The Gap After the Side Ends

Trying to work out, gently, whether any of this is going the right way.

By Rafi Mercer

The arm lifts at the end of a side, swings back, settles. For a few seconds the room is louder than the music was. The fridge. Traffic outside. The small sound of a house deciding what to do next.

That gap is the part I have come to trust. While a record is playing you don't really have an opinion about it — you have the volume, the room, the hour, the drink, all of it pressing in at once. You find out what you think in the quiet afterwards, in whether your hand goes to the shelf for something else or stays where it is.

I have been trying to work out whether this is going the right way, and I keep arriving at the same method. Not measurement. The gap after.

Most weeks here look like nothing. Something is written, something is read, a few people find a room in a city they were already travelling to. Nothing announces itself. Those weeks used to worry me and now they interest me, because they are the ones telling the truth. Anything looks alive on a good day. What matters is what a thing does when nobody is watching it, and this one, left alone, keeps going.

Then there are the days I change something. I hold those to one afternoon a week, deliberately, because the alternative is a hand permanently on the dial. There is a particular restlessness that arrives dressed as ambition — the urge to add, to accelerate, to make a thing bigger by making it busier. Almost every time, the correct move is to leave it. Not touching something that is working is harder than any of the work.

The Listening Club came out of the same instinct, though I had no language for it then. One album a month, played whole, together. It opens without a word — the needle goes down and that is the announcement. The shape hasn't needed changing yet. The constraint is the entire point: a record you cannot skip becomes a record you actually hear. I've written elsewhere about how it started, and the honest version is that it began as two people in a room rather than as a plan.

The book was the same, only slower. I wrote it because I wanted the argument to exist somewhere it couldn't be quietly updated. Print doesn't let you tinker. It has gone back for a fourth run, and the second one sits finished and unpublished, which tells you most of what you need to know about how I feel about hurrying.

So: right direction. I don't think that question can be answered on a Tuesday. You can't read a direction from a single day any more than you can judge a record from thirty seconds of it. What you can do is notice whether you still want to be in the room. Whether the slow weeks feel like decay or like weather. Whether the thing you built asks more of you than it gives back.

Mine doesn't. Not yet.

The arm is back on its rest. The room has gone quiet again. I haven't reached for the shelf, and I haven't got up either.

How do you decide when to change something?

I keep changes to one afternoon a week. Everything else waits. Most urges to intervene don't survive forty-eight hours, and the ones that do tend to be worth acting on. The rest were just restlessness with a good story attached.

What actually happens at a Listening Club session?

One album a month, on vinyl, played all the way through with everyone listening at the same time. No preamble, no talking over it. The needle drops and that is the opening. Notes and conversation come afterwards, not during.

Do I need to know anything about hi-fi to get something out of Tracks & Tales?

No. Most of the best listening rooms I've found are full of people who couldn't name a single component in them. Sitting down and letting a record finish is the whole skill, and nobody needs equipment to practise it.

Tracks & Tales is written slowly, one piece at a time. If you'd like it to arrive quietly each week, subscribe.

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