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I'm not quite sure how I crossed paths with Michael Donaldson, which is one of the delightful effects of the internet we once knew, the way people would bleed into our lives, maybe starting with a stray comment on a blog or a social media encounter, but there was the very real sense of sending out a signal that could attract fellow travelers. And Michael is a steady and welcome presence on my screens. (Find him on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Letterboxd.)

He's turned me on to countless new sounds and broadened my tastes, and his commitment to championing creative goodness now arrives at scale via his publication, The Tonearm.

He even went out of his way to arrange for me to interview one of my all-time music heroes, who then completely flaked. But that's what the best heroes do. They teach us to kill the Buddha in the middle of the street. And so:

Do you believe in a god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

"Does it matter?"

"I know that feels flippant, but I don't mean it that way. It's just that I don't know that I'd behave differently knowing than I do not knowing, and there's no way to be sure of anything anyway. All I have is an interpretation of my perception. I think, therefore I am—fine. But what is that? These thoughts could be the fever dream of a caterpillar sitting on a leaf. They could be one expression of a consciousness that exists collectively in everything. Maybe the nerds are right, and I'm the center of a simulation, World on a Wire style, which is honestly the most tangible argument for a god I've heard. There's no escaping this dream within a dream, as Poe had it, and I've made my peace with that."

"I've also been thinking about John Keats's idea of negative capability. In an 1817 letter to his brothers, Keats describes a person 'capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.' Yeah, I should probably steer clear of any irritable reaching. It's also tempting to say that the mystery is god, that god is the churn of the cosmos in random directions, but I don't think that's right. A god would be part of the churn, subject to the uncertainty like everything else."

"If perception is king, then it's my job to imagine the world I want to live in, and bring it about as best I can. That's tough work—I don't think humanity is innately good and thus isn't much help. For one thing, factory farming exists and is tolerated, which settles the humanity question for me. If you really dig into it, there's very little that humanity contributes to this universe that's a net positive. Two things come to mind, though. One is the asking itself, philosophy, the fact that anyone bothers with a question like yours. The other is art."

"Art is what survives us. When we look at a civilization gone for thousands of years, we marvel at its art before anything else, and that art is how we come to know those people. It's how we understand where we live and who we're living among. And I guess that's the feeling that inspires The Tonearm. The world I want to live in encourages the making of art, the consumption of it, and the understanding of it. That's as pure a way to connect as we have. It's a resistance against the darkness, a torchlight shining at the bastards."

"Art makes no promise that things improve (spoiler: there's a good chance they won't). It's a shared recognition of existence, which is a means of connection, perhaps a means of hope, and most of all a means of expressing this unknowable universe. And that brings us back to my answer to the original question: I don't think the yes-or-no of a god matters much. Yet whatever passes between a person and a work of art might be that same question in a form we can use, arriving as insight, feeling, sympathy, and empathy rather than an answer."

"So we need more people talking about art, more people talking about philosophy, and best of all more people bringing the two together. Despite the dispiriting reports about online journalism and music criticism, The Tonearm is having those conversations, adding more people to its cohort every week. It's going great. It's fun. And there is so much great art, music, and writing out there—as negative as I can be about 'the wretchedness,' being swallowed up in the culture keeps me resilient and ready for battle."

"The songs I've collected for this edition of Midnight Radio carry some of these feelings, I think. They've all got an air of wondering and wandering, curiosity, and unanswered questions. A few might conjure that pull you feel in your stomach as you turn into a philosophical creature, something mysterious swelling up, a little melancholic and somehow uplifting at the same time. Enjoy."

Given Michael's omnivorous taste, I wasn't sure what to expect, and the dozen songs he sent me remain unexpected. It's a delightfully eclectic mix of old favorites and exciting new sounds that immediately reminded me of the Electrifying Mojo, whose broadcasts fused funk, new wave, classical, and electro into new creatures. So I dusted this set with a few clips of Mojo—and to bring our lights full circle, let's do as he says: If you’re in your car, I want you to flash your lights. If you’re sitting on the porch, blink your porch light. I want you to show some solidarity tonight.

1. David Sylvian - Preparations for a Journey
   Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities • Virgin, 1985 • Boomkat
2. Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske - Intuition, Nimbus
   At Source • Light Years, 2026 • Bandcamp
3. Cinna Peyghamy - Glass Teeth 94
   Music For Tombak & Synth • Other People, 2026 • Bandcamp
4. Andy Stott - Luxury Problems
   Luxury Problems • Modern Love, 2012 • Boomkat
5. Sylvester - I Need Somebody to Love Tonight
   Stars • Fantasy, 1979
6. Agile Experiments - Mysteries
   Havana • None More Records, 2026 • Bandcamp
7. King Tubby & Yabby U - Tubby’s Vengeance (48% slower)
   Conquering Lion • Prophecy, 1975 
8. Q-Burns Abstract Message - Uncertain T (52% slower)
   Mixed Emotions: Jazz In The Eighth Dimension Volume One • Eighth Dimension Records, 1995
9. Radwan Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland - Walked and Walked سار و سار
   Eternal Life No End ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها • Constellation, 2026 • Bandcamp
10. Tim Hecker - Music of the Air
    Love Streams • 4AD, 2016 • Bandcamp
11. Cabaret ...

I like Simon Critchley’s thinking about the need for the spiritual to take a physical form: “The fragment offers the promise of the whole. The devotional object, the image, the relic, is the material container for what cannot be contained within it.” What cannot be expressed in language or thought must be felt and seen, and the object becomes a pathway to the sacred because we know it is not sacred. 

My father’s pawn is enough. I don’t need a whole chess set.

2
Sometimes I worry that I’m forgetting how to feel and see. Too much of my life has become a staring contest with the screen, so I bought an enormous sketchpad and some watercolors and ink. I did not intend to paint anything in particular. I wouldn’t know where to begin if I did. So I started with a doodle—a few lines, a confused shape—and followed where it led. A vine became an elephant, which was soon obliterated by too much water so it became a bird-man instead. And so on.

It felt good to get tactile and messy, and I carved out an hour each night to paint, enjoying how my mind roamed while I inked and swirled, jotting notes for this episode in wet fields of blue: half-speed Basic Channel and maybe Aphex too? and why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? This led to the artwork for tonight’s installment. Enjoy.

As I watched each shape bleed into another, I became convinced of a profound truth: The fragment is the thing. The fragment is honest. The fragment is how I live and think today. There is no wholeness or completeness. There is no system. Theory is an imposition, perhaps even authoritarian. Yes, I thought as I watched my watercolors dry. Only fragments from now on.

The underbelly of my brain smiled and said we’ll see.

3

I intended to write about robots and mannequins tonight, but this morning I woke from a nightmare I cannot shake. You know the kind of dream where you wake up gasping, maybe even a little teary-eyed because you’re so grateful you’ve been safely returned to reality? One of those dreams.

I was living in a superstore with my dead parents and we would gather food for the day and sleep on mattresses. At night, I searched for my phone because I knew I needed to get out of there. When I found it in a bin of tomatoes, its screen was filled with fragmented madness: creepy vacation ads, old sitcom scenes, porny pop-ups, and commemorative gold coins—a flood of endlessly regenerating nonsense no matter how hard I tried to swipe it away. Kimchi adds tension to any situation. Become yourself by holding yourself. And so on.

The gibberish leapt from the screen and clawed its way into my head, filling my vision with retirement home commercials, badly-drawn cartoon characters, and testimonials about weird surgeries. I found a door that said EXIT but it led to a room filled with giant muscle men and puffy-lipped girls, all yelling, their mouths stretched into a bottomless keen.

Force quit. Ctrl-alt-delete. I tried to reboot my vision, restart my brain. When I called customer support for technical assistance, they giggled and said there’s no way out, that I’d been mentally hacked. Nothing but digital shrapnel from now on. Then it occurred to me that I could wake up.

4
So my fragment theory has some holes in it. Last night’s fever dream might also be a sign that I’m exhausted by this summer, this overheated season of orange skies, poisonous lettuce, rogue algorithms, and the sense that things are really coming undone.

So here’s a breather. Hopefully tonight’s soundtrack feels like a drift of cleansing air, maybe the audio equivalent of burning sage. Basic Channel pitched down to a heartbeat chug. An Aphex Twin classic stretched to a crawl. Some new favorites from James Murray, Anthony Naples, and Ron Trent’s plush new La Marr project. Plus an excerpt from a track I’ve been working on that loops a reading of the Rigveda from the Fall of Civilizations episode about the collapse of Vijayanagara:

Being one becomes three, becomes eight, becomes eleven, becomes twelve, becomes infinite. That is the soul within and without, yes, within and without.

Over three thousand years ago. Fractals and fragments become one. Only now do I realize tonight’s mix includes a song called “Depths” and a song called “Shallows”. Paradoxes are inescapable. Synchronicities abound.

1. Training Chamber - Senza Corpo
   Triple Mirror • Downwards, 2026 • Bandcamp
2. Mnemonics - Depths
   Mnemonic Devices • Workshop Records, 2025 • Bandcamp
3. HTRK - Dying
   Lilac • Ghostly International, 2020 • Bandcamp
4. James Murray - Shallows
   Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp
5. Basic Channel - Radiance II (63% slower)
   Chain Reaction, 1995 • Boomkat
6. Anthony Naples - Perix
   In Studio Magic • ANS, 2026 • Bandcamp
7. La Marr - Good Magic
   Mood Programs • Music From Memory, 2026 • Bandcamp
8. Rod Modell - Mediterranea II (Excerpt)
   Mediterranea • 2016 • Echospace 313
9. James A. Reeves - Crocodile Eye
   Crocodile Eye • God Is All Mouth, 2026 
10. YL Hooi - Title
    Untitled • Altered States Tapes, 2021 • Bandcamp
11. Aphex Twin - Tha (112.5% slower)
    Selected Ambient Works
12. Christopher Cross - Ride Like the Wind(Midnight Radio Mix)
    Christopher Cross • 1979 • With thanks and apologies to M.

And if you’re in the market for a nice place to catalogue and analyze your dreams, Dream Club is now up and running. Thank you for reading.

The ability to find beauty, both backwards and forwards, is something I've learned from our Very Special Guest, my friend Earl Carlson, who I've known in New Orleans, New York, and now the Middle West. Every month we challenge each other's taste by trading five songs based on themes like "camp" and "death". He's always fiddling with surprising projects and making genre-blurred music, such as this magnificent track that soundtracked my night flight to Vienna.

“So the gist of this is we start in a weird cosmic but grounded space that feels familiar but a bit strange. It's techno. It's dancy. It's leftfield. But also comfortable. It's our vibe right now. Or my vibe right now. I've always tried to make things that impress my friends, that resonate with my friends, but I also struggle with making 'normal' music. I find myself getting frustrated with the output. It's never quite what I hope it'll be. The artists in the first section of tonight's mix seem to be finding their own spaces. Things that feel real."

"I moved back to southeastern Michigan a couple years ago, and I think a lot about Berlin's techno scene being added to the UNESCO world heritage list—this feels like the erasure of something important, while honoring something else important."

"This year I tried my hand at making dub techno, but I struggled to be engaged. I found myself asking why? Why am I using this minor chord—what's beneath this? These subtle drums—am I making muzak or am I making something that sings?"

"Ras G passed away, and it hit home—not because I loved him, but because I recognized he was in our lineage: an SP-404 and a belief he could ride with the ancestors if he sampled them just right. Carlos Niño is doing the same but through a different lens, which tapped into something here. Mandré was a new find for me, from 1977, a decade before I was born, but he's here in the lineage. And my god, Gil Scott—this is the despair that sits as a partner to the cosmos. Any minority voice knows that despair, rage, anger, hopelessness is part and parcel along with the expansive hope and possibility of the cosmos. Black Atlantis."

"Cannibal Ox was my first touch of this vein, this river, this experience. It was them or Binary Star—I didn't know that rap could sound like this, or maybe that music could feel like this. These two projects were the doors for me. This mix is an answer to the question of whether I believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe."

"The written answer is: I don't know. What I do know is that stepping into this river, feeling the current—it feels right. For the first time, it feels like I'm part of a lineage. It's the horrors, it's the sorrow, it's the pain, it's a country, a separate lineage telling us that we aren't enough, that we need to show up differently. It's the joy, it's the community, it's the knowledge that my ancestors are singing spirituals, and before that singing in languages I don't know. It's knowing that after me there will be more."

"I know that I was raised looking up to a white Christ with a pastor telling me I'm born with sin. I looked for my own answers, searching desperately for meaning. Only now, as I raise my own part of this lineage am I starting to feel settled with the answer of 'I don't know but I want to swim in this river.'"

Tonight there will be no extravagant sheets of reverb or uncomfortably long slow-motion songs. Something gave me the sense that I should leave Earl's mix alone. Maybe because there is the clear sense of a rarefied vision within this sequence of songs. Or maybe because Earl sent me a fully mixed audio file and said, "You should leave it alone."

He's right. Sometimes there's nothing to do but step aside and let the music play.

1. JakoJako & Rødhåd - Passeri/Helonias
   In Vere • WSNWG, 2022 • Bandcamp
2. Lyder - Brack
   Weird.fishes • tunnel.visions, 2025 • Bandcamp
3. Rrose - Rib Cage
   Please Touch • Eaux, 2023 • Bandcamp
4. Skee Mask - Session Add
   Compro • Ilian Tape, 2018 • Bandcamp
5. Polygonia - Ceaseless Motion
   Ceaseless Motion • Timedance, 2026 • Bandcamp
6. The Upsetters - Super Ape
   Super Ape • Black Ark, 1976
7. Prince Far I & The Arabs - Final Chapter/Shake the Nation
   Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III • Daddy Kool, 1980 • Bandcamp
8. Ras G - Been Cosmic
   Back on the Planet • Brainfeeder, 2013 • Bandcamp
9. Sun Ra & His Arkestra - Door of the Cosmos
   Sleeping Beauty • El Saturn, 1979 • Bandcamp
10. Carlos Niño & Friends - It's All Happening! (featuring Madlib, Jamire Williams and Dexter Story with strings by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson)
    Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening! • Stones Throw, 2016 • Bandcamp
11. Mandré - Solar Flight (Opus I)
    Mandré • Motown, 1977
12. Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred Is
    Pieces of a Man • Flying Dutchman Records, 1971 • Wax Poetics
13. Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy
    The Cold Vein • Definitive Jux, 2021
14. Binary Star - Reality Check
    Masters of the Universe • 2020 • Bandcamp
15. Wata Igarashi - Mineral
    Mastery Quantum Sound • Houndstooth, 2026 • Bandcamp
16. Vince Staples and Lil Baby - East Point Prayer (Vocals only)
    Ramona Park Broke My Heart • 2022
17. Erykah Badu - Out of My Mind, Just in Time (Vocals only)
    New Amerykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) • 2010

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

• Beauty is almost sinister.
• Beauty overwhelms the senses.
• Beauty cannot be intended.

We begin with billowing vocals and cloudy guitars that gradually disintegrate until we're left with instrumentals, each peeling back layers of sound to uncover an endless thrum from Éliane Radigue, who sought to evoke the Tibetan Book of the Dead after she lost her son. I first heard this song an hour before dawn and I think it's what revelation must sound like. Then we come home to one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know: a glittery guitar from Windy & Carl that sounds like temptation itself.

