Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)
It’s also on freesound.org.