Midnight Radio

When visiting a Taoist temple, you enter through the east door, the mouth of the dragon, which is good luck. After performing your rituals and prayers, you exit through the west, the deadly mouth of the tiger, because now you’re protected from danger. Never enter through the middle door. That’s for gods. In 2016, the NYC-based guitarist Hewson Chen discovered the homesick ballads his father record...

Dispatch from Taiwan. Read the full post. 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 balla...

A tribute to David Lynch that roams through ruined ballads and slow-motion noir. Busted machinery bleeds through the walls and if you listen closely, the Woodsman will remind you which is the water and which is the well. Read the full post . Angelo Badalamenti - Laura Palmer’s Theme Twin Peaks, 1990 | More Rebekah Del Rio - Llorando Mulholland Drive, 2001 | More Dean Hurley - Night Electricity The...

Lately I’ve been pondering a line from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal : “I often wonder why people torment themselves as soon as they can.” It’s an excellent question without an easy answer. TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606 (43% slower) TM 404 | Kontra-Musik, 2013 | Bandcamp Topdown Dialectic - A4 (44% slower) S/T | Peak Oil, 2018 | Bandcamp Echospace - Aequinoxium/Sunset/Abraxas (48% slower) Th...

1. 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...

As another exhausting and demented year comes to a merciful end, we’ve earned a little fun. 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 P...

I’ve come to believe that anything worthwhile rests on a knife’s edge, balanced by a paradox that I can only compare to the delicate act of falling asleep—because it’s only when I do not think about sleep that I can fall asleep. 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 d...

It’s late summer, and everything is overgrown and looks obscene. Trees sag, their leaves are tired, and the grass is scorched. The night hums with creatures I cannot identify—frogs or crickets, maybe, or possibly the power lines. Even though the news continues to break at an alarming speed, these are sluggish days, and I’m doing my best to match their rhythm and collect my thoughts while I wait fo...