1. Mister Baby - Canyon City Blues
   EP • 2023 • Bandcamp
2. Midwife - Angel
   Prayer Hands • Antiquated Future, 2018 • Bandcamp
3. Sugar Plant - Impure
   Trance Mellow • Pony Canyon, 1996 • Bandcamp
4. Hilary Woods - Faults
   Night CRIÚ • Sacred Bones, 2018 • Bandcamp
5. Romance & Not Waving - Shepherd's Dream
   Wings Of Desire • Ecstatic, 2024 • Bandcamp
6. Flying Saucer Attack - Instrumental Wish
   Distance • VHF, 1994 • Bandcamp
7. Brian Eno - Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960
   Ambient 4: On Land • EG Records, 1982
8. Éliane Radigue - Kyema (Excerpt)
   Trilogie de la Mort • 1988 • Bandcamp
9. Windy & Carl - The Sun
   We Will Always Be • Kranky, 2012 • Bandcamp

Tonight marks two years of Midnight Radio! Thank you for tuning in, and for the delightful notes and other forms of encouragement along the way. In these days of mind-numbing overload, attention is a gift I neither expect nor take for granted. Perhaps this is why Midnight Radio is the only deadline I've managed to honor. Episodes will continue to arrive on the 1st and 15th until the end of the year, at which point I'll reevaluate this endeavor.

In other news, I've made some significant upgrades to Spite if you're in the market for a dignified music player without any algorithms or bullshit. This heavyweight mix from Marty is an ideal thing to play on it.

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

At my Thursday night Men's Spirituality Book Club, we've been debating the recovery cliché that "acceptance is the answer," which sounds so limp and lazy.

But I'm learning that acceptance is not passive. Wearing the world as a loose garment requires a difficult and oftentimes exhausting stance that makes room for total inflow: the mental shred, pixellated heat, and humiliating muck that comes with being alive in this absurd century, not to mention the stupid feelings and existential jitters that are part of simply being a person. 

In the end, there's no workable choice other than to hoover it all up and learn to live in the beautiful grey because everything is connected and always changing. So accept it all. Except negation. I reject rejection.

2

But then I came across this sentence from Simon Critchley that I find difficult to accept:

And most writing, like most love, is self-love, which is what makes that writing uninteresting, and that love uninteresting, or not really love—it is one long song of myself.

Reading this, I felt exposed. After all, I write a newsletter of all things. Is this an act of self-love? Perhaps, although it usually feels more like self-loathing, especially when I cannot get my sentences to behave or an episode to sound how I think it should, which is most of the time. 

But if not for this habit, I might not write anything at all. To write requires an audience, real or imagined, which generates an interesting flicker between the self and not-self: the self as author and the self as receiver. This flicker is where the action lives. It creates mistakes and glitches, but also sometimes sparks, which makes the whole undertaking feel worthwhile.

To write anything worth reading requires writing something I do not already know. I learned this lesson well twenty-something years ago when I was a graduate student receiving bleak red letters on my essays about Plato, Rousseau, and Freire. I thought I understood the material and was writing clearly enough, so I asked my professor why I was failing. She smiled as if she’d been waiting for this question. “When you write something you don’t know the answer to,” she said, “I’ll give you an A.”

Ten years ago, I tracked her down at a dinner party to thank her for changing how I write and think and teach. When the party drifted toward the hors d'oeuvres, she took me aside and asked for a hug. I realized how important it is to say these things to people while I can, to let them know how much they've influenced me along the way.

Which is the reason for this year’s special guest series.

3

David Leo Rice is another professor who influenced me. Six years ago, I was stuck on a story that I wanted to start again, so I signed up for a creative writing class at the school where I teach. This was during the strange weeks in New York when rumors about a sick lawyer in Westchester were circulating like a virus but we took the subway anyway and went out to eat and laughed and coughed on each other. So I was already primed for the uncanny when David turned me on to writers like Aimee Bender and Steve Erickson, as well as bits of wisdom like a man who really wants a sandwich is more interesting than a man who sort of wants to cure cancer. We stayed in touch after the class, and soon I was reading High Weirdness and Mark Fischer and thinking about lost futures.

David's stories also broadened my perception. The New House is a fable about the headfuck of creation that I'd like to press into the hands of every artist, writer, and seeker I know. His stories have renovated the architecture of my nightmares, especially The Hate Room, and I can’t wait to receive my copy of his latest collection, The Squimbop Condition, which follows a pair of time-addled brothers who “leave a trail of chaos in their pursuit of an impossible mission: to bring about the Golden Age—over and over again.”

Every few months, David and I have long telephone calls in which we walk around our respective cities and sanity-check our understanding of an increasingly illegible world. Each time we sign off, I'm heartened by his cheerful rejection of nostalgia, which is crucial for acceptance of any kind, and by the way he embraces the mess of our culture to map new routes to the sacred.

And David is with us tonight to discuss the age of the holy spirit. But first, he must answer the official Midnight Radio interview question.

4

Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

"Yes, I feel quite certain that there are dimensions and powers beyond our comprehension, at the very outer edges of our awareness. The human condition, as I've experienced it so far, is to be able to grasp the presence but not the nature of these 'things,' whatever they may be—to know that something is out there (or 'in there,' because I think the innermost part of the imagination merges with the outermost limits of perception), but never to grasp what it is. This is why dreaming, talking, drawing, and writing are so important to me, because they feel like a way of harmonizing and playing with these presences, and finding a means of enjoying rather than suffering from the fact that we can never know what they really are, nor can we ever forget that they're there, on the margin and at the center of everything. Perhaps, therefore, this form of play is the same as prayer—it's not a means of asking for something, nor of pledging loyalty in the usual sense of that term, but of enacting a playful and dynamic relationship with the forces that make us who we are, and whose nature we can never grasp."

5

Tonight's episode opens with six minutes of David reading a few bits from his latest essay, "Master of Puppets: On My Mother’s Death and the Last Chapter of the History of the World," after which we discuss acceptance versus surrender and how to act accordingly in an age of grief and algorithms. And I'm cheered by how he presents the act of reading and writing in 2026 as a holy covenant.

This was a ninety-minute conversation that I've chopped down to 29 minutes, and I’ve exorcised myself from the recording because 1) I like the odd shape that remains, the abrupt shifts that suggest an invisible logic; and 2) I cannot tolerate the sound of my voice or laughter (but Marty is helping me deal with this by making me do argumentative videos).

Because David says things like "in a dead world, mediated by a dead internet that is spawning its own undead successor," I wanted this broadcast to sound like an eerie late-nite transmission, the sort of thing that bleeds across your dashboard in the fog of a cross-country drive. It's laced with static, sighs, and mumbles, and I mangled David's voice until I forgot what it sounded like, searching for a zone between legibility and illegibility which, I think, is where the holy ghost lives.

Here are the songs that cycle in an...

Dreams are about presence. It’s the only time we’re released from ego and intention. Dreams dredge up our baggage and drop us into the here and now of it, a thought that led to tonight’s soundtrack.

It’s a busy swirl that begins with Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (a few shades slower, naturally) and ends with Mika Vainio’s stark cover version. There’s also a pair of Seefeel remixes, a dash of Springsteen, some Spiritualized, and a lot of murmuring. I was aiming for something warm, maybe a little pretty and sinister, that feels like sinking into the soft ground of a dream.

When I played tonight’s songs for C’s approval, she called it my “magical mushroom mix” and made groovy far-out gestures to underscore her point. She meant this in an encouraging way, I think, so I photographed her hands being psychedelic and that’s how we arrived at the artwork for this episode.

1. Pink Floyd - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (19% slower)
   A Saucerful of Secrets • 1968
2. Flavor Crystals - Cetecea (Seefeel Adjustment)
   Five • 2020 • Bandcamp
3. Anthony Calonico - Collapsing
   Spacious Heart • Music From Memory, 2026 • Bandcamp
4. Ana Roxanne - Wishful (Draft)
   Poem 1 • Kranky, 2026 • Bandcamp
5. Blackwater - Oaxaca
   Navigation • Ethbo, 2021 • Bandcamp
6. Bruce Springsteen - State Trooper (15% slower)
   Nebraska • 1982
7. The Dengie Hundred - Tamar
   Brackenbank • Ethbo, 2022 • Bandcamp
8. Roly Porter - Al Dhanab
   Aftertime • Subtext, 2011 • Bandcamp
9. Spiritualized - Electric Mainline II
   Electric Mainline • 1993 • Archive.org
10. Cocteau Twins - Cherry-Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)
    Otherness • Fontana, 1995
11. Variant - The Setting Sun
    The Setting Sun • Field Records, 2009/2026 • Bandcamp
12. Mika Vainio - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
    Oleva • Sahko, 2024 • Bandcamp

Thank you for reading and listening.

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Maybe it’s the simultaneous knowing and not-knowing that makes anything resonate. Tonight we have some half-understood Midnight Radio variants of six songs from Andrea Mazzariello’s War Footing playbook—rewired, filtered, and slowed down between 21% and 94%:

1. Fair Is Foul Is Fair (Astronomical Dub)
2. 43:1 (Tranquil + Justified)
3. Aspirational Gardening (Cosmic Harvest)
4. 80s Death (Redshifted + Microwaved)
5. Post Nova (Initial Singularity)
6. Pre-Post (Final Singularity)

Andrea Mazzariello (words, keyboards, synths, programming, drums), Brady Lenzen (bass), Jason Treuting (drums and percussion), JC Sanford (brass), Dan Trueman (strings), Mike Williams (acoustic guitars), Andy Flory (electric guitars)

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Tonight's selections gratify me because they aim straight for the pleasure centers and risk looking foolish (especially the Orbital track, even though I slowed it down 220%). Yet they also retain some mystery, perhaps even to themselves, chanting and humming until language becomes a garbled holy tone—from the climactic minute of the xx's "Intro" to a loopy Enya edit to a Byzantine hymn from Father Dionysios Tabakis, a 52-year-old priest who dropped one of my favorite albums of the year via the crucial Heat Crimes imprint.

Thank you for listening. (And thank you to Martin Essig for encouraging me to read Simon Critchley and Byung-Chul Han.)

1. The xx - Intro
   xx • XL Recordings, 2005 • Bandcamp
2. Walls - Sunporch (Holy Other Mix)
   Coracle Remixes • Kompakt, 2012 • Bandcamp
3. Seraphim - A3
   London Is Tired of Me • Lost Domain, 2026 • Boomkat
4. Death in Vegas - Girls
   Scorpio Rising • Sanctuary Records, 2002
5. Frederic D Oberland & Radwan Ghazi - Squeal of Swine
   Eternal Life No End ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها • Constellation, 2026 • Bandcamp
6. Enya - Afer Ventus (DNTEL Remix)
   Enya Mixes • 2010 • Boomkat
7. Tears for Fears - Mad World (Midnight Radio Mix)
   The Hurting • 1982
8. Walls - Burnt Sienna
   Walls • Kompakt, 2010 • Bandcamp
9. Father Dionysios Tabakis - ΑΝΑΡΧΟΣ ΘΕΟΣ Βυζαντινά Κάλαντα των Χριστουγέννων σε α΄ήχο
   Paradise Metal • Heat Crimes, 2026 • Boomkat
10. Placid Angles - Saint Anne
    Canada • Oathcreations, 2026 • Bandcamp
11. Orbital - Halcyon and On and On (Midnight Radio Mix)
    Radiccio • 1993 • Bandcamp

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For tonight's episode, Steve sent me a file with selections from some of his favorite songs. He wanted to put together something that would be ideal for a warm afternoon because he's a contrarian who must test the limits of Midnight Radio. Fair enough. Here are the changes I made:

• Swapped the Topdown Dialectic track he selected for one I like better.
• Because he's the least self-aggrandizing person I know, it probably didn’t occur to him to include his own music. I’ve fixed this. A song from his Minor Hexachords project appears midway, and I love how the high-gloss majesty of a Burger & Ink classic gives way to "Radians," which shatters the dub techno template into glittery shards.
• Slowed down the last two songs by 39% and 210% because they sound fantastic this way.

And of course, the usual reverb and static. This 44th episode is exactly 44 minutes long, which pleases me. Thank you for listening.

1. Topdown Dialectic - 20170804-2
   20170804 • Aught, 2017 • Bandcamp
2. Foote/Dickow - Volcano Snail
   High Cube • Geographic North, 2026 • Bandcamp
3. Sa Pa - Ride High
   Ambeesh • Short Span, 2025 • Bandcamp
4. Burger & Ink - Elvism
   Las Vegas • Harvest, 1996 • Boomkat
5. Minor Hexachords - Radians
   Brinkmanship • 2025 • Bandcamp
6. Paperclip Minimiser - B2
   II • Peak Oil, 2026 • Bandcamp
7. Gramm - Legends/Nugroove™
   Personal Rock • Source, 1999 • Bandcamp
8. Vehicular - Vehicular 02 (39% slower)
   False 5 • False Aralia, 2025 • Bandcamp
9. Koen Holtkamp - Atmos 01 (210% slower)
   Atmosfera • Love All Day, 2021 • Bandcamp

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In its common form, nostalgia is a taunt because it fetishes a time that can never be reclaimed. But when dealing with mid-1990s electronica, perhaps it can also be an invitation. To reclaim the energy from a time when dozens of naive albums were inspired by Koyaanisqatsi or the incense-soaked rhythms of Kingsuk Biswas's Bedouin Ascent project. It was a time of creating for its own sake without an eye on any marketplace or notion of virality. Of making things simply because new tools were there. 

So maybe I’ll just sink into this plush couch with cigarette burns in the cushions while Strange Days plays on mute and someone tells me all about the benefits of globalization and the Information Superhighway.

1. Introduction: Stonecirclesampler, Air Liquide, Mojave 3, assorted radio static, etc.
2. Dr. Atmos & Oliver Lieb - Music to Films Movement V
   Music to Films • Fax, 1994
3. Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin - Silent Intelligence V
   From Within III • Fax, 1997
4. Bedouin Ascent - Mammon [Midnight Radio Edit]
   Science, Art, and Ritual • Rising High, 1994 • Bandcamp
5. Massive Attack vs. Mad Professor - Protection (Radiation Ruling the Nation)
   No Protection • Wild Bunch Records, 1995
6. B12 - Radiophonic Workshop
   Time Tourist • Warp, 1996 • Bandcamp
7. Photek - T’raenon Version
   T’raenon • Op-Art, 1996
8. Bedouin Ascent - Transition R
   Science, Art, and Ritual • Rising High, 1994 • Bandcamp
9. Makyo - Devabandha
   Rasa Bhava • Silent Records, 1996 • Bandcamp
10. Epilogue: Stonecirclesampler, Patsy Cline, assorted radio static, etc.

Now I'm in Minneapolis after a viciously turbulent flight because a snowstorm is on the way. They're talking about 8 to 12 inches. I mention this because Midnight Radio seems to be the only deadline I honor and I'm pressing the button at 11:54pm Central Time. It counts.

More importantly, a new version of Spite is available in your local App Store or you can learn more and download it directly here.

