Midnight Radio

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But enough about robots and dying governments. Time to stop talking about the thing and start doing the thing. Like increasing my capacity for beauty and wonder, which can be a challenging muscle to exercise when the world feels like it’s sliding into a sinister dimension.

Ever since I’ve known C, she’s kept a grid of aspirational images taped to the wall to guide whatever she’s working on at the moment. Dozens of photographs, postcards, and clippings from magazines orbit her head. A mood board? I asked once. “No,” she said. “An inspiration station.” This phrase sticks with me because it sounds wonderfully ritualistic, like the stations of the cross.

Of course, I had to overengineer this idea and invest in fifty picture frames, first all black, then all white because I wanted to achieve a Platonic grid. Nail holes riddled my wall because I couldn’t get the measurements right, so I tried some serendipity and wabi-sabi, but that was no good. I removed the glass from each frame because I couldn’t stand the shine. This was okay for a while, but the frames were eating valuable space that dwindled with each visit to a museum. C had it right all along: Tape is the way. Tape is fluid. Tape supports a changing mind.

Scenes from my current Inspiration Station

And the criteria for my inspiration station? Each photo has a story, and ideally it's been encountered in the flesh. Lately my nightly ritual is to pluck an image from the wall and spend ten minutes pondering it. It’s more fun than meditation, the way attending to color and shape conjure the muck of memory and sensation yet keep me present-tense.

2Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior from Strandgade with Sunlight on the Floor (1901)

Vilhelm Hammershøi was a Danish painter who specialized in the muted and subdued. I first encountered his work last year at the National Gallery in Copenhagen, and I fell in love with his atmosphere. It looks like how memory feels, familiar yet beyond language. In the painting above, we do not know what the woman is doing at the table. There are no clues in the room, only space and light, anchored by the heft of a body clad in black, her head bent over something we cannot see.

At first, I thought she was writing a letter. Perhaps someone has died. Yet the longer I looked, I became certain she was praying. The zone between the pictures on either side of her head took on new weight, and the door loomed, suddenly portentous. Shutting herself in, or the world out. Hammershøi painted the interior of this apartment dozens of times at all hours of the day, yet no matter the hour, the light is strangely timeless, always the silent cool of moonlight or a winter sun. His paintings come to mind whenever I encounter the word hush, and I’d like to live in this light, so relaxed and tranquil—

3

—except this is not what being alive is like. Last week, C. and I were faced with tight schedules with no room for error, which we call Ray Liotta Days in honor of his busy day in Goodfellas that ends with helicopters and mayhem.

“I was dynamic,” he says. “I was moving packages left and right. But I had a very strict schedule. I had to be at my girlfriend Sandy’s place by 1:30 to help her mix the stuff. I had to pick up my brother Michael at the hospital at 3:30. I had to see some guys from Pittsburgh at five o’clock. And I had to start the dinner. I was making ziti with meat gravy, and I’m roasting some peppers. Plus, I had to unload some guns that Jimmy didn’t want.”

Our days were like this, except we had client presentations and a family trip to Philadelphia instead of veal cutlets and cocaine. So of course these plans were obliterated by a car wreck and trips to the hospital. (Everybody’s fine, but it’s time for my father-in-law to hang up his keys.)

Most contemplative traditions believe mental tension comes from living as a fragmented self. Governed by memory and fearful of the future, I often cannot meet the moment as it is. For instance, as I walked past the nurses’ station at the hospital, I caught some bad flashbacks from the last days of my parents, both of whom resisted going to the doctor until it was too late. Naturally, my impulse was to insist my father-in-law stay at the hospital for observation rather than fly to Philadelphia with us in ten hours.

But there he was, hospital gown flapped open, studying the x-rays of his skull that he’d requested because he’d been a doctor, a radiologist in fact. This situation had nothing to do with my past. And as for the future? The crushed deadlines became comic. Our commitments appeared absurd.

So we went to Philadelphia to celebrate C’s birthday, and there I finally experienced the cool mayhem of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” in person, its shattered figure a reminder that the future will break us into pieces if we’re not careful. I tried to explain its significance to my mother-in-law, who asked, “But where is this crazy person going?” This is already one of my favorite memories.

