The People Who Don't Listen
ラフィ・マーサー
I am writing this from Amsterdam Airport.
Not from a listening bar. Not from a record shop. Not from a room filled with glowing valves and carefully positioned loudspeakers.
Just an airport.
People moving in every direction. Announcements overhead. Wheels rolling across polished floors. Coffee cups. Delayed flights. Conversations half-heard and quickly forgotten.
And yet listening is exactly what I have been thinking about.
This week I visited one of the world's great audio brands. The sort of place where sound is taken seriously. The sort of place built around the idea that music matters. I arrived expecting to think about speakers, engineering, craftsmanship, and the pursuit of better sound.
Instead, I left thinking about something else entirely.
Listening and hearing are not the same thing.
The distinction feels obvious once you notice it, but I am not sure we talk about it enough.
A person can hear every word you say and never listen.
A person can sit in front of a £100,000 audio system and never truly hear the music.
A person can spend a lifetime surrounded by sound while remaining completely closed to what it is trying to tell them.
Listening, I realised, is not about ears.
It is about willingness.
The willingness to let something outside yourself enter.
The willingness to be changed.
The willingness to admit that you may not already know the answer.
When people do not want to hear, they do not listen.
The older I get, the more I notice how rare genuine listening has become.
We live in a world built around broadcasting. Everyone has a platform. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a feed to maintain, a position to defend, a version of themselves to project into the world.
There is very little reward for sitting quietly and allowing something else to take centre stage.
Yet that is precisely what happens when we put on a record.
Or at least what can happen.
The ritual itself is simple enough. Place the record on the turntable. Lower the needle. Sit down.
But beneath the surface, something much more important is taking place.
For forty minutes or so, we agree to stop talking.
We agree to stop deciding.
We agree to stop directing the experience.
Instead, we receive.
That might be why listening bars fascinate me so much.
People often assume they are about equipment. About rare records. About technical perfection.
Those things matter, of course.
But they are not the point.
The point is that a room full of strangers has collectively decided to pay attention.
For an hour or two, they choose curiosity over certainty.
They choose presence over performance.
They choose listening.
The surprising thing is that I have also discovered the opposite.
I have been in rooms filled with extraordinary sound where nobody seemed interested in hearing anything new.
Rooms where opinions arrived before the music did.
Rooms where certainty occupied every available space.
The systems were magnificent.
The listening was absent.
That observation has stayed with me as I sit here watching travellers move through Schiphol.
Perhaps because it has very little to do with audio.
You see it in business meetings where nobody changes their mind.
You see it in friendships where people wait patiently for their turn to speak.
You see it in families.
You see it online every day.
The world has become extraordinarily good at hearing.
It is not always very good at listening.
And perhaps that is what Tracks & Tales has really been about all along.
Not records.
Not venues.
Not hi-fi.
Not even music.
Those are simply the pathways.
The destination has always been attention.
A belief that some things deserve more time than we currently give them.
A belief that slowing down is not falling behind.
A belief that listening remains one of the most generous things a person can do.
As I look around this airport, I find myself wondering about the thousands of people moving through it today.
What stories are they carrying?
What music has shaped them?
What are they trying to tell the people they love?
And perhaps the more important question:
Who, in their lives, is truly listening?
Because when someone listens properly, something remarkable happens.
The room changes.
The conversation changes.
The music changes.
And sometimes, if we are lucky, we change too.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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