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I often think about Leonard Cohen's observation that religion is the greatest form of art. When I'm moved by a painting, I am not thinking about its veracity. I do not question whether my emotional response is true.

With thoughts like this in my head, I'm grateful that Martin Essig will join us tonight to talk about the history of faith.

M. first appeared in episode 23 to tell us that desire is a demon. Because synchronicities abound, he came into my life at a time when I was grappling with the meaning of me, and he was hellbent on making sure I understood symbolic failure and the Lacanian Real. Along the way, he became a reliable friend, ensuring that I never wander too far into doubt or belief but instead learn to enjoy the dance.

Tonight M. will discuss animism and disenchantment on top of some songs he selected, several of which I've bludgeoned into unrecognizable shapes. But first, he must answer the Very Special Guest Question.

Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

"I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God."

1. XDCVR - Psalm 68
   I Hate That Shit, I Hate All That Shit • Ooh Sounds, 2026 • Bandcamp
2. Luke Slater - Love (Burial)
   Love Remixes • Mote Evolver, 2019 • Boomkat
3. Sun Electric - Episode VI
   Episodes • Detuned, 2026 • Bandcamp
4. Blawan - 993
   Nutrition • Ternesc, 2017 • Bandcamp
5. Jürgen Paape - So Weit Wie Noch Nie (Midnight Radio Edit)
   Total 3 • Kompakt, 2001 • Bandcamp
6. The Field - Reflecting Lights (Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Remix)
   Reflecting Lights Remixe | Kompakt, 2016 | Bandcamp
7. Kakuhan - Kak-Juk
   KAK • Nakid, 2026 • Boomkat
8. Patche - Motorik (60% slower)
   Patche • Popop, 2023 • Bandcamp
9. Can - I Want More (500% slower + filtered)
   Flow Motion • Harvest/Mute, 1976 • Bandcamp
10. Babe Ruth - The Mexican (21% slower)
    First Base | Harvest, 1972 | More

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I’ll admit, I flew too close to the sun on this one. First off, the Concept series has become such a personal landmark that it’s hard to approach it objectively. Of the 32 songs across these records, I have 23 favorites, which would be a four-hour mix. Eventually I had to turn the process of selection into an exercise in subtraction until I was left with an hour of my favorite bits.

Second, I’ve never been good at matching beats. It’s hard and boring. And these songs are phenomenally difficult to mix, filled with analog drift and reversed stutters as if they were designed to ratfuck any crossfade.

Thomas Brinkmann’s variations make this even more challenging. He built a custom turntable with two tonearms that had separate outputs for the left and right channels. By splitting the stereo field across two needles in the same groove, unexpected rhythms and phase shifts emerged, creating what Brinkmann described this as "a little intervention and displacement of elements.”

There's a lot of displacement in tonight's tribute: hard cuts, truncated tracks, and rips of static that remind me of late nights in high school when I would futz with the tuner trying to catch a faint signal of the alien sounds from Deep Space Radio.

When I listen to Concept series today, I hear the wild sense of play that only emerges from routine and parameters; I think about the commitment to a regular cadence that teaches one to live with imperfect results. Most of all, these tracks succeed because they are a dialogue with the listener: they stake out a rigid framework so expectations can be fucked with. The offset of a snare becomes high drama. A glitched drum or an abrupt silence plays off what I expect to hear.

1. 96:01 01:00 
2. 96:01 02:00 VR
3. 96:05 09:00 
4. 96:05 10:00 
5. 96:07 13:00 
6. 96:08 16:00 
7. 96:11 21:00 VR
8. 96:12 23:00 
9. 96:12 24:00 VR

Richie Hawtin - Concept 1 96:12 | Bandcamp
Thomas Brinkmann - Concept 1 96 VR | Bandcamp

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Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

“Yes. Watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was my first spiritual experience. It made me feel existentially connected to all of time, space, and life. That feeling pulled me out of despair and it was my first understanding of god: a widescreen kinship.”

1. Bertrand Belin - Choses Nouvelles
   Persona | Cinq 7, 2019
2. Füxa - Dirty D
   Dirty D | Rocket Girl, 2013 | Bandcamp
3. Damien Jurado & Richard Swift - Radioactivity
   Other People’s Songs Vol. 1 | Secretly Canadian, 2016 | Bandcamp
4. Cliff Martinez - Abscess
   The Knick Soundtrack | Milan, 2014
5. The Cure - Plainsong (Studio Rough Guide Vocal)
   Disintegration | Fiction Records, 1989 | Boomkat
6. Cliff Martinez - Son of Placenta
   The Knick Soundtrack | Milan, 2014
7. A Flock of Seagulls - I Ran (620% slower + filtered / 28% slower)
   A Flock of Seagulls | Jive, 1982
8. Peter Schilling - Major Tom (Völlig Losgelöst)
   Error in the System | Elektra, 1982
9. Belong - Perfect Life
   Common Era | Kranky, 2011 | Bandcamp
10. Brian Reitzell & RJ Manning Jr. - On the Subway
    Lost in Translation Soundtrack | Emperor Norton, 2003 
11. Aural Indifference - The Park
    The Sound of Indifference | Minimal Wave, 1981 | Bandcamp
12. Air - Au Fond du Rêve Doré (150% slower + filtered)
    Love 2 | Astralwerks, 2009

Also worth noting: this 40th episode of Midnight Radio is exactly 40:40. As always, synchronicities abound. Thank you for listening.

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I'm writing this on a Vienna-bound airplane. A full moon shines over the Atlantic, which is roiling away down there in the dark, and I suppose I'm inside a piece of deadly hardware.

I've been keeping a simple journal where I try to write a sentence about my life each day even though I sometimes forget. But I'm hoping to remember in Vienna, where C. and I will visit the Venus of Willendorf, Bruegel's Tower of Babel, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 16th-century fever dreams.

I love flying at night, cocooned in a netherworld beyond space and time, and tonight we'll listen to the music that has been soundtracking this sensation. This hour-long installment kicks off with a synthesizer chorus from Richie Hawtin's 1993 debut as F.U.S.E. Then comes a soulful slab of dub techno that my friend Earl casually sent me the other day, which bleeds into a wonderfully fuzzy track from A New Line (Related)—the territory between cozy and spectral is tough to locate, but these two songs live in its downtown. Then we'll take a cold plunge into some deep winter chug with slow-motion glaciers from Monolake, cv313, and the Field (god, those drums at the 41:40 mark).

1. F.U.S.E. - Night Drive
   Dimension Intrusion | Plus 8, 1993 | Bandcamp
2. My Friend Earl - Snowblow
   2026 | Bandcamp
3. A New Line (Related) - Crewe Away
   Crewe Away | Sound in Silence, 2025 | Bandcamp
4. Monolake - Cyan (44% slower)
   Hong Kong | Chain Reaction, 1997 | Bandcamp
5. Tropic of Cancer - Dive (Wheel of the Law)
   The Sorrow Of Two Blooms | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | Boomkat 
6. The Field - Leave It (31% slower)
   Yesterday and Today | Kompakt, 2009 | Bandcamp
7. cv313 - Beyond the Clouds Reprise II (19% slower)
   Beyond the Clouds (Reprised) | Echospace [Detroit], 2011 | Bandcamp

We return to land with a brief pitched-down snippet of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" because I really enjoyed The Bone Temple.

A quick shout-out to M for introducing me to Critchley, the lectio divina, and many other new flows of intensity. And a tremendous thank you to everybody who has been testing Spite and taking time to send such helpful feedback. I'm genuinely shocked and delighted by the interest in this grouchy mp3 player—there are 38 beta testers now (!) and it will be available in Apple's app store by the end of the week.

Thank you for listening.

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“Hi, I’m Mike. I’ve been a culture enthusiast my whole life. Obsessed with learning and sharing, my dream job was to be a magazine editor. I DJ’d my junior high dances and was editor of my high school newspaper, which led to co-founding the DJ groups Dorkwave and Dethlab, and the blog Burnlab, and contributing to design sites Core77 and Archinect when the internet was exciting. I’m also an exhibit designer, designed albums for Solvent and Matthew Dear for Ghostly International, and produced music events in Detroit because nobody else would fly artists like MOTOR and Vitalic at the time.

At the Godspeed You! Black Emperor show in Detroit recently, James asked if I’d like to do a guest mix for Midnight Radio. I was thrilled, but wanted it to be collaborative: I’d submit a playlist and James would do his editing magic. And here we are.”

And here’s the question I will ask all Midnight Radio guests: Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? Please describe your metaphysics in 150 words or less.

To which Mike replied, “Do I believe in God? No. Not the Christian god that’s watching you masturbate. I am fascinated by the invisible forces of the universe. If I could choose a superpower, it would be to see, hear, and feel all the waves outside the visible and audible spectrums.”

With new waves in mind, here are some songs he loves.

1. Liars - No. 1 Against the Rush
   WIXIW | Mute, 2012 | Bandcamp
2. Cold Cave - Double Lives in Single Beds
   Love Comes Close | Heartworm Press, 2009 | Bandcamp
3. Telefon Tel Aviv - You are the Worst Thing in the World
   Immolate Yourself | BPitch Control, 2009 | Bandcamp
4. The Horrors - Sea Within a Sea
   Primary Colours | XL Recordings, 2009
5. ERAAS - Fang
   ERAAS | Felte, 2012 | Bandcamp 
6. Adult. - Tonight We Fall
   The Way Things Fall | Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp
7. A Place to Bury Strangers - Love Reaches Out (GIFT/Reality Delay Mixes)
   See Through You Rerealized | 2023 | Bandcamp

This mix has become an ideal companion for cold January night drives and early morning runs. I’m so glad Mike reminded me of ERAAS, who produced some of the sleekest yet underrated synthpop I’ve heard. He selected “Briar Path” but I made an eleventh-hour switch to “Fang” because it’s a personal favorite and I wanted to loop its drums.

Also swapped in a couple of remixes that transform "Love Reaches Out" into an M83-style anthem that delivers some good advice for surviving what looks to be another dreadful year: Love reaches out to everyone, not as much as it'd like to, but you gotta keep the dream alive. 

There’s something very satisfying to me about the fact that this mix is exactly 33 minutes and 33 seconds.

Thank you for listening.

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1. Kali Malone - Spectacle of Ritual
   The Sacrificial Code | Ideal Recordings, 2019 | Bandcamp
2. Abul Mogard - Desires Are Reminiscences By Now
   The Sky Had Vanished | Ecstatic, 2015 | Bandcamp
3. Autechre - VLetrmx21 (65% slower)
   Garbage | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp

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* * *

The first seven songs are table-setting for Me-Sheen’s “Sonic Lullaby,” one of the most beautiful songs in my canon. I came across it in 1997 on one of those ponderous “Excursions in Ambience” CDs with hellacious cover art and it’s been living in my head ever since. But first we kick off with Julianna Barwick’s “Prizewinning”, a song that’s somehow lulling and thrilling at once. It never fails to leave me cheering and C. plays it all the time, so it’s definitely a winner. There’s also a spiritualized vocoder workout from Matchess, a nugget of AM radio gold, and a powerful burst of dub techno from Vril—I hope to be reincarnated as the low-end whir on “Infinitum Eternis Anime” and join the rings of Saturn.

And tonight there’s plenty of reverb to carry us into the holidays, along with fragments of some 1950s Welsh miners singing carols because I’m feeling festive.

1. Julianna Barwick - Prizewinning
   The Magic Place | Asthmatic Kitty, 2011 | Bandcamp
2. Matchess - Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes
   Sacracorpa | Trouble in Mind, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. Vril - Infinitum Eternis Anime
   Anima Mundi | Delsin, 2018 | Bandcamp
4. Air - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi (28% slower)
   Premiers Symptômes | Parlophone, 1997
5. Eagles - I Can't Tell You Why (20% slower)
   The Long Point | Asylum Records, 1979
6. Voices From the Lake - Max
   Live at MAXXI, 2015 | Bandcamp
7. Me-Sheen - Sonic Lullaby
   Electronic Membrain | Reflective, 1995
8. Rhos Male Voice Choir: Psalm 23 / Holy Night + Vril loop
   Carols From The Welsh Mines, 1958 | More

For upbeat holiday music, please attend last year’s Professional Holiday Party.

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1. Simple Minds - Don’t You Forget About Me (38% slower)
   The Breakfast Club | 1985 | More
2. Will Web - Spacewalk (30% slower)
   Cosmic Driveby | Direct Beat, 1995
3. The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe (20% slower)
   Hollies | EMI, 1974
4. Vladislav Delay - Huone (46% slower)
   Multila | Chain Reaction, 2000 | Bandcamp
5. Swans - Leaving Meaning (20% slower)
   Leaving Meaning | Mute, 2019 | Bandcamp
6. Pole - Hafen (40% slower)
   2 | Kliff/Matador, 1999 | Bandcamp
7. Aphex Twin - #1 (Cliffs) (42% slower)
   Selected Ambient Works II | Warp, 1994 | Bandcamp
8. The Cars - Jacki (31% slower)
   Heartbeat City | Elektra, 1984

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"I took a deep, cleansing breath and I put that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself, As clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time. And Michael, the time is now."

So the hour has come for some Tom Wilkinson and George Clooney interlaced with five pieces of profound bass and machine grind. And plenty of amniotic, embryonic reverb.

• Try to make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness.
• Richie Hawtin + Thomas Brinkmann - 96:12/24:00 VR
  Concept | 1998 | Bandcamp
• As potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time.
• HTRK - Poison (Mika Vainio Remix)
  Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp
• Yes, the nudity in the parking lot was a mistake, I admit it. It was wrong. It was lame. It was obvious. And therapeutically, it was completely useless.
• TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606
  Kontra, 2013 | Bandcamp
• Is that the correct answer to the multiple choice of me?
• Tropic of Cancer - Stop Suffering
  Blackest Ever Black, 2015 | Boomkat
• What makes this feel good is that I don’t know where this goes.
• µ-Ziq - Peppermint Aero
  Manzana | Balmat, 2025 | Bandcamp
• You think you got the horses for that? Well good luck and god bless.

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Tonight’s soundtrack harmonizes with this idea of time. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been smudging my favorite mid-century vocals across a heartbeat drum and some loops that were trapped in my delay pedal. The result is an hour-long soundtrack composed for Grace Wang’s photography exhibition, The Heart Has Not Stopped, at Clark Centre for the Arts in Toronto.

“Through dreamlike, layered images created with in-camera multiple exposures on film, Wang evokes fleeting moments of memory and time—an intimate meditation on a world both beautiful and unknowable.” The show runs through November 30. (If you can't make it, you can look at some of Grace's photos here.)

Grace’s images combine the haze of memory with the shock of color and unexpected overlays that edge toward the spectral. I tried to capture this sensation by letting bursts of Patsy Cline, Rebekah Del Rio, Nancy Sinatra, The Platters, Yao Su-jung, Roy Orbison, and other familiar voices gradually unfurl. In addition to these samples, the final track was built from tape loops, pitched-down field recordings, and a couple of selections from the excellent Echospace sound library.

Thank you for listening.

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Thirty years later, I suppose I’m doing this again with Midnight Radio, only now I’m stitching together songs in an overheated and disembodied world I wouldn't have recognized back then.