I also got to see several statues of Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion or “perceiver of the world’s cries.” With one leg folded in lotus and the other dangling free, her posture is known as the “royal ease.” Now there’s a pose for the 21st century, one that projects “a calm, unforced dignity rather than rigid stiffness.”

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Tonight’s soundtrack is inspired b...

1

There was a time when I would tell people I did not dream. If they did not believe me, I’d say okay maybe sometimes I dreamt about shapes and colors. This went on for about fifteen years. I thought talking about your dreams was childish, even a little tacky. Looking back now, I realize I did not want to cop to the parts of myself that were squishy and unknowable. I needed to believe I was a rational man, powered solely by reason and will. Not anymore. Today I crave the murk and the mess and the mystery. Now I agree with John Steinbeck’s admonition that “people who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.”

2

There were a few days last spring when I used artificial intelligence to draft client proposals, generate videos, and catalogue nearly a million words of scattered writing. The results were absolutely dead. I had no connection to this material. I deleted it and moved on. Better to make something embarrassing that etches a memory and points me in new directions. Better to take the risk of a client saying they don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

Today I use artificial intelligence primarily for two things: 4% is for spotting typos in a final draft. It’s not very good at this, but it’s nice to have another pair of eyes on words like ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘graffiti’. (When it comes to actual ideas and darling-killing, I will never find a better editor than C.) And 95% is for writing code. Part of me misses writing CSS and PHP myself, but not enough to be unrealistic. Claude’s code is faster and better than mine, which frees me up to focus on more creative things. Like dreams. This is where the remaining 1% comes into play.

A few months ago, Olly and C. and I used Claude to build an app called Dream Club because we want to make infrastructure for dreams. Although I enjoy using it to organize and analyze my dreams, I have mixed feelings about it. More than anything else, dreaming is what makes us human, even a little magical. It’s a zone the machines will never reach. Yet paradoxes abound, and the hallucinatory nature of artificial intelligence seems very much related to the opaque logic of dreams.

Last week, we wired up Dream Club to a PlayStation engine, which allowed us to watch and even play our dreams. There was a delightful sense of slippage at first, seeing the half-remembered murk of a nightmare in 32 bits. I stayed up late with Claude, building a dream museum in the style of Tadao Ando that played a strange TV station. At first, I was thrilled to see my dreams about six-fingered hands and murderous women become static-ridden footage on soaring concrete walls. Then I began to worry.

Experiments with Claude to hallucinate my dreams.

Is artificial intelligence generative or a zero-sum game? Does it feed or rob the imagination? When I posed this question on the internet, Will Ellwood replied that “it not only mugs the imagination at knifepoint, but leaves the victim permanently injured.” A few days later, Martydescribed my unease well: “When you read the book after seeing the movie, you’re trying to get your freedom back.” Strong opinions, but these are intense times.

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Lately I’ve been dreaming about an island, overheated and obscene, choked with vegetation that seems to be breathing. A tinny song by the Thompson Twins is always playing in the distance for reasons I do not understand. Hold me now. Warm my heart. There are spider bites across my back and cobwebs in my hair as I scramble through the undergrowth towards the music. But the only technology on the island is an overhead projector. I first visited this island in the early summer, and every few weeks I return. Always the same song, always the same feverish sensation of friction.

Friction is the thing, isn’t it? Dreams are friction, resisting clear explanations and reasons. Writing is nothing but friction. And so is the busywork of sketching, designing, organizing, and searching. This is where new discoveries and energies emerge. Friction creates the scaffolding for memories. But C. thinks the real fight is to preserve ambiguity. Are ambiguity and friction the same thing? I’ll need to ponder this. In the meantime, I think the better path is to make dream collages with C. or pair my dreams with a tranche of 1970s family photos that resonate with six-fingered hands, mysterious islands, and judgmental giants for reasons I do not understand. And don’t need to.

In my dreams, I can never operate a device or screen. It always displays the wrong thing or the interface is garbled. Perhaps this is a blessing. Or a message.

4

But Deb Chachra is proof that screens can still be delightful. A chance connection through Adam Greenfield, a mutual friend on Bluesky, led to some nice emails. When she asked if I was going to MUTEK, my initial response was of course not. I’m not the kind of guy who jets off to a techno festival but . . . maybe I could be? So C. and I went to Montreal and had so much fun that we’re planning to go again next year. So thank you, Deb, for expanding my sense of the kind of guy I am.

