Midnight Radio

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.

3

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.

4

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.

1. 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
2. John Maus - Hey Moon
   We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves • Ribbon Music, 2011 • Bandcamp
3. M83 - Gone
   Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • Bandcamp
4. Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night - 新世界を上昇させて
   New World Disciples • 2021 • Bandcamp
5. Lusine - These Walls
   Melting Days • Ghostly International, 2026 • Bandcamp
6. Fohn - Hagstone Lullaby
   Porcelain • Odda Recordings, 2026 • Bandcamp
7. Denial - California Dreamin’
   M-Squared/Minimal Wave, 1982 • Bandcamp
8. M83 - In the Cold I’m Standing
   Before the Dawn Heals Us • Gooom, 2004 • Bandcamp
9. Windows 96 - Hard
   One Hundred Mornings • 2018 • Bandcamp
10. James Murray - Becalmed
    Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp
11. 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.

1. Oliver Farshi - Echopraxia (Midnight Radio Murder Mix)
   Fin • 2020 • Bandcamp
2. Grouper - Headache
   Paradise Valley • 2016 •

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.

1. cv313 - Forever in the Sky [Excerpt]
   Plays Sequential Space • Echospace, 2025 • Bandcamp
2. Tomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash - Anone None
   At The Emerald Pool • Melody as Truth, 2026 • Boomkat
3. Fennesz - In My Room
   Agora • Touch, 2019 • Bandcamp
4. Donato Dozzy - Vaporware 01
   Plays Bee Mask • Spectrum Spools, 2013 • Bandcamp
5. Windy & Carl with Optigan Conservatory - Coast Starlight
   Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory • Kranky, 2026 • Boomkat
6. 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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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