Read the full post.

We kick off with some slow-motion Slowdive. When I asked my friend S. if it sounded cool or cursed, he said "Both." Then comes a slow variant of a track from Belong's stone classic, Common Era, which towers above Loveless and Souvlaki when it comes to gazeability.

Autechre's "Bronchusevenmx24" sounds like the heat shimmer on the horizon when the pavement warps and boils, a mirage that Italian sailors called vecchie signore che balla: old ladies dancing. The ladies are even more visible when it’s slowed down. 

And moving through the shimmer to fourth century Ethiopia, liturgies in the Christian church were accompanied by the benega, a stringed instrument "given to king David by God, and brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I, together with the Ark of the Covenant." But the singer's voice is the true instrument here, offering a fragile melody that brings to mind the thoughts of a kid taking apart cassette tapes. And finally, a chilled cup of stone tea with an excerpt from one of Stephen Hitchell's hour-long excursions before we wind down with some drowsy My Bloody Valentine.

1. Slowdive - Machine Gun (50% slower)
   Souvlaki, 1993 • More
2. Belong - A Walk (22% slower)
   Common Era • Bandcamp
3. Slowdive - Mousakka Chaos (20% slower)
   Souvlaki, 1993
4. Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24 (25% slower)
   Garbage, 1995 • Bandcamp
5. Sosena Gebre Eyesus - Save Us From Our Death
   The World Is But a Place of Survival: Begena Songs from Ethiopia | Bandcamp
6. cv313 - Depths of Perception (Excerpt)
   Depths of Perception, 2022 | More
7. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (45% slower)
   Loveless, 1991 | More
8. My Bloody Valentine - Instrumental B
   1988, featuring a Public Enemy sample | More

Dusted with static and murmurations from Spiritualized, Dean Martin, and always and forever, Nancy Sinatra. 

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So I’m looking elsewhere for reason. Read the full post.

* * *

Even though it’s far too warm for the first of October, the night continues to inch closer, which means it’s chromatic season.

The Chromatics have always been an unlikely proposition for me. I prefer my songs scuzzy and reverberated, whereas their music is so sleek and glossy it’s almost lacquered. It’s pop music from a neon world where Ruth Radelet’s frigid voice sings fabulous things like my leather glove grips the wheel. In 2017, they appeared on Twin Peaks before abruptly disbanding for reasons I don’t care to discover. Aside from rattling around the algorithms of streaming services, they've become a ghost—it's impossible to buy their music, and their Bandcamp and record label websites lead to 404s.

During their ten-year run, the Chromatics released only three proper albums but my library has over 250 songs. Drumless versions. Extended mixes. 8-track versions. Alternate takes for fictional movies. The same instrumentals reappear with different vocals and new titles. All these variations leave me wondering about the line between chasing perfection and forever relitigating the past. As if adjusting the variables enough times will finally yield the Platonic synthpop song. All of which makes finding their best tracks a daunting task, so I’ve made a megamix of ten favorites, including three of their covers.

If you like the Chromatics, this is the place to be tonight. And if not, even better: hopefully you’ll start.

1. Lady Night Drive (Cherry, 2012)
2. The Page (Kill for Love, 2012)
3. Stiff as a Board (Faded Now, 2020)
4. Running up that Hill (Night Drive, 2007)
5. The Sound of Silence (Closer to Grey, 2020)
6. Back from the Grave (Kill for Love, 2012)
7. Yes (Symmetry Remix) (Love Theme from Lost River, 2007)
8. Headlight’s Glare (Night Drive, 2007)
9. Disintegration (Running from the Sun, 2012)
10. Into the Black (Kill for Love, 2012)

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Biosphere - The Way of Time
The Way of Time | 2025 | Bandcamp

Romance - Leave Her to Heaven
Love Is Colder Than Death | 2025 | Bandcamp

Minor Hexachords - Minor Concession
Brinkmanship | 2025 | Bandcamp

Sa Pa - Nonspiration
Ambeesh | 2025 | Bandcamp

Rue des Garderies - Jiddu
2025 | Bandcamp

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1. Abul Mogard - Staring at the Sweeps of the Desert
   Works | Ecstatic, 2016 | Bandcamp
2. Black Polygons - Incarnat
   Silence | 2014 | Bandcamp
3. Seefeel - Rupt (Cut Mix)
   Rupt and Flex | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp
4. Transient Waves - Soulspace
   Transient Waves | i, 1997 | Bandcamp
5. Intrusion - Love in Lofi (Remastered by Pole)
   Unreleased Tape Sessions, 2025 | Bandcamp

Read the full post.

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Sixsixsevenfortyseven’s Wounded Dogs is one of my favorite albums this year, a low-frequency exercise in patience, just like running or any repetitive act that hunts for freedom through repetition. An Egyptian low-rider comes next, followed by some metropolitan Detroit sleaze. This sequence lopes along until we get to Drissi El-Abbassi belting from the 1980s in Algeria. Look at this album cover. He was born to make us sweat. But his voice gets shredded by Autechre’s “Clipper” as we drop into more frigid and fractured terrain before winding down with a touch of Digital Underground. Here’s the hyperlink to tonight’s broadcast, or listen below.

I often think about this line from Richard Powers’s Orfeo: “Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough.” 

Read the full post.

Sixsixsevenfortyseven - I Stood There
Wounded Dogs | Youth, 2025 | Bandcamp

Jana & El Nashmy - 3al Bayez
Place: Egypt | Air Texture, 2025 | Bandcamp

Erika - Tomorrow’s Fires (Whodat Remix)
Anevite Void Remixed | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2025 | Bandcamp

DVA Damas - Wet Vision II
Wet Vision | Downwards, 2015 | Boomkat

Drissi El-Abbassi - Zedti Laadab Aliya
Nashazphone | Bandcamp

Autechre - Clipper
Tri Repetae | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp

Broken English Club - Prayer Space
Suburban Hunting | Cititrax, 2015 | Bandcamp

Plastikman - Contain
Consumed | Minus, 1998 | Bandcamp

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There’s a similar flavor to crossing the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. You can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water. I usually cross this line while speeding toward Michigan’s upper peninsula on an empty road in the dark.

Lake Superior frightened me when I was small. My parents enjoyed camping along its shore on long weekends, and I would doze on the sticky pleather backseat of our Pontiac while we drove from Detroit to some vacant beach where we would set up our tent. I would squirm in my sleeping bag, unable to sleep with that mysterious lake sitting out there in the night like it was waiting.

In second grade, we studied the Great Lakes and read a pamphlet that described Lake Superior as the deepest and coldest of the five lakes: Scientists have not yet reached the bottom, and they do not know what lives there. I’d lie awake thinking about what might live in all that uncharted space.

There’s enough water in Lake Superior to submerge all of the Americas. Its southern edge is known as “the Graveyard of the Great Lakes” due to a cascade of shipwrecks. On July 30, 1985, Jeffrey Val Klump became the first person to reach the bottom of Lake Superior at 1,333 feet. This happened after I read that pamphlet.

Forty years later, I think I’ve made my peace with Lake Superior. Antarctica scares me today. My head goes swimmy if I look at it for too long on a map. All that blank land feels like leaping off a rooftop. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to signs that position me on the planet: the 45th parallel, the Continental Divide, and bullet-ridden signs cheerfully announcing the state line. And yes, the pulsing blue dot that accompanies me wherever I go, keeping me oriented and globally positioned.

But there were years when I would crisscross the nation with only a dog-eared atlas. Now I can hardly drive to Target without mapping my route. Something has been lost—a sense of agency, a way of being in the world—but I cannot argue that squinting at a roadmap with a flashlight was better.

Perhaps I’m thinking about Lake Superior tonight because it speaks to a deep-boned craving for mystery in these unmysterious times when it feels like everything can—and should—be answered. Feelings are mistaken for wisdom. Information has displaced wonder.

So tonight's soundtrack offers a murky marine-themed response to a Very Kind Listener's recent request for some dub techno—here's forty minutes submerged in mysterious echoes and watery orchestras. Listen below or better yet, take a sip of this mp3.

1. Loscil - Drained Lake
   Monument Builders | Kranky, 2016 | Bandcamp
2. Porter Ricks - Nautical Dub
   Biokenetics | Chain Reaction, 1996 | Bandcamp
3. Polmo Popo - Aqua
   The Science of Breath | Subtractive, 2002 | Boomkat
4. Variant - Ocean’s End Revisited
   Ocean's End | Echospace, 2015 | Bandcamp
5. Black Polygons - Underwater
   Silence | 2014 | Bandcamp
6. Mammo - Traversing a Raincloud
   General Patterns | Short Span, 2025 | Bandcamp
7. Deepchord - Oceanic
   20 Electrostatic Soundfields | Soma, 2021 | Boomkat

Served with several gallons of reverb, some crushed static, and a dollop of Stevie Wonder.

And dig the quiet luxury of Midnight Radio apparel. TeePublic's tri-blend t-shirts are the softest I've found—but a person can only own so many Spiritualized and Basic Channel shirts, so I've made a few Midnight Radio options to expand my repertoire and weird out the normals. (This isn't a dumbass attempt at monetization, I swear. I earn fifty cents per sale. I just like these shirts—but only the tri-blend.)

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

On the screen, a shirtless man silently unloaded a belt-fed weapon into a crowd while my friend described how the cousin of his sister’s boyfriend saw an ancient woman with blood streaming down her cheeks. That boy was in a hospital now, pulling out his hair, which had turned white.

“He was probably on drugs,” I said, even though I did not yet know what drugs did.

Two nine-year-olds in a dark bathroom, jostling through nervy giggles. Bloody Mary. We said it again, our voices softer this time. Bloody Mary. A door slammed—my friend had fled the bathroom. Alone, I said Bloody Mary a third time, and as the words left my mouth, my belly dropped like I was falling from a great height.

Bloody Mary was not born on a playground. Her legend began in drafty medieval homes where young women would walk backwards down staircases with a hand mirror and candle, hoping they might glimpse their future husband. If they saw a wailing skull, they’d die before they could marry.

A century later, the ritual required the speaker to say Bloody Mary, I killed your baby, which suggests a connection to Mary I of England, the Catholic queen who burned Protestants at the stake because she thought their deaths might be instructive. History named her Bloody Mary, this dour little woman who suffered multiple miscarriages and phantom pregnancies before succumbing to ovarian cancer. It’s not hard to imagine the children of her victims gathered before a mirror, taunting the queen for her failure to produce an heir.

There is, of course, another Mary associated with childbirth, and my eyes breeze past her portraits in museums, already sensing her devotion, vague yet familiar like a cloud. Bloodying the Madonna offers the thrill of transgression, a way to test the weight of the sacred by pulling it down into the muck.

There’s also Mary of Magdalene, who I first encountered in Chicago while moving through Renaissance and Baroque galleries, paintings that held no interest for me until the people I loved began to die. The feverish Magdalene in oils across the centuries, knelt before Christ as he cast the demons from her body, each becoming one of the seven sins. Or the penitent Magdalene pleading in the darkness for salvation, her hair grown long to cover herself while she wandered the desert, hair she would one day use to clean Christ’s wounds before dying in a cave.

Mary of England’s faith was the product of a disordered mind. The Virgin Mary’s faith is so perfect it’s almost inhuman and therefore dull. But Magdalene’s tortured devotion feels not only real, but possible. Sometimes I envy the gleam in her eyes.

But Mary, whoever she might be, is only half of the ritual. The other is the mirror. One night, thirty miles south of Memphis, I considered myself in a large motel mirror behind the television, my face illuminated by a slash of light from the parking lot. I tried not to imagine the other guests this mirror had witnessed, the ones who left cigarette burns in the sink. I concentrated on my reflection as if I could summon the old-world belief in the mirror as a paranormal device, a practice so common it has a name: catoptromancy.

But has anyone seen a ghost in the mirror? Was there ever a white-haired boyfriend in a hospital? Neuroscientists offer explanations, such as Troxler’s Fading, a phenomenon in which staring at a point in the mid-distance, especially in a dim environment, can generate psychedelic effects in the peripheral vision. Autohypnosis is another possible cause: the suspension of disbelief coupled with ritualistic chanting can induce dreamlike visions.

But science does not account for the persistence of evil queens and vampires, of our desire to invent worlds beyond the looking glass or the flash of apprehension when a mirror is broken, even if we do not believe in luck.

Today we hide our dead in morgues and urns, but we used to display their bodies in our homes and cover the mirrors, even if we no longer recalled the ancient belief that a reflection of the departed might trap their soul in the house and prevent passage into a better world. Those were days when our images were honored, even feared—echoes and reflections were the sounds and sights of our souls.

Now we photograph ourselves in front of mountains, memorials, and sandwiches. We’re drowning in faces, which echoes the oldest mirror story, the tale of a young man who fell in love with his reflection and stared at it until he lost the will to live because he knew he could never have the object of his desire.

But back to being nine years old in a dark bathroom, saying Bloody Mary for the third and final time. Nothing happened, and I returned to the television. But that split-second of expectation is the best way I can describe the sensation of almost-belief, the feeling that my understanding of reality was about to go off the rails. I’d like to feel it again sometime.

The only time I came close was in an abandoned asylum where an amateur ghost hunter tried to conjure a poltergeist, but that’s another story.

Speaking of going off the rails, I was planning to stitch together a sequence of slow-motion dub techno classics per a request from a Very Kind Listener, but tonight’s episode veered into unexpected territory. Perhaps dub techno is too chilly for this fever dream of summer. Or too consistent. Something led me to these five very different songs, bound only by high degrees of humidity, but I think they hang together, thanks to some grey zones of reverb and static. I’m intrigued by the possibility of consistency through differentiation—after all, pure repetition leads to seeing the Bloody Mary.

Tonight kicks off with some liturgical rock followed by an infectious ballad from Anna Domino, recorded in her childhood bedroom circa 1984, then Deepchord dons the incense-soaked guise of Mystic AM, pointing the way to a stone classic from Iran in ’71 before we hit Polmo Popo’s majestic 2003 rework of an Arthur Russell disco track from '78—it’s one of the few masterpieces of the early 21st century. Listen below, or reach through the cobwebs of hyperspace and collect this em pee three.

1. Gnod - Peace at Home
   Spot Land | Rocket Recordings, 2024 | Bandcamp
2. Anna Domino - Everyday I Don't
   East and West | Crépuscule, 1984 | Bandcamp
3. Mystic AM - Caravanserai + Den of Thieves
   Cardamom & Laudanum | Astral Industries, 2022 | Ba...

A piece of brain in my hair
The wheels are melting
A ghost is screaming your name

They come from M83’s “Don’t Save Us from the Flames”, and like Rutger Hauer’s monologue about C-beams glittering in the dark, this handful of words conjures an entire world—alien yet somehow known.

I’d like to hear a ghost scream my name. Every now and then, I crave proof that there’s some magic in this fallen world. But if it were to arrive, I’d probably be terrified. Or else you’d find me on a street corner with a sandwich board, screaming at the sky. I’ve never understood the person who claims to have peeked behind the veil yet continues to send emails and worry about their checking account.