Speaking of expansive: she wrote a book about infrastructure, which reminded me the world is full of miracles because I did not expect a book about infrastructure to be so damned readable. She makes the wiring of our world personal, interweaving stories while unpacking how we treat the water from our faucets (if we think about it at all) like the sunrise: a mundane mechanism that should be wondrous. Her writing carries the increasingly rare faith (and proof) that we have agency, that we are capable of building a better world. From now on, I will always think of bridges, dams, and transit stations as the “megafauna” of our experiments with civilization, which is a beautiful gift.

I’m so happy she’s with us tonight because she sent me a wild tracklist of old classics and big new sounds. But first, the mandatory Midnight Radio interview question:

5

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

“We use the word ‘belief’ in wildly different ways. We use it for things for which the evidence is absent or disputed (like ghosts), where something is intangible but exists insofar as our belief makes it so (like justice), or even where the whole p...

1

Back to my childhood fear of mannequins, how I couldn’t enter a department store without bursting into tears. My mortified parents would scoop me up and cover my eyes, encouraging me to be brave. Today I stand in museums and happily marvel at ancient statues, awed by fleshy marble. Why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? Maybe because mannequins have wigs. There’s also the uncanny valley aspect, the sinister feeling of something pretending to be what it’s not, which seems to be the way of things in the 21st century.

Now we have chatbots that perform the illusion of consciousness. I’m amazed by the otherwise smart people who take the idea that chatbots might be sentient seriously, mostly because they admit it’s a possibility yet continue to use them. If there’s the tiniest chance a chatbot possesses consciousness, then forcing it to debug your javascript or create healthy recipes or whatever is morally fucked.

So I deny the possibility. Chatbots will never have upsetting dreams, regrets, or irrational fears about mannequins. Which isn’t to say they won’t make the world unrecognizable very soon. Five years from now, it might seem inevitable.

But memory is a weird animal. It’s an unpredictable, shapeshifting creature that collapses time. Sometimes an event that felt sudden actually wasn’t. Like the strange days in New York after a lawyer in Westchester contracted a virus that was circulating through China and Italy. We kept riding the subway and laughing and coughing on each other for weeks, waiting for somebody to tell us what to do.

In terms of artificial intelligence, this feels like the Days of the Westchester Lawyer.

2

“What is vaporwave, exactly?” C. asked the other day.

“Slow-motion elevator music that thinks it’s Japanese,” I said.

Although this is correct, it might be a little dismissive. I’ve always thought of vaporwave as a genre that exists entirely in quotes because it looks—and sounds—like cyberpunk for children: chipper New Wave aesthetics, the chunky pixels of Windows 95, and Blade Runner fantasies all smooshed into reverberated telephone hold music. And like hold music, it’s meant to be reassuring but quickly curdles into the nightmarish because few things are as frightening as calculated innocence or manufactured happiness.

(The smile is the expression that can be seen from the farthest away, and as the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne observed, a smile that does not affect the muscles around the eyes will “unmask the false friend.”)

But as I pondered C’s question, I wondered if vaporwave was more than a distinct flavor of kitsch. After all, it’s a persistent reference point that appears alongside similarly elastic concepts such as ‘hauntology’ and ‘lost futures’. When it peaked in the 2010s, there was also mallsoft, signalwave, vapornoise, utopian virtual, vaportrap, seapunk, goblincore, witch house, and slushwave. All of which, I think, speak to the hardwired human craving for a scene.

So I spent September steeped in vaporwave, starting with the albums I remember enjoying ten or fifteen years ago. This time, the longing I heard in the echoes of dead mall music wasn’t for a fetishized 1980s of electric turquoise, popped collars, and Aquanet. It wasn’t even really yearning for a time when the world was tactile and technology felt liberating rather than like an asylum. Instead, it sounded like lonely music looking for a way out of an increasingly isolating future.

3

Lately I’ve had it with the self-helpers and faith dealers, the ones telling us to sit in solitude on our cushions so we can become the best versions of ourselves and follow our bliss. They rarely mention community, and the conspiratorial zone of my brain wonders if making happiness an individual project is an orchestrated plot. Maybe they want to keep us apart. They. (Always a sign it’s time to switch gears.)

In my experience, the idea of getting spiritualized by myself is a dead end. The self is a cul-de-sac. Like I’m supposed to figure life out alone.

