Midnight Radio

Frozen rain is falling in the Middle West, and I’m writing to you through a haze of fever and sniffles and nostalgia. This morning I came across a photograph of my mother that has the atmosphere of a dream. There's the incidental heat of a family in motion, the twinned gesture of a hand to the forehead. My mother is returning from an event, and my grandmother follows in the background. An unknown girl stands in the foreground, watching.

The overheated colors and pebbled texture of this picture left me romanticizing the aesthetics of the past: a tactile world of cigarettes, record players, snow on the television, and radios that filled the room like furniture. Might as well have been another planet compared to how I sit with a scrunched face and white plastic in my ears, tapping at a piece of glass. And soon this will look like the days of the hand-cranked Victrola or the first Model T.

It’s a strange sensation, living a life divided between today’s liquid crystal and a youth defined by magnetic tape. Audio and VHS cassettes contained my first impressions of the world. Each unit of entertainment was bound in plastic that occupied space and respected the logic of time, its information deteriorating each time it was played until it dissolved into garbled images and hiss. Now the whole world feels like static. No orientation. No sense of time. Perhaps my generation is uniquely positioned to be disappointed by the humiliations of clicking and scrolling. After all, I still remember the optimism of world wide web and information superhighway.

I miss the reassuring kerchunk of buttons and punching out the plastic tabs on a cassette if the recording was good. Or taping them up again when better music came along. It was a tactile world of messing with limitations, a sensibility defined by the boundaries of the physical rather than a never-ending feed coming from god only knows. Was life better in the Era of Magnetic Tape, or am I suffering from the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?

Either way, this calls for a trip to the Death Prom, where I can hide beneath the crashing waves of an old Ronettes single: big heartbeat drums and an even bigger voice, Ronnie Spector and her beehive carryied the fever dream of American history when she sang “Keep on Dancing” back in ’64, a song so perfect that her husband refused to release it because he was a psychopath. In my notebook, I jotted down a quote from her that reads like a poem: “Everything was quiet, then all of a sudden I heard a low rumble, like there was thunder coming from every corner of the room.”

1. Jeanette - Oí Tu Voz 
   Hispavox, 1967
2. Jessica Pratt - Life Is 
   Here in the Pitch | Mexican Summer, 2024 | Bandcamp
3. Hasnah Haron - Hanya Padamu 
   Malaysia, 1970
4. Dirty Beaches - True Blue + The Ronettes - Keep on Dancin’ 
   Zoo Music, 2010 + Philles Records, recorded 1964, released 1978
5. Connie Francis - Siboney 
   MGM, 1960

And god, how Connie Francis holds those final notes. This mixtape also includes shards of Johnny Mathis, Bobby Vinton, Patsy Cline, and some ominous basslines. Listen below, or here’s an mp3 so dusty you can almost touch it.

The next few episodes of Midnight Radio will be broadcast from Taipei and Tokyo because C. was awarded a generous research grant and I got lucky and married above my station, so I get to tag along. (She also made this delightful collage of me walking down the street.)

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-to-death-prom/

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.

1. TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606 (43% slower)
   TM 404 | Kontra-Musik, 2013 | Bandcamp
2. Topdown Dialectic - A4 (44% slower)
   S/T | Peak Oil, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. Echospace - Aequinoxium/Sunset/Abraxas (48% slower)
   The Coldest Season | Modern Love, 2008 | Boomkat
4. Von Schommer - Wuerfel/Wuerfel Version (45% slower)
   Deepchord, 2000 | Bandcamp
5. IMAX - Concorde (47% slower)
   Deepchord, 2000 | Bandcamp

Also includes snippets from Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Leonard Cohen, Yazoo, Skeeter Davis, Rebekah Del Rio, and 10cc. (The moment at the eight-minute mark when a Joy Division fragment lands on a half-speed synth is my favorite thing yet in these fifteen mixes.)

Listen below, or here’s a premium executive mp3 you can play while you ponder whether or not to root for this asteroid.

Read the full post.

The request lines are open.

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I had to ask Chat GPT how to delete my Instagram account. Living in the twenty-first century feels not only slightly embarrassing but increasingly like an ultimatum: embrace the future without complaint or be left pining for the textures of the past. But there’s always a third way.

Near a decommissioned military base between the Chocolate Mountains and the Santa Rosa range, there’s a candy-colored hill shellacked with religious slogans, the handiwork of a man who dedicated his final years and nine thousand gallons of paint to writing God is Love and Jesus I’m a Sinner in shades of pink and red that make your eyeballs scream. He painted Salvation Mountain after his homemade hot air balloon failed to carry him to heaven, leaving him earthbound in the Mojave desert, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I was only planning to stay for a week,” he told a tourist before he died. “But it was a very good week.”

There’s nothing on County Road 59 in western Nebraska except sleepy cattle and miles of sky. When the silhouette of Stonehenge appeared on the horizon, I thought I was hallucinating until I parked on the shoulder and laid my hands upon the thirty-six Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles stacked into arches that track solar and lunar events—a man’s memorial to his dead father.

Further north in Wisconsin, there’s a wrought-iron spaceship known as the Forevertron, a forbidding contraption assembled from lightning rods, two Thomas Edison dynamos, debris from the local ammunition factory, and a decontamination chamber retrieved from Apollo 11. The Forevertron was built by a frustrated demolition man who wanted to create rather than destroy. One night, he rechristened himself as a Victorian inventor named Dr. Evermore. “I was rather upset with the world,” he explained. “So I decided to send myself back into the heavens on a magnetic lightning forcefield.”

I love this genre of old men speaking to the heavens (and occasionally attempting to launch themselves there) by building candy-colored mountains, car-wreck calendars, and junkyard rockets. I'll probably join them someday, and I hope you have your own Forevertron that you're tinkering with. In the meantime, we have five songs tonight, each promising transcendence in its own way.

First off, the blistering pleasure of Earth’s guitars that ride the line between the sacred and the demonic, followed by a synth-and-vocal workout from The Field that sounds like a crumbling memory of a warehouse party on the brink of the void. Then comes the centerpiece, which C. and I have decided is our favorite genre for 2025: “preposterous yet strangely compelling.”—and I-F’s “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass” fits the bill perfectly. It’s gloriously dumb and a technical triumph that conjures a much nicer future. After this late-20th-century masterpiece, the only logical option is to drop into some static-ridden Joy Division, which I’ve glitched and reverberated when the spirit moved me, followed by Temple ov Saturn's "Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary"—Joan Pope’s music sounds like an incantation that threatens to summon something ominous, which might help us prepare for the rest of 2025.

1. Earth - Coda Maestoso in F(flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)
   Legacy of Dissolution | No Quarter, 2005 | Boomkat
2. The Field - Made of Steel, Made of Stone
   Infinite Moment | Kompakt, 2018 | Bandcamp
3. I-F - Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass
   Fucking Consumer | Disko B, 1998 | Bandcamp
4. Joy Division - Day of the Lords
   Unknown Pleasures | Factory Records, 1979 | More
5. Temple Ov Saturn - Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary
   Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary | 2019 | Bandcamp

Also includes a healthy serving of reverb, a relevant snippet of David Bowie, and Neil Diamond’s "Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show" in slow-motion. Listen below, use this hyperlink to score a high-grade mp3, or if you must, here's a Spotify playlist without the fun stuff.

Some recent inputs: The Lazarus Project is one of my favorite television shows: smart, mind-bendy sci-fi that remembers to be fun. The British know how to make a conspiratorial tech thriller much better than Americans (see also The Capture). The first two songs from this Matchess record have been my morning soundtrack all week, and thank you to Philip Sherburne's newsletter for introducing me to her work. I'm also happy I found Adam Greenfield's dispatches again. Reading-wise, I've started Samantha Harvey's Orbital, and I'm getting the sense that not much will happen in this novel besides hanging out on a spacecraft in the most lyrical way possible, which isn't a bad way to spend some time.

It was a Sunday morning when C. told me that Kessler’s Syndrome might kill us all because sooner or later, all the space debris speeding around above our heads will start colliding, which could produce a chain reaction that mucks up the magnetosphere and we’ll get vaporized by solar wind. Or something.

