Listen, Read, Look, Watch

The four pillars beneath Tracks & Tales, and the order they stand in

By Rafi Mercer

Every one of them begins with a hand.

A hand lifts the tonearm and lowers it to the edge of a record. A hand opens a book, or an email, and holds the place. A hand turns a sleeve over to see what is written on the back. A hand presses play, once, and then rests. These are four small movements, each barely noticed. But watch what the hand has to do afterwards, and you will see almost everything I believe about attention.

Journalists have started asking me what Tracks & Tales is really about. The easy answer is listening bars, or vinyl, or cities. The truer answer is four words in a particular order: listen, read, look, watch. They are the four pillars underneath everything we make, and the order matters. It runs from the most chosen form of attention to the most captured.

Listen. It sits first because it is the only one of the four that cannot happen by accident. Hearing can. Ears have no lids, and sound comes in whether we invite it or not: the road outside, the extractor fan, the playlist in a shop chosen by someone we will never meet. Listening is the decision to take what arrives anyway and give it somewhere to land. A record makes that decision physical. The hand that lowered the needle has to come back twenty minutes later, lift the arm, turn the disc and begin again. Nothing continues unless you continue it. The side ends, and the music asks, quite politely, whether you would like to keep going. That interruption is not a flaw in the format. It is the format. It is the moment the choice is handed back.

Read. A close second. Nothing on a page moves unless you move it. The words sit perfectly still and wait. You set the pace and you supply the voice. If you drift, the sentence does not carry on without you; it waits at the exact point you left it until you return. Reading is listening done with the eyes, an inner voice you have agreed to follow. This is why every piece that goes out under the Tracks & Tales name, the Friday email, the Dailies, the city pages, runs to a three-to-six-minute read at the very least. I know that is an uncomfortable length now, in a world sized for the thumb. It is meant to be. The length is the first small thing I ask of a reader, and the first small thing they decide to give. Anyone who reaches the end has done something deliberate. They chose to start, and then they chose not to stop. A muscle is built that way. You don't build it by reading one long thing. You build it by beginning, again and again, things that ask for more than a glance.

Look. Here the choosing loosens, but it does not let go. The eye is quick and restless, pulled by colour, by movement, by a face. Yet the things we look at are patient things: a photograph, a record sleeve propped against the wall, a street in an unfamiliar city as the shops pull their shutters down. None of them hurry you. The hand has nothing left to do, but you still decide how long you stay, and you are still the one who ends the conversation. Look at a cover for ten seconds or ten minutes; the cover does not mind either way.

Watch. Different again. The moving image sets its own pace and asks you to keep up. The cut decides when you have seen enough, and the score tells you what to feel slightly before you feel it. Film at its best can be as demanding as any record, and I am not against it. But watching is the form in which attention is most easily held for us rather than given by us. The hand presses play once and then has nothing more to do. And the feed is watching perfected. There, the hand does not even start things. The thumb moves, but moving is not choosing. The next thing has already been chosen, and it begins before you have decided whether you wanted it.

Put the four side by side and the order explains itself. It is not a ranking of taste. It is a measure of who does the choosing. At the top, nothing happens unless you make it happen. At the bottom, everything happens whether you take part or not. Somewhere between the two, most of us stopped noticing how much we were giving away.

It was not taken in one go. Nobody signed anything. It went one autoplay, one notification, one "next episode in five seconds" at a time, until a whole evening could pass without a single decision in it. It felt like convenience because it was convenience. That is precisely why it worked.

I have sometimes called what we do an anti-social strategy. It is not quite that. I have nothing against people finding each other; the Listening Club exists so that they can, on the last Sunday of every month, all over the world. What I am against is the feed, attention that is captured rather than given. The strategy is simply to start at the other end of the order. Build everything on the pillars that cannot be done by accident, and trust the rest to rearrange itself around them.

That is why I don't believe the return of the record, the long read and the listening bar is nostalgia. Too many of the people buying vinyl now were not alive the first time round. Too many of those walking into listening bars in Tokyo, London and Mexico City have no older version of it to miss. They are reaching for the top of the order, for the forms that give the decision back. A record is a small physical piece of friction that does exactly that. You have to pick it. You have to put it on. You have to stay.

Attention comes back the way it left, a little at a time. And it seems to me it comes back in reverse order, starting with the most deliberate thing. The first step is not watching less. It is listening more.

A hand lowers the needle. Twenty minutes later, the side ends, and the hand has to decide again.

What are the four pillars behind Tracks & Tales?

Listen, read, look and watch, in that order. Together they describe how Tracks & Tales thinks about attention, from the form that demands the most deliberate choice to the form that most easily captures us. Everything on the platform is built from the top of that order down.

Why are Tracks & Tales pieces written to a three-to-six-minute minimum?

The length is deliberate. Each piece is designed to be a chosen moment, long enough that finishing it means a reader decided to give it their attention. Over time, that habit of beginning and staying matters as much as any single piece.

What is the Listening Club?

The Listening Club is a monthly online listening session held on the last Sunday of every month and open to members anywhere in the world. One album is played in full on vinyl, side by side, with host notes that guide the listening without interrupting it.

If this was a few minutes worth choosing, subscribe and the Friday email will find you each week.

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.