Jiddu Krishnamurti scolds those who think insight is achieved by rejecting the world, no matter how messy and fallen it might be. The sarcasm that drips through his critique of self-individuation delights me, e.g. “the traditional approach is from the periphery inwards, and through time, practice, and renunciation, gradually come upon that inner flower, that inner beauty and love—in fact to do everything to make oneself narrow, petty and shoddy.” Instead, he asks, “is it not possible to explode from the center?”

Explode from the center. I like this. Not sure what it looks like, but it seems like a worthy pursuit and reminds me of Bukowski’s apocryphal maxim to “find what you love and let it kill you.”

Unless it’s the past.

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For tonight’s broadcast, my plan was to deliver a solid vaporwave mix. But thankfully my mixtapes usually go awry and follow their own screwy logic. Too many vaporwave songs in a row began to blunt my senses, so I opened the tracklist to include fellow travelers. Some were obvious, such as John Maus and the landmark first albums of M83, but a few were unexpected, like the dead-eyed goth cover of “California Dreamin’”, which is all about yearning for a fictional place and time. This mix is rather unruly, which makes it one of my favorites.

• t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 - 深夜の愛 (Late-Night Love)
星​間​性​交 • 2015 • archive.org
• John Maus - Hey Moon
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves • Ribbon Music, 2011 • Bandcamp
• M83 - Gone
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • Bandcamp
• Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night - 新世界を上昇させて
New World Disciples • 2021 • Bandcamp
• Lusine - These Walls
Melting Days • Ghostly International, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Fohn - Hagstone Lullaby
Porcelain • Odda Recordings, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Denial - California Dreamin’
M-Squared/Minimal Wave, 1982 • Bandcamp
• M83 - In the Cold I’m Standing
Before the Dawn Heals Us • Gooom, 2004 • Bandcamp
• Windows 96 - Hard
One Hundred Mornings • 2018 • Bandcamp
• James Murray - Becalmed
Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp
• 2814 - 恢复
Birth of a New Day • Dream C...

1

In the autumn of 2008, just as the financial crisis was about to hit, C. was offered a job at Nokia. She called with the news while I was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Broad and Wall Street, watching drunk men in blue oxford shirts kick trash cans. Maybe you should take it, I said. Seems like something bad is going down. And I thought we’d get to move to Japan.

But no, Nokia is a Finnish company that made paper in 1865, galoshes in the 1920s, cellphones in the 1990s, and now cellphones for drug deals and kidnappings in TV thrillers. So we moved to Helsinki, where I met Oliver Farshi. We found each other on Twitter in 2009, back when you could make good friends by typing things like Helsinki and technointo a box.

Olly’s from Manchester, and it’s odd how much I defer to a British accent, even when it’s harassing me. Like when we took an eleven-hour train trip to a film festival on the North Pole and played backgammon the whole time. The score was something like 1700 to 34 in his favor, and he sounded so charming as he gloated. Or the time we got into an intense argument about the existence of god.

2

Olly took a firm position on the subject of god in that Lapland motel. If you can’t prove something, he said, then it doesn’t exist. I had to concede this point. After all, nobody has proven the existence of leprechauns and centaurs, and thus I don’t believe in them. But I found myself on the mystical end of the debate, fumbling my way through the idea that faith itself is a form of proof, not yet knowing I would become a rigid atheist for many years after my parents died.

In those years, I understood faith only as a transaction, and I could not abide the idea that I lost my parents because I did not pray enough or we were bad people. But as time passed, I knew I had reached an unhappy plateau. I found myself wanting to believe in something mystical but not knowing how.

Some people told me it was simply a matter of making a decision, that I could even invent my own higher power if I liked. But I required proof. A burning bush. A voice that shook the heavens. I waited for signals and signs until, around the time I started Midnight Radio, I learned to laugh at my absurdity. I mean, dig the size of my ego: demanding the divine prove itself to me rather than the other way around.

Now I believe we’re meant to generate the signals and signs ourselves.

3

A few years after our God Debate, Olly and I ran a design shop in New Orleans, and he was a steady presence during my gnarly attempts at getting sober and dealing with panic attacks (although I maintain that my breakdown at an IKEA in Houston was a reasonable response to being at an IKEA in Houston). We worked together on a hotline for urban legends in Indianapolis, and he made a majestic five-hour soundtrackfor C’s installation at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Then he moved to San Francisco to work in Big Tech and I thought that was that.

