What a thing of beauty. Four buttons in two vertical pairs, tan ones on the right, white on the left. For no apparent reason, the lowest number of the four addresses is in the lower right, and then the others proceed counter-clockwise, which is to say counter-intuitively: 303, 305, 307, 309. The two labels on the right are from a different era than the one in the lower left. Both typefaces, however, share an oddness: the threes overly stylized, the zeros out of proportion. (It’s as if in the intervening years, the label maker was upgraded, but the product number remained the same, so when time came for a replacement, a process-oriented property manager trusted the paperwork and not their eyes.) As for poor 307, it lost its label long enough ago that the subsequent hand-written number has, itself, faded, left virtually illegible without the context of the neighboring units. Someone, at least, has learned a lesson and taken preemptive action with 303, reinforcing the label’s aging message with black magic marker. But what giveth also taketh away. The same marker appears to have been used to draw an arrow on the 303 button. It points up and to the left. That instruction remains open for interpretation.
Organic Adventures from Buenos Aires, Argentina's Natural Life Essence
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
*Organic Adventures* earns its title over six tracks of field-recording-filled, rain-dappled, thunder-enhanced, bird-song-adorned tracks. The album comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina’s Juan Pablo Giacovino, aka Natural Life Essence. Presumably the release is a thematic follow-up to Giacovino’s earlier [*In-Organic Adventures*](https://natural-life-essence.bandcamp.com/album/in-organic-adventures-continue), which was all soothingly digital music: shimmery, quivering, shiny tracks of synthetic unrealism.
In contrast, the music on *Organic Adventures* is all pleasure-zone-out bliss. The album is an ecosystem unto itself. Some of it gets downright funky, like the dub-flavored “Organic Adverntures-3,” but more often it is densely, droningly minimalistic. “Organic Adventures 4(Part II)” could be a lost Terry Riley recording, a Fourth World raga. “Liberation(Flying Free)” mixes actual nature sounds with fillips of timbral debris.
Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid the music is that it seems not only organic but generative. So sedate yet shifty are the various layers of sound, that they leave behind the traditional concept of composition and come to work more as expertly honed atmospheres. Science fiction that explores artificial life often employs the trope of the expert craftsperson, one who can shape an eyeball or a bonsai tree from inorganic substances and yet make it as real as that which it emulates. Juan Pablo Giacovino is just such a craftsperson of sound. The scifi vibe is affirmed on the album’s final track, “Organic Adventures 8,” which includes an exploratory voiceover — what appears to be someone reading Robert M. Hazen’s 2012 book *The Story of Earth* — that sometimes struggles to be heard amid the overwhelming sound field it can be imagined to describe.
Album originally released by the Neotantra label on June 5, 2020, at [neotantra.bandcamp.com](https://neotantra.bandcamp.com/album/organic-adventures).
This is my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
▰ The Castle of Our Skins ensemble has been running a challenge to black composers to create miniature compositions. The latest is a piece for viola and voice, composed by Yaz Lancaster, and performed by Ashleigh Gordon. It’s less than a minute long, and every second has been taken into consideration. (Thanks again, Tom May, of [memeteria.com](https://memeteria.com/), for having introduced me to Castle of Our Skins.)
▰ This album of various Norah Lorway tracks from the past decade is a powerful collection of music made in the audio-coding language SuperCollider and employing field recordings. *And Then You Win* ranges from light glitchy atmospheres (“Crackly Sky”) to pulsing techno (“Clatter”), nine tracks in all.
▰ The Japanese musician Michiru Aoyama, who runs the small Bullflat3.8 record label, uploads an enormous amount of ambient music to his SoundCloud account, often multiple tracks today. “Recording 20200606060100” is a lush, shoegazy trip with a sedate but promiment pulse.
A high-wind phenomena creates a new San Francisco soundmark.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This 30-second video, filmed through my open back door around 6pm California time today, Saturday, June 6, gives a sense of the hum whose emanation from the Golden Gate Bridge has gained notoriety this weekend. There’s quite a bit of wind and rustling to be heard, and amid that is a clear, guttural drone, as if a bullfrog had taken up Tuvan throat singing. This is not the way this part of the world usually sounds.