Ghosts are scarier than demons, I think, because they’re a presence rather than a desire. They simply are. It’s up to us to live with them.

The twenty-first century has some terrible lyrics:

Recommended for you
Because you liked
Here’s something we think you’ll enjoy
Based on your interests
Curated for you.

Every day is a fight for control. Algorithms gnaw at my agency, hijacking even something as mundane as deciding which TV show to watch, something I used to be able to figure out on my own.

Sometimes it feels like a gut punch, the sight of us weaving along sidewalks and hallways like ghosts, gazing into an illuminated piece of glass. At some point the screen became the world, and now we're haunting it.

But there was a time when people believed sin might cause the stars to fall out of the sky, therefore only the virtuous should practice astronomy. So who knows what the future holds.

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go, then it unfurls into its own strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge.

Better than any thinkpiece about the future, Kawakami conjures the horror and wonder of our species giving way to another as a felt experience that left me shaken in ways both satisfying and horrified. She might be writing from the year 5000 and telling us the news.

In 1977, Roland Barthes described listening as “an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the ‘underside’ of meaning.” He believed this attentive mode was religious in the literal sense because it binds—or ligatures—the listener to “the hidden world of the gods, who, as everyone knows, speak a language of which only a few enigmatic fragments reach men, though it is vital—cruelly enough—for them to understand this language.”

I encountered this argument in Ben Raitfliff’s Run the Song. He applies it to classical music, but I think it captures the spectral quality of dub techno, how it strips the body to its essence and raises it as a shadow: machine drums that once sounded like the future become a heartbeat thump, reverberated like the chug of blood in the veins, sometimes paired with the skeletal snap of a high-hat or snare, always drenched in tape hiss that reminds us hauntings are analogue, not digital.

There’s some of this in tonight’s broadcast. After extending a loop from Suicide until it becomes a dirge, we’ll encounter the heavyweight churn of Variant’s “Foil”, followed by the Superpitcher remix of “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, a pitched-down dose of AM radio glory, and finally, Basic Channel’s landmark “Inversion”. The original burbles along at a swift 132 beats per minute yet its extended phrases of metallic shimmer approach ambient terrain. This is what Barthes’s sacred fragments sound like to me.

1. Suicide - Cheree
   Bronze, 1978 | More
2. Variant - Foil
   Dreaming Thru Vector | Echospace Detroit, 2014 | Bandcamp
3. M83 - Don’t Save Us From the Flames (Superpitcher Remix)
   Before The Dawn Heals Us: Remixes and B-Sides | Gooom, 2005
4. Gerry Rafferty - Down the Line (30% slower)
   City to City | 1978 | More
5. Basic Channel - Inversion (46% slower)
   1994 | Boomkat

As always, these tracks are laced with echoes from Nancy Sinatra, the Paris Sisters, the Zombies, the Righteous Brothers, and more. I think they pair especially well with pitched-down and fuzzed-out dub techno. Listen below or download this pale blue mp3 before it turns to vapor.

Hooray for the first anniversary of Midnight Radio! Thank you for celebrating with me—and for the notes of encouragement that have carried me along and made this a reassuring ritual throughout this unfortunate and humiliating season. I’ve never managed to keep a public-facing endeavor going for such a long stretch, but I intend to keep doing it until I’m dead or bored, whichever comes first.

In the meantime, I’m compiling the first year of writing into a little book, cleverly titled Midnight Radio Volume 1, and it will include other bits and bobs about faith, ghosts, and reverb. I’m still fiddling with the design, but if everything goes according to plan (which it probably won’t), it should be available in August.

Speaking of "Don't Save Us From the Flames," a couple of years ago, I used it to soundtrack this video mood board of the ghost story I've been writing and rewriting for years.

In other news, C. and I were invited to create a futuristic temple at the McConnell Center for the Arts in 2027. It’s an excellent space here in Columbus, Ohio, and we’re looking forward to filling it with neon and echoes, assuming there’s still an Ohio and we’re not eaten by robots before then.

But the most exciting thing arrived in a small box from Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Looking ahead to the Ides of July, longtime friend of Midnight Radio, Michael Donaldson, recently mentioned he’d appreciate some more hiss-soaked reverberations along the lines of Variant’s "Foil"—this will be the next episode, and it might be several days long.

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

My dad lost his mother to cancer when he was twenty-four. I never met her, but I know she loved the blue heron, a big swoopy thing that dragged its legs across the sky. When my parents spotted one, they'd pull the car to the side of the road and gawk. There she is, they'd whisper, and my father would bite his lip. It was the closest I saw him come to tears until the day my mother died.

My grandfather kept a stuffed bald eagle in his basement—an oddly seditious act. But he was delighted to show everyone the paperwork, including a letter with a presidential seal that confirmed the bird was legal. He’d found it on the beach with a broken wing and tried to nurse it back to health but failed. After he died, my father reported seeing bald eagles in improbable places. A parking lot in Chicago. Circling over the Detroit interstate.

My father's faith in birds deepened after my mother died. "Now she's a cardinal," he said. "Remember how excited she’d get when she saw the first one each spring?" He would call at strange hours with reports of cardinals. He saw one perched on the railing of the building where he moved after selling the house, and again on the hospital lawn after his lung transplant. Over the years, I became accustomed to the way he'd clear his throat to make space for his inventory of herons, eagles, and cardinals. These birds were plain facts to him, proof of a sensible universe where those who left did not leave us.

I realized too late that I never knew my father's favorite bird, and now there's nobody left to ask. But if I ever see a cardinal flying alongside another bird, maybe that's the one.

Perhaps it's more fruitful to contemplate the desire to believe, rather than worry about the shape it takes.

But there is precedent for my parents’ faith: an ancient work called the Ornithogonia that describes the transformation of humans into birds may have inspired Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In this poem, Ovid mourns the lost ages of gold and silver, when people were decent, magic filled the world, and the gods were good. He was nostalgic in the year 8.

Holding onto the past is not a good look, although it’s tempting. I struggle to separate the flux of 2025 from the standard-issue complaints of middle age. But ‘normal’ disappeared a long time ago; it’s not coming back, and good riddance—it's time to clear the stage and put on a better show.

Death Prom is not nostalgic. Squint your ears through the reverb and the exhausted fumes of the past might fuel a new mystery. Old standards by Elvis Presley and Bobby Vinton decay into digital artifacts, leaving behind an interesting residue that makes room for moments like M83’s "Moon Child", which sounds like the exhaust of history plunging into the future, come what may. At any rate, it’s the perfect soundtrack for when the heavens come crashing down. Listen below, or right-click + save-file-as and let this artisanal mp3 take root in the soil of your hard drive.

1. Elvis Presley - Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (8-14% slower)
   RCA Victor, 1960
2. M Fadzil & Clique Fantastique - Do'a
   Malaysia, 1971
3. Bobby Vinton - Sealed With a Kiss (20% slower)
   Epic, 1972
4. Drugdealer - Wild Motion
   Raw Honey | Mexican Summer, 2019 | Bandcamp
5. Naomi Akimoto - 十六夜の月
   Aquarelle, 1984
6. M83 - Moon Child
   Before the Dawn Heals Us | Gooom, 2005 | Bandcamp

In other news, I was interviewed about my internet website and I’m still compiling a list of my favorite things and a playlist of beautiful songs for ugly running.

The next episode will mark the one-year anniversary of Midnight Radio, and we’ll celebrate with a somewhat exciting announcement.

Until then, the request lines are open. Thank you for listening.

M. rolls heavy. There’s not much small talk with him. Doesn’t matter who you are—interact with him for five minutes and you’ll be reckoning with Lacanian lack or, if there’s a shift in the light, perhaps Deleuzian notions of new inflows of creativity and intensity. He’s pushed my thinking into new terrain, and he’s with us tonight to pull hammers, snakes, money, and Samara from The Ring into the zone where desire and demons meet.

Here’s how tonight’s audio came to be: M. asked if I wanted to do a podcast, and I said no because podcasts are annoying and I don’t need more media in my life. He showed up with microphones anyway, and we recorded a conversation, after which I deleted myself and left his side of the discussion intact.

M’s thoughts on the horror of insatiable desire offer some strategies for dealing with the unruly self. It also sounds like an accurate diagnosis of the current American moment.

No matter how many lists I make, there’s something within me that will never be comfortable or understood—and this is how it should be. But here’s a list anyway:

1. Ghost Dubs - Chemical (18% slower)
   Damaged | Pressure, 2024 | Bandcamp
2. Pole - Berlin
   1 | Matador, 1998 | Bandcamp
3. MMMD - Egoismo
   Egoismo | Antifrost, 2019 | Bandcamp
4. Biosphere - Houses on the Hill
   Shenzhou | Touch, 2002 | Bandcamp
5. Basic Channel - Radiance I (31% slower)
   Basic Channel, 1994 | Boomkat
6. Heathered Pearls - Beach Shelter (Loscil Grind Remix)
   Loyal Reworks | Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp
7. Keith - Flob Gob (Jukebox Mix)
   Pernod Parks Productions, 2025 | Bandcamp
8. Rod Modell - Forester Park
   Vibrasound: The Deepchord Years 1999-2004
9. Civilistjävel! - A2
   Järnnätter | Felt, 2022 | Bandcamp
10. Thomas Brinkmann - Maschine
    Totes Rennen | Supposé, 1998 | Bandcamp

Tonight’s episode opens with some heavyweight dub to introduce M., and when he finishes speaking, we’ll test the limits of repetition by listening to Thomas Brinkmann’s intensive loop of a vocal from Blixa Bargeld. And here’s a partial list of the audio files of M. if you’d like a roadmap:

• M Saturated Spew.m4a
• M Broken Hammer.m4a
• M Making a Clearing.m4a
• M Demon Mother Desire.m4a
• M You Want Your Mother to Feed You.m4a
• M Insatiable Serial Killer Desire.m4a
• M Desire Itself Is Excessive.m4a
• M It Goes On and On.m4a

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Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Charlie Megira - Tomorrow’s Gone
Da Abtomatic Meisterzinger Mambo Chic | 2001 | Bandcamp

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya - Hounds of Heaven
Orbweaving | Heaven Metal, 2023 | Bandcamp

Ensemble Economique - Your Lips Against Mine
Melt Into Nothing | Denovali, 2014 | Bandcamp

Windy & Carl - Lighthouse
Drawing of Sound | Blue Flea, 1996 | Bandcamp

Füxa - Dreamlanding
3 Field Rotation | Mind Expansion, 1995 | Bandcamp

Read the full post with a complete inventory of dreams.

The request lines are open.

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Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

• A drum loop from Woob’s “Odonna” (Woob 1194, 1994 | More)
• Goma ritual chants, tape hiss, static, and fifty-two pounds of reverb.
• Hiroshi Yoshimura – Adelaide (Flora, 1987 | Bandcamp)
• Some in-house synthesizers and a kick drum that, late at night, sounds like something knocking from the other side of the veil.

Perhaps demons are ready for a reboot. The grifters, faith-dealers, dead-eyed influencers, and screamers are stripping our world for parts, and we crave justice—not the justice of our rickety institutions, but something cosmic that assures us the universe can balance itself. 

Read the full post.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

At the crowded Sensō-ji temple in Tokyo, I received an auspicious fortune: Just like dead trees bloom flowers when spring comes, everything will be prosperous. I smiled as if I’d won a rare prize. For a moment, I believed this random piece of paper knew things about my life.

The lady next to me received a bad fortune. It actually said 'Bad Fortune' in several languages, and the portion I glimpsed warned her that happiness and money would be scarce and a season of loneliness was on its way. Bad fortunes are folded up and tied to a metal rack. A few laugh it off, but others look shaken, and we give them sympathetic looks.

Entering a sacred zone demands a shift in thinking. Some say the raised stone thresholds we step over to enter a temple are there to repel bad spirits, but a woman told me they are meant to humble us. In the past, people were forced to bow as they lifted their robes to cross.

I wish we had some architecture to humble us today. I’d like to see people bow as they enter a Target or a Taco Bell.

I’m jealous of those who know how to move through religious spaces—the ones whose faith seems limbic, their bodies following a secret choreography they’ve always known. They know which way to cross themselves. They know when to kneel, or bow, or clap.

At Taoist temples, people often bow three times before they approach the altar, and I envied their holy thoughts—the sutras and incantations in their heads. I later learned that, with each bow, they often recite their name, birthday, and address, to make sure the gods can find them if they’re listening.

Knowing this took the pressure off. Let the ultramundane and the spiritualized mingle.

Designed by Kenzo Tange in 1962, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo's Sekiguchi neighborhood is an alien tower of stainless steel that forms a cross. Inside, waves of soaring concrete are slashed with sunlight and shadow, their surfaces stained with time.

As I sat in an empty pew, I gazed at the skylight fifteen stories above my head and thought about my mother, even though we never went to church together. Enveloped by forces beyond my usual scale, I felt strangely tranquil. I felt held.

No photographs were allowed, and I admired this policy. It forced me to deal with the space through language and ink. I made this sketch—something I haven’t done in years:

There was no stained glass or Biblical scenery. Only a massive solitary cross that made the notion of religion seem even more otherworldly. A spotlight hung over the altar, casting the only electric light. There was no noise except the occasional rustle of a visitor shifting in their seat, and a low hum that sounded like outer space.

I watched and listened in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It occured to me that all those bad fortunes knotted together on a metal rack looked like snow-covered branches of flowers, just like my auspicious fortune had promised.

Metaphors abound, but on to tonight’s episode, which kicks off with a Buddhist chant that bleeds into my favorite song of the year so far. Like Kenzo Tange’s cathedral—which feels both like mid-20th-century optimism and a vision from a still-distant future—“Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback” simultaneously sounds like 1982 and the year 3000. After a few detours through Shibuya and Shinjuku, we’ll find our way to Sugar Plant, a Japanese duo whose dreamy vapor from the 1990s ought to be etched into memory alongside names like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive.

1. Unspecified Enemies - Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback
   Numbers, 2025 | Bandcamp
2. Tomo Akikawabaya - A Dream of No Pillow
   The Invitation of the Dead, 1986 | Bandcamp
3. Brian Reitzell and Roger Joseph Manning Jr - Shibuya
   Lost in Translation Soundtrack, 2003
4. 2814 - 新宿ゴールデン街 (Shinjuku Golden Street)
   Birth of a New Day | Dream Catalogue, 2015 | Bandcamp
5. Sugar Plant - Happy
   Wonder, 1998 | Bandcamp

Also features field recordings I made of ritualistic chants and the soothing sounds of a shopping mall at the Tokyo Dome. Listen below or better yet, download a neon-soaked mp3 here.

The next episode will be dedicated to fire purification, taiko drums, and as always, reverb. Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

In 2016, the NYC-based guitarist Hewson Chen discovered the homesick ballads his father recorded after emigrating from Taiwan. He set them to music and called it Taiwanese Folk Style, and it’s a remarkable collaboration across generations—and one of the most delightful albums I’ve heard in years.

Two weeks ago, my friend P. turned me on to Yu Ching, a Taiwanese musician who serves chilled shots of shoegaze. I’ve also been steeping myself in Alex Zhang Hungtai’s extensive catalog, especially his work as Dirty Beaches, a patron saint of Death Prom.

So tonight’s episode is dedicated to the Taiwan-related music that has been soundtracking my slow rainy runs along the Tansui River, where clouds are draped over the mountains on the horizon, and all of those ancient landscape scrolls suddenly make perfect sense. I also realized that the pylons of the interstate looked like Shinto shrines before I accidentally ran up the exit ramp. But they don’t make landscape scrolls about that.

High walls surround the Confucian temple because you must work for the knowledge within.

1. Yu Ching - Love
   The Crystal Hum | Night School, 2024 | Bandcamp
2. 姚苏蓉 (Yao Su-jung) - 磁性的迷惑 (Magnetic Seduction)
   MMI, 1969 | More
3. James Chen - Summer in Taiwan
   Taiwanese Folk Style | Moon Glyph, 2016 | Bandcamp
4. Dirty Beaches - Low Rider / I Dream in Neon
   Cassette/Drifters | Zoo Music, 2008/2012 | Bandcamp
5. James Chen - Don’t Be Discouraged
   Taiwanese Folk Style | Moon Glyph, 2016 | Bandcamp
6. Yu Ching - 桑桑 (Sun Sun)
   Planetes Records, 2024 | Bandcamp
7. Alex Zhang Hungtai & Tseng Kuo Hung - Ten Swords
   Longone | 2020 | Bandcamp

Also contains the sounds of elderly people doing circulatory exercises in Da’an Park, the recording from an aggressive ice cream vendor, and the usual bits of static and tuning. And as always, plenty of reverb.

Read the full post here.

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Tonight's installment is bookended by two tracks from an all-time favorite album that’s been keeping me company on this trip: Atom Heart & Tetsu Inoue's Flowerhead, a drowsy low-end opus that comforted me thirty years ago and still delights me today. Along the way, there are some newer songs drenched in fuzz and streaked with Taiwanese ballads from the mid-twentieth century before winding down with a chant I recorded at Songshan Ciyou Temple. This mixtape is tailored for headphones, ideally while walking down a rainy street filled with people carrying clear plastic umbrellas.

1. Datacide - Flowerhead
   Flowerhead | Rather Interesting, 1995 | Bandcamp
2. Civilistjävel! - XVI
   Följd | Felt, 2025 | Bandcamp
3. Matchess - Of the Living
   Sacracorpa | Trouble in Mind, 2018 | Bandcamp
4. Leyland Kirby - They Are All Dead, There Are No Skip At All
   Eager to Tear Apart the Stars | History Always Favours the Winners, 2011 | Bandcamp
5. Datacide - Deep Chair
   Flowerhead | Rather Interesting, 1995 | Bandcamp

Interspersed with sections from:

• 美黛 (Mei Tai) - Unforgettable Memories
  Taiwan | Union Records, 1965 | More
• Zhen Hui-Ling - Ice Point
  Taiwan, 1960s
• 姚蘇蓉 (Yao Su-jung) - 負心的人
  Taiwan, 1967 | More
• Unknown - Lighthouse in the Night Fog
  Taiwan, 1960s
• 紀露霞 (Chi Lu-hsia) - 黃昏嶺 (Sunset Ridge)
  Taiwan, 1957 | More
• 胡美紅 (Hu Mei-Hong) - Autumn Wind, Night Rain / Three Sighs
  Taiwan | ATS, 1967 | More
• Recording from Songshan Ciyou Temple
  March 13, 2025 | More

The request lines are open.

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Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

• Angelo Badalamenti - Laura Palmer’s Theme
  Twin Peaks, 1990 | More
• Rebekah Del Rio - Llorando
  Mulholland Drive, 2001 | More
• Dean Hurley - Night Electricity Theme
  Anthology Resource Vol. 1 | Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017 | Bandcamp
• Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Constant Fear
  Black Earth | Wonder, 2002 | More
• Roy Orbison - Crying
  RCA Victor, 1961 | More
• Bobby Vinton - Blue Velvet
  Epic, 1963 | More
• Chris Isaak - Wicked Game (23% slower)
  Reprise, 1989 | More
• The Paris Sisters - I Love How You Love Me
  Gregmark, 1961 | More
• Julee Cruise - Falling
  Floating Into the Night, 1989 | Three Demos
• Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Theme
  Twin Peaks, 1990 | More
• Roy Orbison - In Dreams (20% slower)
  Monument Records, 1963 | More
• Rod Modell + Taka Noda - Untitled 2
  Glow World | Silentes, 2024 | Bandcamp

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The overheated colors and pebbled texture of this picture left me romanticizing the aesthetics of the past: a tactile world of cigarettes, record players, snow on the television, and radios that filled the room like furniture. Might as well have been another planet compared to how I sit with a scrunched face and white plastic in my ears, tapping at a piece of glass. And soon this will look like the days of the hand-cranked Victrola or the first Model T.

It’s a strange sensation, living a life divided between today’s liquid crystal and a youth defined by magnetic tape. Audio and VHS cassettes contained my first impressions of the world. Each unit of entertainment was bound in plastic that occupied space and respected the logic of time, its information deteriorating each time it was played until it dissolved into garbled images and hiss. Now the whole world feels like static. No orientation. No sense of time. Perhaps my generation is uniquely positioned to be disappointed by the humiliations of clicking and scrolling. After all, I still remember the optimism of world wide web and information superhighway.

I miss the reassuring kerchunk of buttons and punching out the plastic tabs on a cassette if the recording was good. Or taping them up again when better music came along. It was a tactile world of messing with limitations, a sensibility defined by the boundaries of the physical rather than a never-ending feed coming from god only knows. Was life better in the Era of Magnetic Tape, or am I suffering from the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?

Either way, this calls for a trip to the Death Prom, where I can hide beneath the crashing waves of an old Ronettes single: big heartbeat drums and an even bigger voice, Ronnie Spector and her beehive carryied the fever dream of American history when she sang “Keep on Dancing” back in ’64, a song so perfect that her husband refused to release it because he was a psychopath. In my notebook, I jotted down a quote from her that reads like a poem: “Everything was quiet, then all of a sudden I heard a low rumble, like there was thunder coming from every corner of the room.”

1. Jeanette - Oí Tu Voz 
   Hispavox, 1967
2. Jessica Pratt - Life Is 
   Here in the Pitch | Mexican Summer, 2024 | Bandcamp
3. Hasnah Haron - Hanya Padamu 
   Malaysia, 1970
4. Dirty Beaches - True Blue + The Ronettes - Keep on Dancin’ 
   Zoo Music, 2010 + Philles Records, recorded 1964, released 1978
5. Connie Francis - Siboney 
   MGM, 1960

And god, how Connie Francis holds those final notes. This mixtape also includes shards of Johnny Mathis, Bobby Vinton, Patsy Cline, and some ominous basslines. Listen below, or here’s an mp3 so dusty you can almost touch it.

The next few episodes of Midnight Radio will be broadcast from Taipei and Tokyo because C. was awarded a generous research grant and I got lucky and married above my station, so I get to tag along. (She also made this delightful collage of me walking down the street.)

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-to-death-prom/

1. TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606 (43% slower)
   TM 404 | Kontra-Musik, 2013 | Bandcamp
2. Topdown Dialectic - A4 (44% slower)
   S/T | Peak Oil, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. Echospace - Aequinoxium/Sunset/Abraxas (48% slower)
   The Coldest Season | Modern Love, 2008 | Boomkat
4. Von Schommer - Wuerfel/Wuerfel Version (45% slower)
   Deepchord, 2000 | Bandcamp
5. IMAX - Concorde (47% slower)
   Deepchord, 2000 | Bandcamp

Also includes snippets from Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Leonard Cohen, Yazoo, Skeeter Davis, Rebekah Del Rio, and 10cc. (The moment at the eight-minute mark when a Joy Division fragment lands on a half-speed synth is my favorite thing yet in these fifteen mixes.)

Listen below, or here’s a premium executive mp3 you can play while you ponder whether or not to root for this asteroid.

Read the full post.

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Near a decommissioned military base between the Chocolate Mountains and the Santa Rosa range, there’s a candy-colored hill shellacked with religious slogans, the handiwork of a man who dedicated his final years and nine thousand gallons of paint to writing God is Love and Jesus I’m a Sinner in shades of pink and red that make your eyeballs scream. He painted Salvation Mountain after his homemade hot air balloon failed to carry him to heaven, leaving him earthbound in the Mojave desert, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I was only planning to stay for a week,” he told a tourist before he died. “But it was a very good week.”

There’s nothing on County Road 59 in western Nebraska except sleepy cattle and miles of sky. When the silhouette of Stonehenge appeared on the horizon, I thought I was hallucinating until I parked on the shoulder and laid my hands upon the thirty-six Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles stacked into arches that track solar and lunar events—a man’s memorial to his dead father.

Further north in Wisconsin, there’s a wrought-iron spaceship known as the Forevertron, a forbidding contraption assembled from lightning rods, two Thomas Edison dynamos, debris from the local ammunition factory, and a decontamination chamber retrieved from Apollo 11. The Forevertron was built by a frustrated demolition man who wanted to create rather than destroy. One night, he rechristened himself as a Victorian inventor named Dr. Evermore. “I was rather upset with the world,” he explained. “So I decided to send myself back into the heavens on a magnetic lightning forcefield.”

I love this genre of old men speaking to the heavens (and occasionally attempting to launch themselves there) by building candy-colored mountains, car-wreck calendars, and junkyard rockets. I'll probably join them someday, and I hope you have your own Forevertron that you're tinkering with. In the meantime, we have five songs tonight, each promising transcendence in its own way.

First off, the blistering pleasure of Earth’s guitars that ride the line between the sacred and the demonic, followed by a synth-and-vocal workout from The Field that sounds like a crumbling memory of a warehouse party on the brink of the void. Then comes the centerpiece, which C. and I have decided is our favorite genre for 2025: “preposterous yet strangely compelling.”—and I-F’s “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass” fits the bill perfectly. It’s gloriously dumb and a technical triumph that conjures a much nicer future. After this late-20th-century masterpiece, the only logical option is to drop into some static-ridden Joy Division, which I’ve glitched and reverberated when the spirit moved me, followed by Temple ov Saturn's "Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary"—Joan Pope’s music sounds like an incantation that threatens to summon something ominous, which might help us prepare for the rest of 2025.

1. Earth - Coda Maestoso in F(flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)
   Legacy of Dissolution | No Quarter, 2005 | Boomkat
2. The Field - Made of Steel, Made of Stone
   Infinite Moment | Kompakt, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. I-F - Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass
   Fucking Consumer | Disko B, 1998 | Bandcamp
4. Joy Division - Day of the Lords
   Unknown Pleasures | Factory Records, 1979 | More
5. Temple Ov Saturn - Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary
   Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary | 2019 | Bandcamp

Also includes a healthy serving of reverb, a relevant snippet of David Bowie, and Neil Diamond’s "Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show" in slow-motion. Listen below, use this hyperlink to score a high-grade mp3, or if you must, here's a Spotify playlist without the fun stuff.

Some recent inputs: The Lazarus Project is one of my favorite television shows: smart, mind-bendy sci-fi that remembers to be fun. The British know how to make a conspiratorial tech thriller much better than Americans (see also The Capture). The first two songs from this Matchess record have been my morning soundtrack all week, and thank you to Philip Sherburne's newsletter for introducing me to her work. I'm also happy I found Adam Greenfield's dispatches again. Reading-wise, I've started Samantha Harvey's Orbital, and I'm getting the sense that not much will happen in this novel besides hanging out on a spacecraft in the most lyrical way possible, which isn't a bad way to spend some time.

It was a Sunday morning when C. told me that Kessler’s Syndrome might kill us all because sooner or later, all the space debris speeding around above our heads will start colliding, which could produce a chain reaction that mucks up the magnetosphere and we’ll get vaporized by solar wind. Or something.

A few hours later, a friend called to tell me octopuses are from outer space. He thinks they will become the dominant species after artificial intelligence determines humans are an illogical lifeform and wipes us out. This produced a delightful new euphemism for a scary future, e.g., after the technological/climate/nuclear disaster, there’ll be nothing left but Juan’s Octopus Word. It cushions the blow.

I’m so thankful for the interesting people in my life—and thank you for reading and listening. The request lines are open. (I hope you'll request something, otherwise we’ll have a subzero dub sess...

The first housecats in ancient Egypt gradually discovered they received more attention from their owners when their meows mimicked a human baby’s cry. Today, birds mimic police sirens and chainsaws, and artificial intelligence is probably harvesting these videos for b-roll footage and ambient soundscapes designed to wake us up at an optimal hour. Someday, we might no longer understand what is echoing what.

2.

When I was growing up, my mom often told me that perfectionism was my worst trait. I took this as a compliment because I was young and arrogant. Who wouldn’t want to be a perfectionist? Three decades and so many missed opportunities later, I can’t tell you how many times I look up at the ceiling—or wherever my mom’s ghost might be—to tell her she was so damned right.

3.

There’s a song called “Lali Lale”—upbeat and a little seductive, the singer’s voice autotuned for a hypnotic effect. Although she sings in a language I do not understand, the intent is clear: to speak to the limbic, to make the listener feel cool and sleek. But in the middle of a verse, she breaks into laughter. Her laugh is not calculated or cool; it’s awkward and nervous, the sound of someone breaking character. I like to imagine the moment in the studio when she glances at the faces behind the mixing board to do another take. Instead, they tell her to keep going, keep rolling. So she gets back to the beat, and now the song has become truly alive, a document of the unpredictable, an artifact of the genuinely human.

This song is the last track in tonight’s mix, and the laughter at the 28:51 mark is one of my favorite moments in the music I listened to in 2024. Messes and accidents, weird typos and blurts of laughter—these things feel more essential now that everything is increasingly filtered, auto-suggested, and optimized.

Embrace the fragment. Cultivate collisions. Bring the residue to the forefront.

And residue is how tonight’s broadcast begins: I excavated the vocal dregs from last year’s mixes to usher in one of my favorite songs, Wolfgang Voigt’s off-kilter loop of T. Rex and Roxy Music, which I like to play first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Then I’ve paired Nancy Sinatra with some bass, static, and a kick drum that I scraped out of an old file. The third track is a terribly-named song by a terribly-named band, but the music itself is an ideal way to start the year in easy mode. 

1. Love, Inc - Life’s a Gas
   Force Inc, 1996 | More
2. Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang (Midnight Radio Static Mix)
3. Japancakes - Handguns & Firearms
   Bliss Out Vol. 19: Belmondo | Darla, 2002 | More
4. Chantssss - Swan
   Shyness | Theory Therapy, 2024 | More
5. DjNiraha & Lale Pishmari - Lali Lale
   KorgMusic2024DemoEL​-​HELL​-​EΛ | Heat Crimes, 2024 | More

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Here are five joyous songs that make me smile whenever I hear them. Three of these tracks are thirty years old; the other two are pushing twenty-five—these are nostalgic songs, and I hope you’ll enjoy revisiting them. Or better yet, having a first encounter.

Mike Dunn - God Made Me Phunky
MD-Express, 1994
Possibly the most righteous loop ever made: built from a piano that burrows its way into your soul and makes a very nice home for Mike Dunn to sound like the coolest earthling to ever spend time on this planet. 