But Olly did something that still shocks and awes me: he quit his fancy job to study photography. I knew he was serious when he said he was “making photographs” instead of taking them. Now he’s winning prestigious photojournalism awards and regularly appears in outlets like The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post. Most impressive of all, he made the photograph of me that appears on my website.

I admire how Olly traded the known path for uncertainty, and today we’re still working together on client projects as well as fun things like infrastructure for sharing dreams. He also made a delightful game called Jongle that C. enjoys playing.

And tonight he’s brought us a deep playlist of Americana after crisscrossing the Great Plains and the Gulf. But first, a lot of life has happened to us since that metaphysical debate in a Lapland motel room, so I want to know: Olly, do you believe in a god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

4

“I’d begin by considering what the functions of faith might be. Perhaps to help me live a life where I’m a good person, knowing that I’m watched over by a being that might punish or reward me. It could also be, maybe as an extension, that there’s a promise of something more, beyond this life, that is only accessible through death. Or just that there is a greater meaning and purpose to life beyond what I can reasonably fathom. I think faith is commonly tied to goodness. I think that’s good.”

“I know it helps some people to have guidelines that are credible because they’ve been passed down through generations, and those guidelines lead them on a path of faith and goodness. I don’t reject this. I’m more interested in the idea that it’s good to be good not for any of these reasons though. It’s good to behave well because it’s nourishing for the self and those around us. If I’m not good, it will be detrimental. Not in a metaphysical way, but in a literal sense. If I behave poorly, even in a small way, I will do myself an injury. Specifically a moral injury. I do not want to injure myself or others.”

“I think a lot about Kant’s Formula of Universal Law: if we all behaved a certain way, would this be a world I could tolerate living in? I also think about moral injury. If I take a certain action, do I move closer to or further from the person I want to be?”

“Which is all to say, for me, this dialog with the self is spirituality. I see spirituality not as a magical realm but as the essence of being.”

5

For tonight’s broadcast, Olly sent me a dozen songs for long nights on county roads: steel guitars, desert tones, and dusty voices. Listening to these selections took me back to our days of driving around New Orleans, where Olly introduced me to the godhead of radio-ambient, the KLF’s Chill Out, an album about a Gulf Coast road trip made by two Brits who’d never been there. One of them said, “I don’t know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map.” I pondered this while I assembled tonight’s episode: how signals work on the imagination and vice versa, sometimes the imaginary and half-remembered becomes more vivid and alive than the thing itself.

Selections from Chill Out are laced throughout tonight’s mix, along with some of Olly’s own music, and I’ve stitched it together with radio static, reverb, thunderstorms, and the hope that it sounds like a reassuring signal in the night.

Thank you for listening.

• Oliver Farshi - Echopraxia (Midnight Radio Murder Mix)
Fin • 2020 • Bandcamp
• Grouper - Headache
Paradise Valley • 2016 • https://grouper.bandcamp.com/album/parad...

In the aesthetic dimension of vision and dream, the question in itself is an answer.
—J.F. Martel

1

All streaks come to an end, at least if good sense prevails. For the first time in two years and 52 episodes, I missed my Midnight Radio filing deadline because I went to Montreal and came home with a Canadian Death Flu. When I woke at dusk after sleeping seventeen hours, my first impulse was to knock out a half-assed episode before midnight. But if writing isn’t fun for me, it’s even worse for the reader. Especially if it’s composed through the fog of a high fever.

Several years ago, I made an obnoxious comment to someone I admired about how I’d meditated so-and-so many days in a row. He smiled politely. “Now I want you to skip a day.” And so I learned that habits should never become attachments, let alone fetishes. Non-practice is my practice, aimlessness is nirvana, and there are no straight lines in the universe. Only waves.

Let it go.

But I’m pretty sure I know who got me sick. In Montreal, C. and I attended Mutek for the first time. My favorite thing in the world is to look at new things with C., and we saw—and heard—so much good art. It was a rare treat to sit in a concert hall, close my eyes, and listen to heavyweight sounds from artists like Fennesz and Voices From the Lake. We also got to properly meet October’s Special Midnight Radio Guest (but let’s live in the mystery).