I first got word of the hum Friday evening, June 5, shortly after 8pm, when Barry Threw, executive director of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, DM’d me [a tweet](https://twitter.com/akirodic/status/1269108035802116096) from Aki Rodić, a local computer graphics specialist. Rodić’s tweet read “New railings on the Golden Gate Bridge are producing deafening eeirie sound that can be heard for miles,” accompanied by an emoji for the bridge and linking to a video, the sole video, on a YouTube account attributed to Roaming Records. The video is titled [“Deafening Sound Over Golden Gate Bridge.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfsZ585gTnE) Recorded at 2:34pm earlier that same day, it plays for 59 seconds, showing the view through the front window of a car as it crosses the bridge. A haunting sound is prominent, a ghostly choral effect, like the world’s largest glass harmonica had been brought in to score a film titled Escape from San Francisco.
This evening, reports of the strange phenomenon outrank the [demonstration](https://www.sfgate.com/local/editorspicks/article/Mill-Valley-mayor-Sashi-McEntee-Black-Lives-Matter-15319551.php) that blocked traffic on the bridge this afternoon. A [report](https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/golden-gate-bridge-noises-trnd/index.html) by CNN’s Alisha Ebrahimji quoted a spokesperson for the bridge, “We knew going into the handrail replacement that the Bridge would sing during exceptionally high winds from the west, as we saw yesterday.” A KQED [report](https://www.kqed.org/arts/13881451/the-golden-gate-bridge-sounds-like-a-david-lynch-movie-now) notes, as well, it was understood in advance that the design change “would begin to hum” in high winds.
The Golden Gate Bridge Hum should not be confused with [“the Hum,”](https://strangesounds.org/the-hum) a “low-frequency buzz” that numerous people around the world complain about, and that has led to numerous theories as to its origin. Nor is a fully intentional music composition, like the [“singing road”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Nl53bCC78) on a stretch of Route 66 in New Mexico that plays “America the Beautiful,” produced by National Geographic:
San Francisco has its share of soundmarks, to use Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer’s term for the sonic equivalent of landmarks. One of them, the weekly Tuesday noon test of the outdoor public warning system, went silent this past December, at the start of a two-year rehabilitation project. Perhaps by the end of 2021, we’ll hear it in a duet with the bridge.
For geographic reference, I live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, just north of Golden Gate Park and roughly three miles from the center of the Golden Gate Bridge. We’ll see, in the coming weeks, as the wind slows, whether this is an isolated event, or if the high winds have awoken our ears to a sound that we’ll now notice more regularly.
Video originally posted to [youtube.com/disquiet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwlr_1xAGDM).
The Corona Hat from the thrifty and ingenius Håkan Lidbo
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The sounds of footsteps, birdsong, and occasional beeps accompany Håkan Lidbo as he walks around Stockholm, Sweden, in this video he posted on May 31. The beeps aren’t a soundtrack, any more than are the other heard elements. The beeps are the result of proximity alerts courtesy of the Corona Hat he’s seen wearing. The hat, Lidbo’s own invention, looks like what might have happened had Devo been given control of the CDC back in January. Costing less than 20 euros, it’s constructed from a parking sensors and a globe. Lidbo has a very specific recommendation for powering it: “rechargeable robot vacuum cleaner batteries.” He notes in the accompanying explanatory text that Sweden has not been enforcing lockdown. The hat appears to be his informed precaution.
Major thanks to Michael Calore of Wired for drawing my attention to the video. I’m sad to say I lost track of Lidbo for more than a decade. According to the disquiet.com [archive search](https://disquiet.com/?s=lidbo&searchsubmit=Search), I first wrote about his music back in early 2004, but haven’t since mid-2009. According to the massive navigation at his own website, he’s been up to an enormous amount in the intervening years. Plenty to dig into.
More on the Corona Hat at [hakanlidbo.com/coronahat]( http//hakanlidbo.com/coronahat). Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNtS1t_w5w). Moe from Lidbo at [hakanlidbo.com](https://www.hakanlidbo.com/).