SoleTech - Sole Waves
Detrechno, 1994 | More
This track is both ridiculous and also the best-ever use of a Kraftwerk sample. In the summer of ’94, “chuck chuck” earwormed everyone in the metropolitan Detroit area and improbably became the most requested song on the radio for a few weeks, which might be the easiest way to explain to someone why Detroit is a very special place. It also prepared me for my encounters with the Electrifying Mojo, Deep Space Radio, and Basic Channel.

Detroit Grand Pubahs - If Snow Was Black
Intuit Solar, 1999
One of the most underrated songs I know, this track sounds like the steam that billows from Detroit’s streets on a subzero January night, and Paris the Black Fu’s voice will live in your head all winter if you’re lucky: If snow was black, I’d wear black shades and drive a black car. I’d smoke black cigarettes and hide in the shadows…

Quarks - I Walk (Superpitcher Schaffel Mix)
Kompakt, 2002 | More
We were in our early twenties, logging time at Other Music, Kim’s, Tonic, and the Bunker—and music-wise, Komapkt reigned supreme. We didn’t try to emulate their sound, but they reminded us that electronic music could be monumental and fun, and this is a lesson I still carry into my writing and other personal pursuits: I’d better be having a good time because I’m sure as hell not doing it for the money.

Basic Channel - Phylyps Trak II
Chain Reaction, 1994 | More
In January of ’95, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall to check out a hip-hop show I’ve long since forgotten. But I remember the militant thump thump that drew me upstairs to the dark third floor with windows that overlooked the city. I’d never seen humanity like this: club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit, all lock-stepping in a perfect grid, their heads bowed before the bassbin like an altar, which soon I learned it was.

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This seems like a good time to honor this vivid request because there’s a lot of heartbreak going around at various scales. Individual. National. Maybe even planetary. The humiliations and insults of living in an exhausted age take a toll, and I admire how our Very Kind Listener captures this sensation in the image of a heart gradually breaking beneath the weight.

Slowly, as they say. Then all at once.

There are a few ways to tackle this, radio-wise. The obvious move would be to queue up some sad-sack ballads and call it a night. But grief rolls heavy. Heartbreak is hot-blooded. Sometimes it sounds less like weeping and more like a scream. So I’ve stitched together five all-time heavyweight favorites, chosen because they sound very much involved with the human condition. When Kim Sun’s voice drops at the two-minute mark, you’ll know if this is for you. These voices have lived heavy. They understand that grief is the price of love.

Everything worthwhile rests on a knife’s edge, which brings us back to the Tannhäuser Gate, that strange zone between wakefulness and sleep, suspended between doubt and faith—and I hope this half-hour captures the bleary sensation of tuning a radio in the hour of the wolf, hoping to hear a voice that knows what it’s like. Sometimes wisdom is tonal, and sometimes it’s concrete, like when O. V. Wright sings I want to go to heaven but I’m scared to fly.

1. Kim Sun + Shin Jung Hyun - The Man Who Must Leave
   Beautiful Rivers And Mountains | 1973 | More
2. O.V. Wright - Everybody Knows
   (If It's) Only For Tonight | Back Beat Records, 1965 | More
3. Chen Mei Feng - 誰能知道我的情 (Who Can Know My Love?)
   Singapore, 1969 | More
4. Dilber Doğan – Yıkılla Köyler (Destroyed Villages)
   Yıkılada Bizim Köyler | 1988 | More
5. M83 - Farewell/Goodbye + Je Vous Hais Petites Filles
   Before the Dawn Heals Us | Mute, 2005 | More

Also includes several layers of crackle and reverb, along with echoes from Skeeter Davis, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Nancy Sinatra, The Paris Sisters, and more.

Listen below—better yet, keep it classy and download this state-of-the-art MPEG Audio Layer 3. Or here’s a joyless Spotify playlist if that’s your thing, but you won’t get any crackle or reverb or Al Green easter eggs, and you won’t hear Chen Mei Feng sing “Who Will Know My Love?”

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/the-heart-accumulates-microcracks/

My last normal flight was in 2009 from Helsinki to Istanbul on a chaotic airplane with ashtrays in the armrests. Three weeks later, I flew to Detroit because my mother was dying, and that’s when it began: the panic attacks and dread, the inability to do anything except monitor every mechanical noise and atmospheric shudder. For fifteen years, I was strangely insane, my brain intent on torturing itself rather than letting come what may. Hypervigilence is a core feature of anxiety, but there’s also ego: I alone knew my flight was uniquely doomed. The airplane required my attention to stay aloft.

I thought about this when the result of last week’s election became clear. As I stared at the reddening map of America, I wondered why I’d invested so much time monitoring the polls and listening to punditry, diligently following every gasp of two dying political parties, both driven senile by the internet. So no more news for me. From now on, I will seek a life without opinion mongers, thought leaders, professional outragers, pundits, and faith dealers.

True freedom is not thinking about the president every day.

As my government shifts from feckless to frightening, the idea of vnutrennaya emigratsia is circulating, the Russian strategy of internal exile to survive the idiocy of public life in bleak times. Liberation through rejection is a classic move, such as Voltaire’s advice to cultivate my own garden rather than wring my hands at the state of the world—or worse yet, to imagine this is noble or productive.

Better still, there’s Dada’s cognitive leap into the absurd, which set the stage for the dreamlife of Surrealism. From a stage in 1916, Hugo Ball's words echo into our time: “This humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect."

“Leave everything,” André Breton instructed a few years later. “Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow.” If logic produced catastrophic wars and rotting institutions, perhaps logic itself was the problem.

Internal exile sounds nice. It’s a trip I should have taken a while ago.

So we’re on this timeline now, and here are five ribcage-shuddering songs to greet the moment. Think of it as sage clearing or whatever prophets and healers do.

Tonight’s installment kicks off with the most badass beat I know, a beat that burns every other beat to ashes, followed by a track from Panasonic that becomes a cathartic buzzsaw. It was their final song. Then we steer into the supernatural with some Ectomorph sleaze and a low-end haunting by Demdike Stare, named for a witch whose gaze could either hex or cure, which might be another strategy for psychic liberation (see this video). Then we hit Grungerman’s “Fackeln Im Sturm”, a Gothic anthem from ’97 that translates to “torches in the storm,” and finally, we cool off with some end-of-days AM radio chatter that I recorded in the Mojave desert twenty years ago, a reminder that American paranoia is evergreen.

1. Muslimgauze - Ryoji Ikeda Remix #6
   Staalplaat, 2020 | More
2. Panasonic - Pan Finale
   Gravitoni | Blast First, 2018 | More
3. Ectomorph - Crawl of the Cthulu
   Stalker | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | More
4. Demdike Stare - Metamorphosis
   Elemental | Modern Love, 2012 | More
5. Grungerman - Fackeln Im Sturm
   Profan, 1997

Listen below or better yet, let’s make mp3s great again.

In other news, I'm sprucing up my website with some bold typography because I’m feeling punchy these days. It's still a bit of a mess, but that's okay because nothing matters or makes sense anymore except doing whatever it takes to keep our torches burning.

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

But these days, I’m only reading about crosstabs and herding. This habit has become so compulsive that I’ve needed to create a situation that physically prevents me from checking the latest election news by pairing a keyboard with a tiny screen no less than 36” away. It’s an embarrassing yet effective solution: keep the internet out of arm’s reach.

Why am I so hopelessly addicted to the latest news? Because the mind craves certainty—and this is the crux of so many of my troubles: the inability to live in the grey.

For years, casting a vote has felt like choosing between murder and suicide, and for most of this election, I was enjoying this season finale of America as bizarro entertainment. But in September, I found myself experiencing something I hadn’t felt in years: hope. I’ve never felt as connected to a candidate as I do with Kamala Harris. She seems like a genuinely happy, recognizable, consensus-driven, grey-area person operating in good faith. She seems like somebody who’s been in a supermarket before.

I don’t agree with Harris on everything, but only a child expects the world to conform to their will. Besides, policy is a speck in the rearview mirror these days. Right now, Americans must choose between living in a shared reality or the hallucinations of a vicious game show host. I don’t know what we’ll decide.

Which brings me to tonight's playlist. As we teeter on the edge of several unpleasant possible futures, I thought it might be nice to stitch together five of the most reassuring songs I know, starting with these lyrics from Union Jack’s There Will Be No Armageddon:

There will be no Armageddon. There will be no sudden ending. We will see our children grow, and theirs grow after them.

For fifty years, we have awaited the future with a mounting sense of fear. Our path to the next millennium seemed certain to be lit by the bright lights of a nuclear conflagration. But now, as we raise our arms, we see that we have almost made it to the year 2000 and beyond.

These vocals come from The Lathe of Heaven, a 1980 film adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel. Union Jack released this song thirty years ago, back when many of us had faith in technology, and it’s very 1995. It noodles around in ambient-trance mode for a while, and I clipped out the bits that haven’t aged well—but I implore you, wait until the bass kicks in at five minutes and thirty-three seconds. It’s one of my favorite moments in the world, and I'd like to have it played at my funeral.

Next up is the song I tattooed on my arm thirteen years ago: “Ladies and Gentlemen We’re Floating in Space” by Spiritualized. The tattoo has grown blurry over the years, and I’ve blurred the song tonight, fusing it with the original Elvis Presley version (which was based on a French melody from 1784!) and lacing it through the mix.

1. Union Jack - There Will Be No Armageddon
   (1995 | More)
2. Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen, We’re Floating in Space
   (1997 | More)
3. T. Rex - Cosmic Dancer
   (Electric Warrior | Reprise, 1971 | More)
4. Air - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi
   (Premiers Symptômes | Source, 1997 | More)
5. Gyeongsu & June - Lead to Curse
   (All to None | Dear Dogs, 2024 | More)

Also features The Paris Sisters, Elvis, and more. Listen below or download a state-of-the-art mp3. Or here’s a boring unmixed, unreverberated Spotify playlist. Whichever route you choose, I hope these songs help smooth out the next 90 hours or so.

Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the end of Daylight Savings Time, my favorite day of the year because it brings the night closer. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Reset the internet to 2009.

Please take moody portraits of your desk in the six o’clock dusk and send them to me.

Thank you for tuning in. The request lines are open.

She’s doing remarkable things with ink and a knife these days, and you can see some of her paintings on this brand-new website I designed + built for her. Sometimes I get to watch her work, and she moves fast and loose, belonging entirely to the moment as she swirls her ink across a massive canvas. Meanwhile, I hunch over my notebook like a troll, frowning over the placement of a comma and wondering whether I have anything to say, any words to offer, and if I do, worrying they might be misunderstood.

Is it possible to write the way she paints? Can I become less stilted on the page, maybe really let loose and get wild without writing bad poetry? Perhaps these midnight letters will degrade into abstract bursts and garbled scenes—conditions that feel like the headspace of being alive in the 2020s.

People on TV talk about how they’re going to vote for so-and-so because they seem like they’re going to win. At the superstore, a kid consoles his little sister by saying, “If you think too hard, you get scared,” which pretty much sums up the human situation.

But back to tonight’s soundtrack for C’s painting. She’s a tough customer with top-shelf taste, capable of decimating an artist’s entire discography with a single word. (Burial: “itchy”; LCD Soundsystem: “clownish”; My Bloody Valentine: “carsick”.) But I love that C. loves Cliff Martinez's film scores, which are stellar, even though he was the drummer in the worst band on planet Earth. He's also a native of Columbus, Ohio, which is our current home. Sometimes the universe aligns.

What is "taste," and where does it come from, anyway? Is it hardwired or learned? When it comes to C's taste, I'm certain of two things: a) she prefers greyscale synthesizers that tilt toward the tragic but has no patience for treacle; and b) she loves the maximalist howl of Godspeed You! Black Emporer’s “Moya,” a song, she says, “that makes you want to get on your knees and believe in something.”

So here’s an attempt to move from point A to B, and I hope you’ll find it a reliable companion for the times you'd like to catch your breath, swirl some ideas around, and maybe even pray to whatever gods or demons are helping you get through this decade.

1. Cliff Martinez & Gregory Tripi - Sister
   (Only God Forgives | Milan, 2013 | More)
2. Cliff Martinez - I Drive
   (Drive | Lakeshore Records, 2011 | More)
3. Popnoname - Fembria
   (Pop Ambient | Kompakt, 2008 | More)
4. The Black Dog - Vertical Grip on Reality
   (Music for Photographers | Dust Science, 2021 | More)
5. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Aerial Views by Helicopter
   (Interim Report, March 1979 | 2021 | More)
6. Romance - Never Will/Hymn to the Sea
   (Fade Into You | Ecstatic, 2023 | More)
7. Dedekind Cut - De-Civilization
   (Tahoe | Kranky, 2018 | More)
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Moya
   (Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada | Kranky, 1999 | More)

Also includes reverberated snippets from T. Rex, Beach House, Lee Hazlewood, Johnny Mathis, Velvet Underground, Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vinton, and Chromatics. (There are three extra songs in this mix because I owe you a few after the single-minded focus of the previous installment.)

You can listen below or better yet, download a freshly pressed mp3. If you prefer a subpar experience without any transitions, static, reverb, or fun, here's a Spotify playlist.

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

But I'm still thinking about reverb. Last night, it struck me that reverb is my Tannhäuser Gate, both there and not there, a threshold between the zones of shape and fog, definition and possibility. Sort of like my brain during the first hour of the day.

Here’s the routine: Wake up. Check the weather. Check the latest polls. Make some coffee. Check the latest polls. The other day, C. asked, “Did you see the news?” and I held my breath, bracing for scenes from another disaster, the latest inhuman act. She could tell me everyone in Nebraska disappeared last night. She could tell me anything, and I would believe it, for these are days of suspended disbelief.

I often think about Douglas Coupland’s confession that “around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.”

Coupland takes comfort in the idea that we’re in this together, that we’ve all been “neurally homogenised,” but this idea horrifies me on an elemental level, as if my soul is on the line. Sometimes it feels like an ultimatum: embrace a pixellated future without complaint or grieve for the textures of the past. Perhaps the only solution is a cognitive leap similar to how the Constructivists and Futurists plunged into the future a century ago, determined to fuse with the machine. Embrace speed. Groove on distraction. Let my thoughts get garbled and strange. Find god in the liquid crystal glow.

Until then, one of my favorite songs for concentration is Richard Hawtin & Pete Namlook’s “A Million Miles to Earth", an ambient classic that turned thirty years old this year. It’s an epic of sweeping chords with a very 1990s synthesizer pitched to a particular flavor of pre-millennium optimism—faith that technology would improve us, that history had ended, and global harmony was around the corner.

Last week, I slowed it down to sludge and tended to it while I worked on other things, occasionally adding a dash of Ronettes here, a pinch of Elvis Presley there. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred it 57% or 89% slower, so I smushed both versions together, stripped out the treacly piano bits, and installed some passages of static and reverb. Now it sounds like wave upon wave of a slowly freezing sea, and it has become a reliable companion for hour-long bouts of writing and pixel-pushing.

