Bird Bathroom

The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco.