Rafi Mercer — Founder of Tracks & Tales, Author of The Luxury of Listening

From the floor above the 100 Club to a Listening Club that gathers in eleven countries: a listener's life, and the philosophy underneath it.

By Rafi Mercer

In the mornings, the floor still held the night before. The Virgin Games store at 100 Oxford Street sat directly above the 100 Club, and whatever had happened downstairs (brass, sweat, beer, a kind of freedom you couldn't buy upstairs) rose through the boards and waited for the shutters to go up. You could smell it. Sound leaves a trace long after it has gone. I learnt that before I learnt almost anything else about music.

My name is Rafi Mercer. I'm the founder of Tracks & Tales, the author of The Luxury of Listening, and the host of The Listening Club. That's the short answer, and it's the one most people arrive here looking for. The longer answer takes a little more time, which is rather the point.

I've never been especially good at doing things the acceptable way. Part of me still enjoys walking slightly off the beat, listening for the rhythms other people step over. I don't do it to provoke. I do it quietly and by instinct, because that's where I feel most awake. That streak was already there when I walked into the shop on Oxford Street, a young man with too much curiosity and not enough patience.

I didn't stay upstairs for long. The pull of the Virgin Megastore at the Tottenham Court Road end was too strong. It was a cathedral of noise where genres, people and ideas collided, and it ran on a kind of deliberate chaos that Branson seemed to cultivate on purpose. It suited me. I've always been at ease in well-timed disorder. In time I was buying jazz for Virgin in London, and buying teaches you something that listening for pleasure never quite does. Every record becomes a decision. Someone will take it home on the strength of your judgement, and that turns taste into a responsibility.

Those years taught me that listening is both internal and external. It isn't just hearing. It's decoding: working out why one track moves you and another leaves you standing. My mind has always worked quickly. What I learnt, slowly, was to pair that speed with patience. Think fast, listen slow. Stay with a sound long enough to find out what's true in it.

Then came the second act. From 2000 onwards it was digital: start-ups, global platforms, IPOs. Those chapters moved at jet speed. I helped build ideas that scaled across continents, where culture met commerce in real time. I learnt what success sounds like when it's amplified: bright, metallic, efficient. If you listen carefully, you can also hear the hum of exhaustion underneath it. Those years left me with a conviction I've never shaken. Every venture, from a corner record shop to a multinational, lives or dies by its ability to listen. Strategy, scale and growth all behave like acoustics. Stop listening and you lose tone, and soon after that you lose the truth.

Tracks & Tales began in a room I'd been in more than once without knowing it was the start of anything. It was the New York bars. In the best of them, young and old sat together, rich and poor, the cool and the entirely ordinary. Everyone had to coexist for the place to be what it was, and if one group had been removed, the room would have gone flat. I've always heard my own taste the same way: no one place, no one rule. You can still hear traces of those rooms in the New York listening bars guide, but they live most clearly in the founding idea itself.

The guide grew from there. Tracks & Tales now covers listening rooms across 171 countries and 6,465 cities, from vinyl bars and hi-fi cafés to sound-first restaurants. All of them are held to one published standard, the Tracks & Tales Star system, applied the same way in London as in Tokyo. You'll find them in the city guides and the venue listings, and the same standard now shapes rooms before they open through Tracks & Tales Advisory. But the bars were only ever the doorway. Tracks & Tales isn't really a guide to listening bars. It's a brand built around the value of listening itself, and what Tracks & Tales actually is took me a long time to say plainly. Listening is one of the few genuine luxuries left that doesn't require money to reach.

The philosophy underneath all of it is simple enough to fit in a sentence and difficult enough to take a lifetime. Listen first. Then read. Then look. Then watch. It's the order I try to give each day, and over time it has become the order I try to give a life.

Listening comes first because it asks the most and gives the most. A record played the whole way through, on its own terms, rearranges the hours around it. Reading comes next, because words slow the mind down to the speed at which ideas can actually land. That's why the Tracks & Tales Daily exists, and why every essay, email and guide is written to be at least a three- to six-minute read. That length is uncomfortable on purpose. Attention is a muscle, and it wastes away without work. Looking comes third: at rooms, at sleeves, at the objects music leaves behind, at the albums that define listening culture. Watching comes last, deliberately. The screen gets what is left once the other three have had their share. That's why the videos, from the Listening Room to the "I Bought a Copy Of…" series on YouTube, are built to send you back to the record rather than hold you in front of the screen. I call it an anti-social strategy, half joking. Everything else online runs in the opposite order, and I wanted one place that didn't. If you want the shorter statement of belief, it lives in the Tracks & Tales manifesto.

