The Mixtape and the Buyers' Office

How a conversation with my daughter explained the way I build a listening session

By Rafi Mercer

My daughter started singing before I'd finished the sentence.

We were talking about the next listening session. I won't say what it is yet. I'd mentioned a couple of the tracks and she joined in, quietly, the way you do with songs you've known for years. She's twenty-three, my younger one. When she'd finished she said it was a really quite strong session coming up, and that it wasn't like the others.

I'd been explaining how a session gets made, because I don't think it's obvious from the outside. Choosing the record takes me about twenty days. That means listening to a lot of music, most of which won't make it. Then it takes three or four days to build everything around the record: the context, the notes, the gaps between tracks. Then I buy the vinyl. Then I record the session. Then there's the admin between recording it and broadcasting it, done wherever I can find the facilities to do it. By the time members sit down on the last Sunday of the month, I've been living with that record for most of the month.

When I said it out loud it sounded like a lot. It didn't feel like a lot. It felt familiar, and I tried to work out why.

The first answer was the buyers' office at Virgin. When I was buying jazz in London in the nineties, the office had a simple rule. Anyone could put a CD on, and everyone listened. There were buyers from every category in that room, each with their own area to know for work and their own records they loved for no reason at all. So every day was a mix. Someone's soul record, then someone's indie single, then a jazz record of mine that nobody had asked for. You didn't skip. You listened, because that was the job, and because the person who'd put it on was sitting across from you.

The listening sessions work a bit like that. Each month I'm the one putting the record on. The room is now members in fifteen countries instead of a handful of desks, but the rule is the same. A record goes on and everyone listens.

The second answer came a bit later in the conversation, and it went back further. The way I put a session together is a lot like making a mixtape.

I didn't make mixtapes in the seventies, and probably not in the early eighties. But from the later eighties into the nineties, before CDs and then digital took over, I made plenty. Part of the pleasure was finding the songs. Some I recorded off my dad's stereo. Some off the radio. Some from another tape, some from a vinyl record. Each one sounded slightly different depending on where it came from, and you put them all together on one cassette.

It took hours. Hours and hours. A mixtape recorded in real time, so a four-minute song took four minutes, and if you got the order wrong you started again. A C90 gave you ninety minutes, forty-five a side, and you had to think about the shape of each side. What to open with. What to put last before the other person turned it over.

I'm not surprised now that I'm happy to spend twenty days choosing one record. I'd been practising for a long time.

The part of the mixtape I think people underrate is the paper card. Every cassette case had one, folded around the tape. You could write the track listing on it, which was useful. You could also draw on it, write messages on it, decorate it however you wanted. That card made the tape a gift. It was also a kind of message in a bottle, and a time capsule, though nobody thought of it that way at the time. If you pick up an old mixtape today it takes you straight back to when you made it, and the handwriting does as much of that as the music.

I made one for my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife. I remember drawing a hand on the card. I remember that clearly.

I can't remember any of the songs I put on it.

That's stayed with me since yesterday. I must have spent hours choosing and recording those songs, and what I remember is a drawing. I'd like to know what was on that tape.

Music today doesn't really have the mixtape in that sense. You can make a playlist in a minute, send it in a second and change it whenever you like. I make playlists like everyone else and there's nothing wrong with them. But a playlist doesn't come with a card. It doesn't tell you how long it took, or who it was made for, or what the person making it wanted to say.

This isn't nostalgia. Cassettes weren't better objects. They hissed, they stretched, and they got chewed up in car stereos. What interests me is how the thing was done, because doing it taught you things. That order matters. That a side of music has a shape. That the time you spend making something for someone is part of what you're giving them. A lot of what Tracks & Tales does is try to explain how these things used to work. Not to bring them back, but because I understood them, and I think other people would find them useful too.

So the listening sessions take something from both places. From the buyers' office, the idea that a record goes on and the room listens. From the mixtape, the idea that the record sits inside something that took far longer to make than it takes to hear. The notes and the context around each session are my version of the paper card.

My daughter didn't need any of that explained. She heard a couple of the tracks and sang along.

I remember the hand and not the songs. She'll probably remember the songs.

What is a Tracks & Tales Listening Session?

Once a month, on the last Sunday, members of The Listening Club gather online to hear one album on vinyl from start to finish, hosted by Rafi Mercer. Each session takes several weeks to choose and prepare, includes context and notes around the record, and is archived for members afterwards.

Why compare a listening session to a mixtape?

Both are made slowly and for someone else. A mixtape took hours to record in real time and came with a handwritten card that made it a gift. A listening session takes weeks to choose and days to build, and the notes around the record do the job the card used to do.

What was a C90 cassette?

A C90 was a cassette tape with ninety minutes of recording time, forty-five minutes on each side. It was the standard choice for home-made mixtapes in the 1980s and 1990s, and came with a paper card inside the case for track listings and artwork.

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