Albums as Maps, Cities as Soundscapes | Tracks & Tales Guide

By Rafi Mercer

There are albums that stay with you like places, and cities that greet you like songs. The line between the two has always been porous. Walk through Barcelona on a late summer evening and you may hear an echo of a record you first played years ago in a quiet room; land in Osaka after midnight and you will recognise the architecture of rhythm before you have even unpacked your bags. In the same way that a record sleeve can smell of paper, ink, and time, a city carries its own texture, its own resonance. Listening is never confined to the grooves of vinyl or the cones of a loudspeaker; it is a way of understanding the world.

Tracks & Tales was built on this realisation: that the geography of sound is both personal and universal. The album is a map, the city a soundscape. Each carries within it a sense of arrival, a recognition of something larger than the moment. The collection we began with, The 50 Best Albums for Deep Listening, was never intended to be definitive. Instead, it was a compass — a set of bearings, a reminder that wherever you are, listening deeply can orient you in space and time.

Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is not just a recording, it is New York in midnight blue, smoky and precise. Terry Callier’s The New Folk Sound carries with it the grain of Chicago, a city that breathes in chords and truths. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Async folds Tokyo into a single sustained note — fragile, enduring, impossible to forget. To listen to these albums is to sit in a room, but also to move through a city, to trace the outlines of architecture, light, and atmosphere. They do not just exist on shelves or playlists, they exist in streets and skylines, in the pause between footsteps and the weight of night air.

The cities respond in kind. Step into Barcelona’s listening bars and you will hear the Mediterranean refracted through vinyl grooves, the pulse of sun-warmed stone translated into hi-fi detail. Wander the alleyways of Osaka, and the exuberance of the city’s grit and tempo will remind you of jazz’s restless drive, a rhythm that refuses to sit still. Sit down in Seoul, where precision and innovation create listening rooms that feel like futures unfolding, every detail sharpened by intent. In Stockholm, Scandinavian clarity meets Northern soul, and the room becomes a vessel for contrast — the coolness of restraint met with the warmth of groove. And in Oslo, a record will surprise you, not because of its rarity, but because of the intensity with which it inhabits the space, as if every note has been sharpened by Nordic light.

Luxury, in this world, is not the price tag of a system or the exclusivity of a bottle behind the bar. Luxury is expectation and its disruption: to be seated in Oslo and hear a Brazilian pressing of a 1970s samba track, or to walk into a bar in Stockholm and recognise the warmth of Detroit soul carried across the water. The surprise is not just in the selection but in the way it is presented. A great listening bar system can make you feel the wood of a bass string or the skin of a snare as if it were within reach. A great city will remind you that music is not confined to its origins but is always on the move, always translating itself into new contexts.

I have spent years travelling with music as my compass. Each flight, each corner, each pause at an unfamiliar bar counter has revealed how deeply sound binds us to place. There was a night in Athens when the ruins seemed to hum in harmony with the dub playing inside a low-lit room, a reminder that history itself can be a rhythm. In Dublin, the storytelling tradition was mirrored in the way records were introduced — not just dropped onto turntables, but spoken into existence with care. In Shanghai, a future system carried sound as though the city itself were a circuit board, buzzing and alive with signal.

Albums carry similar memories. They become places you return to, landscapes that expand with every listen. Donald Byrd’s Places and Spaces is a skyline in brass; Burial’s Untrue is a night bus journey through East London rain. Each record in the Listening Bar Album Library holds this dual role: personal document and collective geography. When you play Laraaji’s Day of Radiance, it can be an afternoon spent with light filtered through curtains, but it can also be an entire season in a city you once knew, remembered only through its glow.

This is why we build atlases. The 50 Cities of Sound project is not simply a list of locations, but an acknowledgment that sound is a global language, spoken differently in every place but always legible if you listen long enough. The Tracks & Tales Listening Bar Atlas is an attempt to capture this: to create a guide that is part cartography, part curation, part love letter. To walk through it is to accept that no two cities will sound the same, but all will carry the same promise — that somewhere, someone has set the room for listening.

Luxury sound, then, is not a product but a way of being in the world. It is the knowledge that an album can be a destination, that a city can be a song, and that both can surprise you at any turn. It is knowing that deep listening is not an indulgence but a discipline, one that rewards patience and curiosity. To expect the expected is easy; to expect the unexpected is to live fully within sound.

Every journey confirms this. You may board a flight with a record in your headphones and step off into a city that suddenly makes sense of it. You may stumble into a bar where the first track pulls you back to a time you thought forgotten. You may sit alone at a counter, watching the record spin, and feel the world tilt slightly, as if reminding you that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

The future of Tracks & Tales will always be about weaving these strands together — albums as guides, cities as chapters, venues as punctuation marks. To enter this world is to accept that sound is geography: the map is the music, the city is the system, and the journey is the listening.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.