Where Shall I Go?

How the day begins at Tracks & Tales: one place, one record, nothing else.

By Rafi Mercer

Six o'clock. Coffee. Oban at my feet, waiting to see whether the day starts with a walk or with this.

It starts with this.

Before the emails and the news, before the world gets its hands on the morning, there's one question, and only one: where shall I go?

I don't mean on a map, at least not yet. I mean by ear. I travel somewhere in my mind and look for a place to listen. It might be a bar in Tokyo with the lights turned low, a basement in Philadelphia or a room above a shop in Lisbon. And once I'm there, I ask what that place would play.

Then I go and find the record.

It isn't research, and it isn't a feed telling me what I'll like. It's closer to wandering. You set off towards one thing and the music takes you somewhere else. This morning I went looking for French house with a bit of jazz in it and ended up in Paris in 1996, with a record I'd half forgotten. That's how it goes. The place chooses the record, and sometimes the record chooses the place.

There's no distraction in it. There's nothing to scroll, just one destination and one album, and the time it takes to hear it properly.

I've come to think of it as the most useful hour of the day. Not because it's productive, because it isn't. It reminds me what the rest of the day is for, and that the world is still wide even on the days it feels small.

Then the coffee's cold and Oban has given up waiting.

Where shall I go tomorrow?

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