The Day Before the Noise

On the quiet work of finishing things before the season begins

By Rafi Mercer

There’s a particular stillness to the Saturday before Christmas week that doesn’t get talked about very much. It isn’t calm in the way a Sunday morning is calm. It’s more like a room after the furniture has been lifted but before it’s put back down again. Everything feels temporary. Everyone feels in transit.

I’m standing in the showroom and not listening to very much at all. Not because there’s nothing to play, but because today doesn’t seem to want music. It wants completion. It wants the loose ends tied, the doors closed properly, the list quietly ticked off. You can feel it in people as they pass by — not rushing, exactly, but already somewhere else in their heads.

This is one of those days where choosing an album feels like asking too much of the moment. Music, when it’s right, asks for attention. Today is about endurance rather than immersion. It’s not a listening day; it’s a getting-through day.

And that’s fine.

There’s a strange discipline in recognising that not every day needs a soundtrack. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is let the room sound like a room. Let the floorboards speak. Let the air sit where it is. Let the system rest, like a good instrument waiting for the right hands.

These days are part of listening culture too — the days where sound steps back and lets life finish its sentence. Tomorrow or the next day, music will return and feel generous again. It always does. But today isn’t asking for beauty. It’s asking to be done properly.

So I stay with the quiet. I keep the lights right. I keep things moving. And I don’t force a record onto a day that hasn’t invited one.

That, in its own small way, is still listening.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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