The Listening Club is where that philosophy becomes a ritual. On the last Sunday of every month, one album is played on vinyl, in full, from one room to members around the world. The session opens without words. The needle comes down and the record speaks first. Around it sit a few companion tracks, closer to a constellation than a playlist. The interludes between them work like psychological architecture, a breath before the next room. My host notes mark three moments in every track: something Curious, something Special, and the moment that makes you sit up, which I call Wow. The first session was Donald Byrd's Places and Spaces. The second was Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders' Promises. Every session has to be unexpected, and I accept that some people will decide it isn't for them. Not everything is for everyone, and that's a harder principle to hold than it sounds. The club now has members in eleven countries, but I've never measured it by attendance. As I wrote in The Back Stairs, one listener is enough if the hour genuinely changed shape for them. The past sessions are collected in the Listening Club sessions archive.

Every Friday there's a letter. It opens with "Hello there," and closes by thanking you for sitting still with me for a moment. Between the two, it goes wherever the week went. At its centre are two fixed rooms: The Listening Album, a long essay on one record, and The Listening City, a short portrait of somewhere that listens in its own way. Each week I give that album's record away to whoever wants it. They cover the postage and the record is theirs. It's a small act, but it makes the Friday email feel less like a broadcast and more like a hand passing something across a table. You can subscribe here.

Then there's the book. The Luxury of Listening isn't a book about what to listen to. It's about how to listen again, treating attention as the thing that has become scarce and following it beyond music into rooms, cities, conversations and silence. I print it myself, and every copy ships with a handwritten note. Its cover grew the way most things at Tracks & Tales grow, from what was already obviously there. First it had no cover, then a plain one. Then the Listening Club began, and members started sending back their own thoughts on each session, so the book took more of that in. Later it gained a colour, and then a dot, which I eventually recognised as the centre of a record. Now, alongside the permanent editions, there are small batches whose cover colour is drawn from that week's Listening Album in the Friday email. Each batch is printed once and then retired, so every copy is tied to a single record.

If I had to reduce the whole thing to a line, it would be the one at the end of the ten principles I wrote down for Tracks & Tales. Listen carefully. Choose deliberately. Make fewer things. Make them matter. Keep what is worth keeping.

People often measure success in noise: in visibility, in proof, in the echo of applause. I've learnt to measure it in resonance. My rewards are mostly internal now, the quiet satisfaction of having built something that sounds like me. Tracks & Tales is my rebellion dressed in refinement, elegant on the surface and radical underneath. It's proof that you can move through the world gently and still leave a mark. Looking back, I can see it's an autobiography told through listening. Every city guide, every room, every record is part memoir and part mirror.

I'm calm about it now. Calm about the noise, calm about the climb, calm about what comes next. Everything I make is for people who feel deeply and listen well, and who sense that something larger is vibrating just beneath the surface of things.

Somewhere on Oxford Street, a floor still holds last night. Somewhere else, on the last Sunday of the month, a needle comes down and nobody speaks. It's the same trace. I'm still following it.

Until next time

Rafi Mercer

Who is Rafi Mercer?

Rafi Mercer is a British writer and the founder of Tracks & Tales, a global guide to listening bars and listening culture. He is the author of The Luxury of Listening and hosts The Listening Club, a monthly vinyl listening session for members worldwide. He began his career at Virgin in London, where he bought jazz, before spending more than two decades in digital strategy and global start-ups.

What is Tracks & Tales?

Tracks & Tales is a guide to rooms where sound is treated seriously, including listening bars, hi-fi cafés and sound-first venues, across 171 countries. Every venue is assessed against one published standard, the Tracks & Tales Star system. Alongside the guide it publishes essays, album writing, city guides and a weekly Friday letter.

What is the Listening Club?

The Listening Club is a monthly session in which one album is played on vinyl, in full, from start to finish, for members around the world. It takes place on the last Sunday of every month, opens without commentary, and includes a few companion tracks and host notes on each track.

What is The Luxury of Listening about?

The Luxury of Listening is Rafi Mercer's book on how to listen again rather than what to listen to. It treats attention as a scarce resource and extends listening beyond music to rooms, cities, conversation and silence. Each copy is printed by the author and ships with a handwritten note.

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