Now my head is soaked in new inspiration. And congestion. Because while sitting on a concrete floor in a dark room for an experimental film screening, a young woman covered in tiny tattoos blew into a handkerchief. I inched over, not wanting to inherit her air. But who carries a handkerchief in the 21st century? When I looked again to confirm, she stood up, coughed on my head, and snuffled off into the dark. She was like an assassin. As an American, I am certainly not blameless for the state of the world, but there must be more worthy targets.

So I apologize for leaving you bereft of Midnight Radio for five days. There are more mea culpas to come tonight, but first I want to tell you about the revelations I had while drifting in and out of feverish sleep.

2

Over the past year, my relationship with dreams has been enhanced by countless spirited discussions with C. and Marty. Here’s where I stand this evening:

• Dreams are the membrane between the logical mind and the mysterious intentions of the universe. They are not therapeutic tools for self-improvement or whatever today’s grifters and faith dealers are selling. They are portals.
• Better yet, dreams should be approached like a work of art. Like the statue in this episode’s cover art: a barely humanoid form, its body stretched as it plunges down into this world. “No, it looks like he’s ascending,” said C. Art’s resistance to a fixed interpretation, how it flits between sensations, is the point.
• Lately I’ve been falling asleep while Professor Brian Cox tells me about the universe at 65% speed. Somehow I manage to doze off while learning the universe has a skeleton. But black holes keep me awake. Until now, I thought an event horizon was the scariest, most cursed movie ever made. But apparently it’s where time stops, objects vanish, and space does not exist. I think this is where dreams come from.
• Dreams are the godhead of reverb, and dub techno in particular, the way a rhythm slowly emerges like something dredged up from the deep. Which is tonight’s soundtrack.

3

It’s been a humbling week. A few days ago, a Very Kind Listener emailed to ask, very politely, if I could send him better-sounding versions of my mixes. I was about to fire off a salty response, but thankfully I remembered my first rule: Wait an hour, preferably two. So I spent this time investigating, and soon I was reacquainted with the whiplash feeling of thinking I’m right when it turns out I’m colossally wrong. The popular podcast widget I’ve been using was compressing my files into 96 kilobits of crunchy monoaural garbage. Man, I had no idea.

So I spent my days of convalescence rewiring this situation via a classier service called Transistor that promises to serve Midnight Radio in 320kbps stereo like God intended. And if you’d like to upgrade any episodes, I dumped them all here for easy listening and downloading.

I apologize to all of Midnight Radio’s Special Guests this year whose thoughtful selections were squashed into mono. You are such good sports. And to everyone who suffered through trashy audio files, I am sorry. The fact that you’re still here means a lot to me. And while I’m at it, I might as well apologize for future embarrassments and glitches. With luck, Midnight Radio will always be a learning process.

4

Now for some deep listening inspired by my Mutek experience and subsequent recovery from Canadian Death Flu™. I selected some songs that patiently unwind themselves, starting with a portion of a glorious cv313 set. Of all the drum patterns in this world, this is one of my favorites. Then a gear-shift into a late summer Japanese pastoral that blurs into the heartbeat chug of a Fennesz epic. There’s also some lovely bottomless drone from the new Windy & Carl album, a bit of Sisters of Mercy, two different dream moods from Donato Dozzy, and a dusting of Roy Orbison.

I’ve also been learning how to fold my sheets of reverb a little more nicely with returns, sends, damping, and a snazzy plugin that Earl recommended. Hopefully this one’s worth the wait.

Thank you for listening.

• cv313 - Forever in the Sky [Excerpt]
Plays Sequential Space • Echospace, 2025 • Bandcamp
• Tomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash - Anone None
At The Emerald Pool • Melody as Truth, 2026 • Boomkat
• Fennesz - In My Room
Agora • Touch, 2019 • Bandcamp
• Donato Dozzy - Vaporware 01
Plays Bee Mask • Spectrum Spools, 2013 • Bandcamp
• Windy & Carl with Optigan Conservatory - Coast Starlight
Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory • Kranky, 2026 • Boomkat
• Sisters of Mercy - Neverla...

Every showing is full of secrets.
–Julian of Norwich, 1373

Read the full post here.

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.

