Tracks & Tales Essay

Rafi Mercer

Ma Fleur — The Cinematic Orchestra (2007)

In 2007 the Cinematic Orchestra made the soundtrack to a film that was never made. Jason Swinscoe handed his unfinished music to a friend, got back...

Rafi Mercer

Keeping the Thread

A low morning, a drive with the radio off, and an orchestra that arrived before the song. Rafi Mercer follows one thread, from Massive Attack's "Th...

Rafi Mercer

The Records That Wait

Some records are made ahead of their listeners. Donny Hathaway's Extension of a Man barely registered in 1973. Then the world caught up with it, an...

Rafi Mercer

What the Sleeve Was Holding

For years I treated the sleeve as packaging, the thing that got a record from the shop to the shelf. Then one credit on a Paul Bley cover led me to...

Rafi Mercer

Looking Up

Years into building Tracks & Tales, Rafi Mercer finds its first lesson in the roof of the Royal Albert Hall, where a boy at the Proms once look...

Rafi Mercer

The Record Will Wait

There was a back doorstep at the end of the English corridor, out of sight but within earshot of everything. Years later, I've come to think an alb...

Rafi Mercer

The Replies Start With a City

Readers have started writing back with their home listening city and the record that started it, and then telling others. Rafi Mercer on what that ...

Rafi Mercer

The Mixtape and the Buyers' Office

My daughter started singing along before I'd finished the sentence. Talking her through the next listening session, I realised the way I build them...

Rafi Mercer

The Quiet Rebellion Runs Both Ways

Everyone, we're told, is listening to old music now. But spend a year with new records and you start hearing the old ones everywhere inside them, a...

Rafi Mercer

I'd Heard Lisbon Before I Got There

A thin strip of orange over a Yorkshire field brings back Getz/Gilberto, a Rio record made in New York. It raises a question I've only answered onc...

Rafi Mercer

Listen, Read, Look, Watch

Every form of attention begins with a hand. What separates them is what the hand has to keep doing afterwards. These are the four pillars beneath e...

Rafi Mercer

A Story of Stories

The last session of Songs in the Key of Life ended at six minutes to five in the morning. Fifty years on, a record made by ear, remembered by someo...

Rafi Mercer

Not Everything Is for Everyone

A bar in New York only worked because everyone was in it: old and young, rich and broke, the cool and the plainly mad. Rafi Mercer on why the Liste...

Rafi Mercer

Music Didn't Get Worse. We Changed the Way We Found It.

Something did end in the 1990s, but it wasn't the quality of the records. It was the small number of doors music had to come through, and the fact ...

Rafi Mercer

Kiku Hifi, Liverpool — A Jazz Kissa in the Ropewalks

Kiku Hifi, Liverpool — a Japanese-inspired jazz kissa on Gradwell Street. Speciality coffee by day, vintage hi-fi and full-album listening by night...

Rafi Mercer

The Cold Shelf

The street gave up around four, and nothing in the flat wanted to be loud. What I was after wasn't calm — calm is a tempo. It was cold, which is a ...

Rafi Mercer

Six Degrees of Tracks & Tales, No. 002: Kingston to Bristol

A route from a Kingston record made for open windows to a small Bristol room modelled on a Tokyo listening café — following the singer whose voice ...

Rafi Mercer

Six Degrees of Tracks & Tales, No. 001: Tokyo to Leeds

A route through the archive rather than a search of it. Six reads, in order, from the jazz kissa of post-war Tokyo to a Leeds bedroom built from ca...

Rafi Mercer

The Track You Skip

Hold a well-played record up to the light and the grooves tell on you — some bands worn grey, others untouched since the day the sleeve was opened....

Rafi Mercer

The Spoils

In August 2016 I spent three days in Paris with every door open — basement to glass stairwell to rooftop to festival field, no gaps, no queues. Mos...

Rafi Mercer

Four in the Morning, and Something Started Playing

Awake at four with the house to myself, I lay still and listened to the silence — and my mind started playing a record I hadn't chosen. On the mind...

Rafi Mercer

The West-Facing Island

Everyone arrives in Ibiza pointing the wrong way. The mythology faces east — the clubs, the night that never ends. But the ritual that matters happ...

Rafi Mercer

The Record You Already Knew, and That is It

Some records feel familiar the first time you play them — not vaguely, but specifically. Quincy Jones's You've Got It Bad Girl is the source of tha...

Rafi Mercer

The Year the Music Changed Its Name

Between 1992 and 1997, London produced a body of music as ambitious as any city has managed — built in bedrooms, broadcast on pirate radio, and gon...

Rafi Mercer

The Hall That Held Its Breath

Frahm's first single-night live album carries something no studio record can: the audible presence of thousands of people being quiet together, on ...

Rafi Mercer

Gustav Holst — The Planets (1918)

Some say old music is not good music. Then you listen to Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and that argument collapses almost immediately.

Rafi Mercer

Something Is About to Happen

The Listening Club is quietly approaching a milestone — one worth marking not for its size, but for its pace. A short note on thresholds, patience,...

Rafi Mercer

The Gateway to the Weekend Is Opening

Two words, carried for over thirty years. A reflection on Pete Tong, the Friday ritual he built, the night he handed house music to an orchestra —...

Rafi Mercer

The Future Changes the Past

The notes are identical. The performances are identical. Nothing about the recording has changed. Yet the experience is completely different. A ref...

Rafi Mercer

The Origin Cannot Be Improved

There is a room in Shimokitazawa that has not changed its purpose in forty years. The jazz kissa was not designed to be charming — it was designed ...

Rafi Mercer

The Power of Going Away

Sade built one of the most influential careers in music by repeatedly choosing to vanish. This is a reflection on what that decision actually cost ...

