Midnight Radio

1 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 t...

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 rati...

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...

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...

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...

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 co...

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 agai...

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-blu...

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 T...

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 humil...

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...

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 depart...

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...

Read the full post here.   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...

Read the entire post here .  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 cr...

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 epis...

Read the full post . 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...

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 - Chos...

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 remem...

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,...

Three songs that possess the righteously serene energy I fantasize about cultivating in the first minutes of a new year. Then the actual year starts happening. But playing this mix each morning should keep the dream alive. Read the full post. Kali Malone - Spectacle of Ritual The Sacrificial Code | Ideal Recordings, 2019 | Bandcamp Abul Mogard - Desires Are Reminiscences By Now The Sky Had Vanishe...

Here in the Middle West, we’ve already enjoyed two excellent snowstorms, which augurs well for a proper winter. Although the year is winding down, the future is still coming fast and dumb. The people in charge are hellbent on giving us artificially intelligent colleagues and companions, and they’re banking on a heavy assumption: that we value the sense of a relationship more than a living person....

Like my thoughts on egg foo young and tornados , tonight’s broadcast is all over the map—but I’m increasingly fond of intensely personal playlists that ratfuck the algorithm. We kick off with a Breakfast Club anthem pitched down into Sisters of Mercy gloom, followed by a heavy slice of Detroit electro I bought in '95 and played to death, entranced by its bottomless growl. Years later, I heard...

An ode to Michael Clayton and the giddy renewal before death. Read the full post . " 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 s...

The clocks roll back an hour tonight, and it’s my favorite moment of the year. Not only does it bring the night closer, it reminds me that if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Remove days from the week. Reset the internet to 2009. Have a functional government. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest holiday with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Toni...