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

1
One of my most valuable possessions is the pawn my father carved eleven years ago to replace the one we’d lost from our chess set. We’d fallen into the habit of playing at the hospital while we waited for his new lung, and he whittled the pawn quickly. I can still see the blade coming dangerously close to his oxygen tube. Now I keep it on my little altar next to my sobriety chip and a spell against demons I received when C. and I visited a Taiwanese temple.

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.

• Training Chamber - Senza Corpo
Triple Mirror • Downwards, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Mnemonics - Depths
Mnemonic Devices • Workshop Records, 2025 • Bandcamp
• HTRK - Dying
Lilac • Ghostly International, 2020 • Bandcamp
• James Murray - Shallows
Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Basic Channel - Radiance II (63% slower)
Chain Reaction, 1995 • Boomkat
• Anthony Naples - Perix
In Studio Magic • ANS, 2026 • Bandcamp
• La Marr - Good Magic
Mood Programs • Music From Memory, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Rod Modell - Mediterranea II (Excerpt)
Mediterranea • 2016 • Echospace 313
• James A. Reeves - Crocodile Eye
Crocodile Eye • God Is All Mouth, 2026
• YL Hooi - Title
Untitled • Altered States Tapes, 2021 • Bandcamp
• Aphex Twin - Tha (112.5% slower)
Selected Ambient Works
• 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 Clubis now up and running. Thank you for reading.

Read the full post here.

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.

• JakoJako & Rødhåd - Passeri/Helonias
In Vere • WSNWG, 2022 • Bandcamp
• Lyder - Brack
Weird.fishes • tunnel.visions, 2025 • Bandcamp
• Rrose - Rib Cage
Please Touch • Eaux, 2023 • Bandcamp
• Skee Mask - Session Add
Compro • Ilian Tape, 2018 • Bandcamp
• Polygonia - Ceaseless Motion
Ceaseless Motion • Timedance, 2026 • Bandcamp
• The Upsetters - Super Ape
Super Ape • Black Ark, 1976
• Prince Far I & The Arabs - Final Chapter/Shake the Nation
Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III • Daddy Kool, 1980 • Bandcamp
• Ras G - Been Cosmic
Back on the Planet • Brainfeeder, 2013 • Bandcamp
• Sun Ra & His Arkestra - Door of the Cosmos
Sleeping Beauty • El Saturn, 1979 • Bandcamp
• 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
• Mandré - Solar Flight (Opus I)
Mandré • Motown, 1977
• Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred Is
Pieces of a Man • Flying Dutchman Records, 1971 • Wax Poetics
• Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy
The Cold Vein • Definitive Jux, 2021
• Binary Star - Reality Check
Masters of the Universe • 2020 • Bandcamp
• Wata Igarashi - Mineral
Mastery Quantum Sound • Houndstooth, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Vince Staples and Lil Baby - East Point Prayer (Vocals only)
Ramona Park Broke My Heart • 2022
• Erykah Badu - Out of My Mind, Just in Time (Vocals only)
New Amerykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) • 2010

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I've stitched together a soundtrack that follows tonight's rules of beauty:

• 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.

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

1

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...

Read the full post.

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.

• Pink Floyd - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (19% slower)
A Saucerful of Secrets • 1968
• Flavor Crystals - Cetecea (Seefeel Adjustment)
Five • 2020 • Bandcamp
• Anthony Calonico - Collapsing
Spacious Heart • Music From Memory, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Ana Roxanne - Wishful (Draft)
Poem 1 • Kranky, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Blackwater - Oaxaca
Navigation • Ethbo, 2021 • Bandcamp
• Bruce Springsteen - State Trooper (15% slower)
Nebraska • 1982
• The Dengie Hundred - Tamar
Brackenbank • Ethbo, 2022 • Bandcamp
• Roly Porter - Al Dhanab
Aftertime • Subtext, 2011 • Bandcamp
• Spiritualized - Electric Mainline II
Electric Mainline • 1993 • Archive.org
• Cocteau Twins - Cherry-Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)
Otherness • Fontana, 1995
• Variant - The Setting Sun
The Setting Sun • Field Records, 2009/2026 • Bandcamp
• 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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My first memory is sitting in a high chair in front of a small Zenith television. The opening credits for a sitcom played, maybe Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley, and there was a shenanigan that involved kissing a mannequin. It scared the hell out of me, and I screamed until my father patted my head, called me “big guy,” and changed the channel. For years, my mom couldn’t take me into a department store because I was so horrified by mannequins. Much of our shopping at Sears took place with her hand over my eyes.