Rafi Mercer

Why Do Great Years Happen? — 1959 and the Mystery of Creative Clusters

Why Do Great Years Happen? — 1959 and the Mystery of Creative Clusters · When mastery reaches its tipping point, movements emerge · In 1959, jazz d...

Rafi Mercer

The Thirty Seconds

I stood in front of the room and asked a question. Then I stopped talking. Thirty seconds passed — and in that silence, something shifted. This is ...

Rafi Mercer

Can I Listen, or Will I Lose the Moment?

We tell ourselves we love music. Yet giving a single record our full attention can feel surprisingly uncomfortable — not because we don't want to h...

Rafi Mercer

Session Two — What Actually Goes Into a Listening Club Session

Discover the hidden process behind a Tracks & Tales Listening Club session — from finding the origin album to weeks of listening, sequencing, v...

Rafi Mercer

Jazz Standards — The Songs That Learned How to Live Again

A jazz standard is not simply an old song — it is a song that musicians keep choosing. This is the story of why that distinction matters, and what ...

Rafi Mercer

When People Disappeared Into Music

When people filmed the drop, they kept the evidence. When people disappeared into it, they kept the feeling. And feelings last longer.

Rafi Mercer

Miles Davis at 100 — The Sound You Carry Forward

Miles Davis wasn't about volume. Even at his most electric, the real power sat somewhere else — in tension, restraint, in knowing exactly when not ...

Rafi Mercer

How to Set Up a Vinyl Listening Room

A vinyl listening room does not begin with the turntable. It begins with the room itself — and three decisions, made in the right order, that chang...

Rafi Mercer

Anthony Bourdain and the Quiet Rebellion of Staying Human

Underneath the food, the travel, the cigarettes and the searching, Bourdain was documenting something most people could feel but not name. A medita...

Rafi Mercer

The New Luxury of Listening

Discover why listening culture is quietly becoming one of modern life's new luxuries — from Paul Desmond and Andy Warhol to listening bars, attenti...

Rafi Mercer

Finding Your Way Back

On waking at 4am, putting on Serge Gainsbourg's No. 4, and finding your way back to the things you didn't know you'd left behind — a personal essay...

Rafi Mercer

How the World Found Us

There's a map open on my screen — rows and columns, pulled from analytics, each one marking a moment where someone, somewhere, went looking for a p...

Rafi Mercer

The Places Where Listening Is Winning

The places where listening is winning aren't always the ones with the most venues. They're the ones where the audience arrives first.

Rafi Mercer

They Didn't Lose This Record. They Left It Where It Couldn't Travel.

The word used about Winter in America is lost. Twenty-five years out of print, circulating as a rumour, passed hand to hand between people who knew...

Rafi Mercer

The System That Sold Us Silence

The EMI factory in Hayes took three decades to die. While it drained, the world was being reorganised around a different idea of what music was for...

Rafi Mercer

The Work That Never Quite Finishes

I've been watching The Defiant Ones this week — Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre talking about what it actually takes to make something real. Not the mythol...

Rafi Mercer

What Comes Next Is Beautiful

Most things are built in private. I said from the beginning this would be different — that Tracks & Tales would be shaped in the open, not reve...

Rafi Mercer

The Bridge — Donald Byrd, the Birth of Hip Hop, and What London Heard First

There is a bassline that changed everything. Not loudly. Not in one moment. But across two decades and two continents, a groove pressed into vinyl ...

Rafi Mercer

Record Store Day — The Ritual of Returning

There are days that feel like events, and then there are days that feel like a return. Record Store Day has always been the latter. If I could be a...

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The Tracks & Tales Guide Essay

Ma Fleur — The Cinematic Orchestra (2007)

Keeping the Thread

The Records That Wait

What the Sleeve Was Holding

Looking Up

The Record Will Wait

The Replies Start With a City

The Mixtape and the Buyers' Office

The Quiet Rebellion Runs Both Ways

I'd Heard Lisbon Before I Got There

Listen, Read, Look, Watch

A Story of Stories

Not Everything Is for Everyone

Music Didn't Get Worse. We Changed the Way We Found It.

Kiku Hifi, Liverpool — A Jazz Kissa in the Ropewalks

The Cold Shelf

Six Degrees of Tracks & Tales, No. 002: Kingston to Bristol

Six Degrees of Tracks & Tales, No. 001: Tokyo to Leeds

The Track You Skip

The Spoils

Four in the Morning, and Something Started Playing

The West-Facing Island

The Record You Already Knew, and That is It

The Year the Music Changed Its Name

The Hall That Held Its Breath

Gustav Holst — The Planets (1918)

Something Is About to Happen

The Gateway to the Weekend Is Opening

The Future Changes the Past

The Origin Cannot Be Improved

The Power of Going Away

Why Do Great Years Happen? — 1959 and the Mystery of Creative Clusters

The Thirty Seconds

Can I Listen, or Will I Lose the Moment?

Session Two — What Actually Goes Into a Listening Club Session

Jazz Standards — The Songs That Learned How to Live Again

When People Disappeared Into Music

Miles Davis at 100 — The Sound You Carry Forward

How to Set Up a Vinyl Listening Room

Anthony Bourdain and the Quiet Rebellion of Staying Human

The New Luxury of Listening

Finding Your Way Back

How the World Found Us

The Places Where Listening Is Winning

They Didn't Lose This Record. They Left It Where It Couldn't Travel.

The System That Sold Us Silence

The Work That Never Quite Finishes

What Comes Next Is Beautiful

The Bridge — Donald Byrd, the Birth of Hip Hop, and What London Heard First

Record Store Day — The Ritual of Returning

The Tracks & Tales Guide Weekly Letters.