My WordPress install now asks me to “prove my humanity” when I log in. That’s a sick joke to pull on a tired middle-aged man first thing in the morning. Playing Holly’s “Morning Sun” through the earbuds. Which, for reasons hermetic and hard to articulate, feels like a summer music to me. Whereas, say, “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes” from some years ago feels like an autumn music, of dark evenings and car headlights. I think it must be personal: associating certain sounds with certain times and experiences in my own life, hearing them in contexts that bind them to seasons. Sometimes I think it even predates the time in my life when music playback became portable and we all began to carry soundtracks for being out in the world. Environments summoning sound memory. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy field recordings so often. We — or at least I — now live in a world where the sounds of life and industry contain keys for the insides of our heads.

 

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