Midnight Radio

There was this thing we did in grade school, and maybe you tried it too. It was one of those childhood dares that spread through playgrounds and school buses until it gathered force, becoming a fate to be tempted, something that must be proved. One night during a sleepover, my friend muted the television and said, “I heard if you say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in the mirror, you’ll see a witch.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are my all-time favorite lyrics:

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

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

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

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

The twenty-first century has some terrible lyrics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

Here in the landlocked center of Ohio, I stood in a superstore parking lot and watched a dozen seagulls circle overhead, hunting for minnows or plankton or whatever seagulls eat. Their rusty squawks filled the night, and I wondered if something in nature was breaking. Then I remembered my parents' relationship with birds. My mother was a lapsed Catholic who kept the church at a distance. My father never talked about god, at least not until the end. But they both believed in birds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I moved to Ohio last year, I didn’t expect to become fascinated by death drives, desire, and demonology. There are several reasons for this trajectory—such as living in the Year of Our Lord 2025—but a primary force is my friend M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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

Some of tonight’s songs are about heaven, some are about hell, and perhaps this is what all dreams are ultimately about. Listen to Charlie Megira’s guitar, more alive and determined than his voice, grasping for something we know but cannot define. An Israeli guitarist whose life was brief and tragic, Megira was “a mold-breaking artist who disintegrated while we were all staring at our phones.” In the final minute of ‘Tomorrow’s Gone’, I like to think he’s saying “my heart to heaven” even though he’s singing in Hebrew. It makes a nice transition to Midwife, who reminds us that the hounds of heaven run like hell.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full post with a complete inventory of dreams.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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

I began to feel pleasantly haunted, finding information in the static, a hymnal in the hiss as I carved two hours down to the eighteen minutes we have before us now. Here are the ingredients:

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

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

Read the full post.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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

Although I have no religion and do not believe in omens, something takes hold of me whenever I step into a church or a temple. My cast of mind shifts into the superstitious. I find myself hunting for revelation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 recorded after emigrating from Taiwan. He set them to music and called it Taiwanese Folk Style, and it’s a remarkable collaboration across generations—and one of the most delightful albums I’ve heard in years.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full post here.

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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

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 ballads from the mid-twentieth century before winding down with a chant I recorded at Songshan Ciyou Temple. This mixtape is tailored for headphones, ideally while walking down a rainy street filled with people carrying clear plastic umbrellas.

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

Interspersed with sections from:

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

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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

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

The request lines are open.

Support the show

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