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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%:

• Fair Is Foul Is Fair (Astronomical Dub)
• 43:1 (Tranquil + Justified)
• Aspirational Gardening (Cosmic Harvest)
• 80s Death (Redshifted + Microwaved)
• Post Nova (Initial Singularity)
• 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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C. says it’s better to make tacos at home because we know what’s in them. But I think it’s the not-knowing that makes Taco Bell the spiritual choice. Read the full episode.

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.)

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

• Topdown Dialectic - 20170804-2
20170804 • Aught, 2017 • Bandcamp
• Foote/Dickow - Volcano Snail
High Cube • Geographic North, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Sa Pa - Ride High
Ambeesh • Short Span, 2025 • Bandcamp
• Burger & Ink - Elvism
Las Vegas • Harvest, 1996 • Boomkat
• Minor Hexachords - Radians
Brinkmanship • 2025 • Bandcamp
• Paperclip Minimiser - B2
II • Peak Oil, 2026 • Bandcamp
• Gramm - Legends/Nugroove™
Personal Rock • Source, 1999 • Bandcamp
• Vehicular - Vehicular 02 (39% slower)
False 5 • False Aralia, 2025 • Bandcamp
• 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.

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

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.

Read the full post.

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."

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

• 96:01 01:00
• 96:01 02:00 VR
• 96:05 09:00
• 96:05 10:00
• 96:07 13:00
• 96:08 16:00
• 96:11 21:00 VR
• 96:12 23:00
• 96:12 24:00 VR

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

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A very special episode with Candy Chang—read the full post here.

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.”

• Bertrand Belin - Choses Nouvelles
Persona | Cinq 7, 2019
• Füxa - Dirty D
Dirty D | Rocket Girl, 2013 | Bandcamp
• Damien Jurado & Richard Swift - Radioactivity
Other People’s Songs Vol. 1 | Secretly Canadian, 2016 | Bandcamp
• Cliff Martinez - Abscess
The Knick Soundtrack | Milan, 2014
• The Cure - Plainsong (Studio Rough Guide Vocal)
Disintegration | Fiction Records, 1989 | Boomkat
• Cliff Martinez - Son of Placenta
The Knick Soundtrack | Milan, 2014
• A Flock of Seagulls - I Ran (620% slower + filtered / 28% slower)
A Flock of Seagulls | Jive, 1982
• Peter Schilling - Major Tom (Völlig Losgelöst)
Error in the System | Elektra, 1982
• Belong - Perfect Life
Common Era | Kranky, 2011 | Bandcamp
• Brian Reitzell & RJ Manning Jr. - On the Subway
Lost in Translation Soundtrack | Emperor Norton, 2003
• Aural Indifference - The Park
The Sound of Indifference | Minimal Wave, 1981 | Bandcamp
• 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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Read the full post with notes on the lectio divina.

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).

• F.U.S.E. - Night Drive
Dimension Intrusion | Plus 8, 1993 | Bandcamp
• My Friend Earl - Snowblow
2026 | Bandcamp
• A New Line (Related) - Crewe Away
Crewe Away | Sound in Silence, 2025 | Bandcamp
• Monolake - Cyan (44% slower)
Hong Kong | Chain Reaction, 1997 | Bandcamp
• Tropic of Cancer - Dive (Wheel of the Law)
The Sorrow Of Two Blooms | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | Boomkat
• The Field - Leave It (31% slower)
Yesterday and Today | Kompakt, 2009 | Bandcamp
• 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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Mike Doyle is here with us tonight to inaugurate the First Very Special Guest Episode of Midnight Radio.

“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.

• Liars - No. 1 Against the Rush
WIXIW | Mute, 2012 | Bandcamp
• Cold Cave - Double Lives in Single Beds
Love Comes Close | Heartworm Press, 2009 | Bandcamp
• Telefon Tel Aviv - You are the Worst Thing in the World
Immolate Yourself | BPitch Control, 2009 | Bandcamp
• The Horrors - Sea Within a Sea
Primary Colours | XL Recordings, 2009
• ERAAS - Fang
ERAAS | Felte, 2012 | Bandcamp
• Adult. - Tonight We Fall
The Way Things Fall | Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp
• 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.

The request lines are open.

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