• Richie Hawtin & Pete Namlook - A Million Miles to Earth
  (57%—89% slower)
  (From Within | Plus 8, 1994)
• Radio static, reverb, highway traffic, and fragments of Skeeter Davis, Elvis Presley, Mojave 3, Tommy James & the Shondells, Everly Brothers, Paris Sisters, The Zombies, Righteous Brothers, Lee Hazlewood, and Patsy Cline.

Listen below, or better yet, here’s an mp3. If you’d like to hear the original version, here’s a Spotify link and a nifty video on YouTube.

If you have two more minutes to kill, please help me identify this wonderful song and/or the language it’s in.

Thank you for taking the time to listen. The request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/two-million-miles-to-earth/

Perhaps the answer is simple: echos and fog generate mystery. In 1973, the painter Gerhard Richter said, "I've never found anything lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas, you can perceive as many trees as you want."

For years, I’ve been writing a novel about a noise that belongs to either God or a demon. Along the way, I’ve become convinced the trick with storytelling is to create a situation where whatever the reader might imagine is infinitely more compelling than anything I might describe. "Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door," Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre. "When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster."

A lack of mystery might explain why today's ultra-high-definition, motion-smoothed devices evoke nausea. There's no room for the imagination. Analog media is better for hauntings: a whisper in the crackle of an old record, a face emerging from snow on the television set, a sinister voice on a reel-to-reel. Ghosts don't feel at home in mp3 files or LCD screens.

The connection between reverb and mystery is clear to me, but I’m curious why reverb sounds like memory. There's a direct link in my brain between a voice drenched in echo and, say, a rainy night seven years ago at a dim sum joint that felt as if it'd been concocted in a dream: diner chrome and pleather mixed with Chinese lanterns while a 1970s sitcom played on a Zenith over the bar. Sure, the past tends to blur, but my vision of the future isn't exactly crisp, especially when I can’t stop watching the news these days. This season finale of America is freakier than anything I might imagine.

But here are five early autumn classics that always mellow me out.

1. Gas - Pop 02
   Pop | Kompakt, 2000 | More
2. Aphex Twin - #19
   Selected Ambient Works Volume II | Warp, 1994 | More
3. Midwife - Forever
   Prayer Hands | Antiquated Future, 2018 | More
4. Sonic Youth - Superstar
   If I Were a Carpenter | A&M, 1994 | More
5. Seefeel - Filter Dub
   Quique | Too Pure, 1993 | More

And yes, this mix is soaked in reverb, much of which is the residue that's been accumulating from prior episodes—plus the requested Linda Rondstadt and a dash of Lee Hazlewood. Listen below, or get your freshly-mixed mp3 here. (Or a Spotify playlist if you're square.)

Thank you for listening. And reading. The request lines are always open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/five-early-autumn-classics/

When I got sober eleven years ago, they told me to take it a day at a time, although this cliché comes with a silent, contradictory wish: a day at a time so I will never drink again and wreck my only life. I’ve also learned the hard way that the only way to avoid a panic attack is to not worry about having a panic attack. And if I do not want to squander this life as a cheap cynic or an insufferable zealot, doubt and faith must exist in equal measure. 

These paradoxes can probably be unwound all the way back to the Buddha’s claim that “non-practice is my practice, the attainment of non-attainment.” But I like to think of the rare zone between two opposing conditions as the Tannhäuser Gate.

Enough philosophy. Onwards to tonight’s maximum-strength Blade Running mix. It opens with a sequence of neon-soaked synthesizers, then we’ll take a breather before ramping up to an end-of-days song that sounds like klieg lights sweeping across a fiery sky. As usual, this mix comes packaged with a heavy dose of reverb and some fractured ballads.

1. Blanck Mass - Chernobyl
   Blanck Mass • Rock Action Records, 2011 • More
2. Alessandro Cortini - Gira
   Forse • Important Music, 2013 • More
3. M83 - On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain
   Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • More
4. Blade Runner interlude
5. Kristoffer Lo - Front Row Gallows View
   The Black Meat • Propellor Recordings, 2016 • More
6. Bremen - Entering Phase Two
   Bremen • Blackest Ever Black, 2014 • More

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

The sound of distant traffic shushing through late-night rain might be one of the most relaxing sounds I know. The same goes for a drowsy radio talking about light drizzle at the airport. But my favorite soundtrack for contemplation is slow-motion techno.

Over the years, slowing down my favorite songs has become a spiritual practice, and I’ve come here tonight to preach the poetics of pitched-down electronics. It’s a rebellion against time, a way to slow down the clock and peek into its gears. There is fascinating information in the heartbeat of a half-speed machine: gunk and grain, the unexpected pleasure of negative space. When I die, I’d like to spend eternity nestled in the bass of Pole’s "Modul". Until then, the best I can do is slow it down and make it last a little longer. And so this episode of Midnight Radio is devoted to the glory of slow-motion machinery, featuring five all-time favorites from the 1990s stretched out until they’re nice and roomy. For me, hearing the title track from Plastikman’s landmark Consumed at half-speed feels like a revelation.

Ventriloquism began as a religious practice. The word comes from Latin for “speak from the stomach”: venter (belly) and loqui (speak). The ancients believed the sounds produced by the belly belonged to the dead, and the ventriloquist would interpret these growls and grumbles because people thought they told the future. So who’s to say what’s spiritual today?

Tonight's mix is below, or you can download it here. It's doused in plenty of reverb and sprinkled with some doo-wop and torch songs by Nancy Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Skeeter Davis, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. (Here's a Spotify playlist if you'd like to hear the original songs at their normal speed.)

1. Richie Hawtin - 07 13-00 (54% slower)
   Concept 1 | 1996 | More
2. Pole - Modul (56% slower)
   1 | Matador, 1998 | More
3. Autechre - Yulquen (48% slower)
   Amber | Warp, 1994 | More
4. Basic Channel - Radiance II (44% slower)
   Radiance | Basic Channel, 1994 | More
5. Plastikman - Consumed (50% slower)
   Consumed | Minus, 1998 | More

These five songs rewired my brain when I first heard them 25 years ago, back when I had faith in the Information Superhighway and the new millennium. What will my nostalgia look like 25 years from now? I try to imagine myself as an old man, telling the kids about the good old days when every street corner had a Chase bank and a CVS, how we carried pieces of glass in our pockets that made us cranky. But in the meantime, let’s install roadside plaques across the nation that describe its hauntings and spiritual visions. Put a sign in front of a grain silo that says it’s a sculpture by a conceptual artist named Olive Garden. Return some myth to this fallen world.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Panic is an attack on reason. The world sparkles like it might evaporate. Arms go swimmy. The body feels like it’s been turned inside out, and the heart jackhammers against bone, trying to escape this mess. It’s a hell of a thing to experience at eighty miles per hour. Under these conditions, it's impossible to practice the tools I've learned for surviving the 21st century: breathe through the nose, tune into the moment, and remember that I belong to the deathless, that I'm a little beacon of joy beyond body and form. No, the lizard brain takes control: I scream. I hyperventilate. I swerve toward the nearest exit.

Why must the mind torture itself? They say a panic attack is residue from our Stone Age brains, a glitch in the wiring, although I fail to see how such a reaction would save me from a tiger. Or maybe panic disorder is a Jungian arrow pointing to an unsettled problem, and my anima needs alignment. But my hunch is that it’s genetic. My mother suffered terribly from agoraphobia. She avoided the highway, even as a passenger, and now this is happening to me. My inheritance.

So I’m giving psychology a shot, and it was long overdue. Gutting it out wasn’t getting me very far. My therapist taught me how to give myself a panic attack in twenty seconds flat, which is a fun party trick. He wants me to do this five times per day, and I do. At night, I drive the Midwestern highways, trying to get my interstate mojo back. Each day, I feel a bit better, even though the world feels a little more insane.

Perhaps my highway panic reflects a loss of faith in the human project. Because you have to kid yourself a little when you get on the freeway, not think about it too hard—all those speeding vehicles with distracted, angry, and anxious creatures at the wheel. You're relying upon blind faith they won’t hammer their brakes or punch the gas. And there might be a lesson here.

But who are these insomniacs and mutants who ride the suburban highways after midnight? I try to imagine their lives: the blonde in a Honda blowing kisses to herself in the rearview, the exhausted man with purple skin in a rusty pickup, the kid with wraparound shades on my bumper, teeth flashing like he wants to gnaw it. It’s enough to rattle the best of us, which brings us to tonight’s broadcast: five reassuring songs for midnight driving—sleek and glossy, something that sounds like the sight of neon washing across your hood.

The other day, my friend M. told me I might enjoy a band called the Glass Beams. Fortunately, I misheard their name, and that’s how I discovered my new favorite band, the Glass Beads: slick Ukrainian cold wave that kicks off tonight’s mix, followed by Tropic of Cancer’s heavenly reverb, then Robert Görl’s ‘Mit Dir,’ which might be the most perfect song ever made on this planet. Forty-one years later, it still sounds like the future. Then we have a deep cut from the high priests of night driving, Chromatics, before concluding with a glorious detour through Japan circa 1985. While stitching this mixtape together, I discovered C. has very strong opinions about her night driving soundtrack, and I thank her for making it better.

1. Glass Beads - City of Anger
   Therapy | Fabrika Records, 2020 | More
2. Tropic of Cancer - Court of Devotion
   Restless Idylls | Blackest Ever Black, 2013 | More
3. Robert Görl - Mit Dir
   Mute, 1983 | More
4. Chromatics - Lady Night Drive
   Cherry | Italians Do It Better, 2018 | More
5. Tomo Akikawabaya - A Dream of No Pillow
   The Invitation of The Dead | Minimal Wave, 1985 | More

Also includes reverberations of some sad-sack country music via Jack Greene and Hank Williams, a few grainy loops, and some paranoid ramblings I recorded from AM radio. You can download it here or listen below. If you prefer Spotify, here's a playlist, although you won't get any reverb or radio chatter.

Welcome to the second installment of Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs delivered 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month. I’m not sure who coined the term “death prom,” but it is a crucial sound in my life. The first and only mention of it I’ve found comes from Joe Colly’s 2011 review of Alex Zhang Hungtai’s important work as Dirty Beaches, which transforms mid-century Americana into spectral karaoke.

Death Prom should be a proper genre. But it’s more than a catchall for anything that evokes a saccharine 1950s ballad or girl bands named after jewels, their voices reverberated and ghostly. Here are my guidelines:

• Time is a factor. Listening to Roy Orbison in 1961 is not Death Prom, but hearing it bleed through the walls of a cheap motel in 2024 is very Death Prom.
• The urtext for Death Prom is Suicide’s "Surrender", a 1988 confection that injects a 1950s slow dance with dread.
• A doo-wop ballad from a long-dead one-hit wonder fighting its way through the radio static is the ultimate Death Prom sound.

Death Prom makes you feel a little seductive, perhaps leaning against a wall outside the party while you take a cinematic drag from a cigarette. But Death Prom also contains grief, bringing to mind Roland Barthes’s argument that every photograph is inherently morbid because it captures a moment lost to time. And Death Prom sounds like a faded photograph: a romanticized snapshot of youthful longing that exists only in hindsight. Most of all, Death Prom is about reverb; it's the sound of elegant decay and vapor trails.

It’s tempting to classify Death Prom as nostalgia, but I think its trajectory is forward-facing because it carries the dreams of the past into the present. It is a haunting.

And it's a fitting soundtrack for this unsettled season, in which everything seems to be happening at once yet also feels weirdly static. In a similar vein, I’m currently reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a sprawling, somewhat fractured novel in which the same airplane with the same passengers lands twice. This line resonated: “But when the remote control batteries are dead, we just keep pushing harder. It’s only human.”

Sadly, we're making more daylight every year because we broke the weather, but I hope tonight’s broadcast provides a moment of reprieve from this overheated summer. After a brief station identification featuring the Electrifying Mojo, we'll move through five essential ingredients of my Death Prom canon, including a pair of ballads from Detroit and Indonesia that seem to exist without any frame of reference or biographical information. Which is very Death Prom.

1. Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best
   Badlands | Zoo, 2011 | More
2. The Larados - Now the Parting Begins
   Detroit, 1957
3. Annie Rae - Bang Bung Ranggaek
   Indonesia, 1970
4. Suicide - Surrender
   NYC | Chapter 22, 1987 | More
5. Richard Swift - Would You?
   Ground Trouble Jaw | Secretly Canadian, 2008 | More

Also contains fragments from Skeeter Davis, The Teddybears, The Paris Sisters, The Righteous Brothers, Bobby Vinton, The Moody Blues, and Elvis Presley.

The mixtape is below, or you can download it here. If you prefer Big Streaming, here’s a Spotify playlist, but it doesn't contain half as much reverb or whispering at the edges or an earworm from Annie Rae.

Thank you for reading. And listening.

Welcome to Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs + a brief ramble delivered 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month. Our debut broadcast begins with a stone summertime classic and some underrated Japanese dream pop, followed by a humid laser workout, a touch of Suicide, a river of Michigan space rock, and mountains of glorious reverb.

Now, about that summertime classic: there are nights when I listen to “Jesus Children of America” for hours, getting lost in its plush bassline before Stevie Wonder delivers a righteous inventory of America’s soul. He challenges those who claim religion as faith: “Tell me, holy roller, are you standing for everything you talk about?” He captures the hell of addiction: “Are you happy when you stick a needle in your vein? Tell the truth now.” And he sings like the world’s about to come undone at any moment: “You’d better tell your story fast.”

Three days after the song was released, Wonder was asleep in the passenger seat after a show in South Carolina when a truck loaded with timber hit its brakes. A log smashed through the windshield, and Wonder spent four days in a coma. “We brought one of his instruments—I think it was the Clavinet—to the hospital,” said a friend. "For a while, Stevie just looked at it. You could see he was afraid to touch it because he didn’t know if he still had it in him. He didn’t know if he could still play. And then, when he finally did . . . man, you could just see the happiness spreading all over him. I’ll never forget that."

That was fifty years ago. Wonder lost his sense of smell, but he found God. “Everything is the way it is supposed to be," he said. "The accident, losing the sense of smell — everything that has ever happened to me is the way it is supposed to have been. I wrote ‘Higher Ground’ before the accident. Something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and get myself together.”

I’m still getting myself together. It’s a never-ending project. Last year, I made an album to accompany my bouts of late-night writing. I’m doing my best to be less self-righteous. And I moved from Vegas to Ohio.

Now for tonight's broadcast: after a brief station identification, we'll hear the Electrifying Mojo tell us to flash our headlights because he's our spirit animal for this endeavor, then we'll drop into a loop or two before moving through five songs that work best during a heatwave:

1. Stevie Wonder - Jesus Children of America
   Innervisions | Tamla, 1973 | More
2. Sugar Plant - Rise
   Happy | 7th Heaven, 1998 | More
3. Actress - Hubble
   Thriller, 2009 | More
4. Suicide - Cheree (Remix)
   Suicide | Bronze Records, 1978 | More
5. Füxa - Karmaloop
   Accretion | Mind Expansion, 1998 | More

The mix is below. If you prefer Big Streaming, here’s a Spotify playlist, although it’s not nearly as interesting as the static and reverb of the proper midnight broadcast, which also includes some advice at the nineteen-minute mark for how to relax circa 1963.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/heatwave/