hadn't fully understood it. Not the words — the weight. What effort actually meant. What challenge. What time, and what money. It was only in talking it through, hearing it described rather than reading it compressed into paragraphs, that the scale of it landed. A unique listening moment, I think he called it. And then he said something else, something my friend Fernando at Monocle had said to me in almost the same words: you're on to something there.
When two people, an ocean apart, who have never met each other, arrive independently at the same sentence, it's worth sitting still with.
The sessions, for those who haven't joined one yet, work like this. One album a month, played on vinyl from start to finish. But the album is only half of it. Between the tracks, I bring in other records — the influences that fed it, the echoes it left behind, the parallels sitting quietly on shelves either side of it. The featured album is the spine; the records between are the story. It's the difference between being handed a masterpiece and being walked through the rooms it was built in. All of it happens on our private channel, hosted by me, so a member in Chicago or Tokyo or North Georgia can be part of the same listening moment regardless of time zone.
One of our Founding Members, Peter in Oxford, put the discipline of it better than I ever have: "The viewer needs to wait and let the session unfold. There can't be any preconceptions." That's the whole point. You don't know which record comes next between the tracks. You're not meant to. You sit, and the session opens out around you.
What Dave couldn't see from the outside — what nobody can, really — is everything that surrounds that hour or two. The sourcing of the right pressings, plural, because a session isn't one record but a constellation of them. The listening that happens long before the recording does, working out which records earn their place between the tracks and which merely fill time. The recording, the editing, the hosting, the quiet infrastructure that keeps the channel private and the archive intact. None of it is glamorous. All of it is deliberate. The session you watch is the visible tenth of something much larger, and I've come to accept that this is how it should be. The best rooms I've ever listened in never showed you the work either. You just noticed the air felt different.
But the call did prompt something. If the effort is invisible, perhaps the least I can do is make the sessions themselves richer — give them more to hold. So I've gone back into the three most recent recordings and done extra work on each: chapters added, so you can move through the session properly — the album tracks, and the records between them — and additional context woven in around what each session made room for.
The Miles Davis session — Kind of Blue | The Long Echo | Full Vinyl Session + What It Made Possible — now traces not just the record but the long shadow it cast, and the records between the tracks that show what it opened the door to. If you want the deeper written companion, the full essay lives on the site: Miles Davis — Kind of Blue (1959).
The Donald Byrd session — Places & Spaces | Full Vinyl Session + The Records That Shaped It — follows the lineage inward: the records that fed the Mizell Brothers' shimmer, played between the tracks where they belong. The album essay is here: Donald Byrd — Places and Spaces (1975).
And the Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders session — Promises | Full Vinyl Session + The Records Around It — maps the constellation around that extraordinary single piece: what surrounds it, what speaks to it, what to reach for when the final movement fades.
Here is the part that matters if you're reading this today rather than next week: these three sessions are public for roughly the next three days. After that, they move behind the Listening Club paywall, into the archive open to members only. That's not a marketing device. It's the same principle the whole platform runs on — that constraint creates significance, that a session available forever to everyone is worth less to each person than a session held in a room with the door gently closed. The archive is where these recordings live permanently. The open window is simply a courtesy, and a short one.
Dave left me with one more thought before we rang off — that a session might, someday, be shared in some kind of open forum. An interesting idea, and not the first he's given me worth pondering. But like everything here, one step at a time. The sessions were built slowly, deliberately, one record between the tracks at a time. Whatever they become next will be built the same way.
You're on to something there. I'll take that sentence twice, from two continents, and get back to work.
What are the Listening Club sessions?
One album a month, played on vinyl from start to finish — and between the tracks, other records that open it out: influences, echoes, parallels. Sessions are hosted by founder Rafi Mercer on the club's private channel, so members can join from anywhere in the world, with a permanent archive available to everyone in the club.
How long are the three sessions publicly viewable?
For roughly three days from the publication of this piece. After that, the Kind of Blue, Places & Spaces, and Promises sessions move behind the Listening Club paywall and can only be accessed through the members' archive.
Do I need special equipment to take part?
No. The sessions are filmed vinyl playbacks with chapters and added context — you can watch and listen on whatever you have. That said, the better your speakers or headphones, the closer you get to being in the room.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
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