The Room Between the Tracks
On what holds a listening session together
I've been building the next Listening Club session this week.
There is one album at the heart of it. We listen to it in full, start to finish, the way it was meant to be heard. But between its tracks — in the gaps, the breath, the space where one movement ends and the next hasn't quite begun — something else arrives.
Kool & The Gang. Ryuichi Sakamoto. Massive Attack. Radiohead. Jordan Rakei. The xx.
Not introductions. Not warm-up acts. Something harder to name than that. A hand reaching across. A quiet conversation between pieces of music that have never met but somehow already know each other. You can't see the connection. You can't quite think it into words. You can only hear it, and feel it, and find that it changes how the next track on the album lands.
That's what I'm learning to build inside these sessions. Not a programme. Not a playlist. Something closer to a room that holds you while the music does its work.
The album at the centre of this one has been waiting for the right setting. I think we've found it.
We gather on the last Sunday of every month at 4PM GMT. You'll need to be a Listening Club member to be in the room — if you're not yet, there's still time before the end of the month.
Rafi
What are the interludes in a Listening Club session?
Tracks from other artists placed between the album's own songs — not as interruptions but as connective tissue. They hold the space between movements, change the emotional temperature slightly, and make the next track arrive differently than it would have alone.
How do you choose what goes between the tracks?
Instinct, mostly. Something in the feel rather than the genre or era. Sakamoto and Radiohead have nothing obvious in common. But in the right order, in the right room, the connection is immediate — you feel it before you can explain it.
Does listening to an album this way change it?
Yes. The gaps become part of the record. The album starts to breathe differently. Tracks you've heard many times arrive as if for the first time.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. If this resonated, subscribe.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world — last Sunday of the month, 4PM GMT. Join here.