A few hours later, a friend called to tell me octopuses are from outer space. He thinks they will become the dominant species after artificial intelligence determines humans are an illogical lifeform and wipes us out. This produced a delightful new euphemism for a scary future, e.g., after the technological/climate/nuclear disaster, there’ll be nothing left but Juan’s Octopus Word. It cushions the blow.

I’m so thankful for the interesting people in my life—and thank you for reading and listening. The request lines are open. (I hope you'll request something, otherwise we’ll have a subzero dub sess...

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 echoing what.

2.

When I was growing up, my mom often told me that perfectionism was my worst trait. I took this as a compliment because I was young and arrogant. Who wouldn’t want to be a perfectionist? Three decades and so many missed opportunities later, I can’t tell you how many times I look up at the ceiling—or wherever my mom’s ghost might be—to tell her she was so damned right.

3.

There’s a song called “Lali Lale”—upbeat and a little seductive, the singer’s voice autotuned for a hypnotic effect. Although she sings in a language I do not understand, the intent is clear: to speak to the limbic, to make the listener feel cool and sleek. But in the middle of a verse, she breaks into laughter. Her laugh is not calculated or cool; it’s awkward and nervous, the sound of someone breaking character. I like to imagine the moment in the studio when she glances at the faces behind the mixing board to do another take. Instead, they tell her to keep going, keep rolling. So she gets back to the beat, and now the song has become truly alive, a document of the unpredictable, an artifact of the genuinely human.

This song is the last track in tonight’s mix, and the laughter at the 28:51 mark is one of my favorite moments in the music I listened to in 2024. Messes and accidents, weird typos and blurts of laughter—these things feel more essential now that everything is increasingly filtered, auto-suggested, and optimized.

Embrace the fragment. Cultivate collisions. Bring the residue to the forefront.

And residue is how tonight’s broadcast begins: I excavated the vocal dregs from last year’s mixes to usher in one of my favorite songs, Wolfgang Voigt’s off-kilter loop of T. Rex and Roxy Music, which I like to play first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Then I’ve paired Nancy Sinatra with some bass, static, and a kick drum that I scraped out of an old file. The third track is a terribly-named song by a terribly-named band, but the music itself is an ideal way to start the year in easy mode. 

1. Love, Inc - Life’s a Gas
   Force Inc, 1996 | More
2. Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang (Midnight Radio Static Mix)
3. Japancakes - Handguns & Firearms
   Bliss Out Vol. 19: Belmondo | Darla, 2002 | More
4. Chantssss - Swan
   Shyness | Theory Therapy, 2024 | More
5. DjNiraha & Lale Pishmari - Lali Lale
   KorgMusic2024DemoEL​-​HELL​-​EΛ | Heat Crimes, 2024 | More

The request lines are open.

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

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
Possibly the most righteous loop ever made: built from a piano that burrows its way into your soul and makes a very nice home for Mike Dunn to sound like the coolest earthling to ever spend time on this planet. 

SoleTech - Sole Waves
Detrechno, 1994 | More
This track is both ridiculous and also the best-ever use of a Kraftwerk sample. In the summer of ’94, “chuck chuck” earwormed everyone in the metropolitan Detroit area and improbably became the most requested song on the radio for a few weeks, which might be the easiest way to explain to someone why Detroit is a very special place. It also prepared me for my encounters with the Electrifying Mojo, Deep Space Radio, and Basic Channel.

Detroit Grand Pubahs - If Snow Was Black
Intuit Solar, 1999
One of the most underrated songs I know, this track sounds like the steam that billows from Detroit’s streets on a subzero January night, and Paris the Black Fu’s voice will live in your head all winter if you’re lucky: If snow was black, I’d wear black shades and drive a black car. I’d smoke black cigarettes and hide in the shadows…

Quarks - I Walk (Superpitcher Schaffel Mix)
Kompakt, 2002 | More
We were in our early twenties, logging time at Other Music, Kim’s, Tonic, and the Bunker—and music-wise, Komapkt reigned supreme. We didn’t try to emulate their sound, but they reminded us that electronic music could be monumental and fun, and this is a lesson I still carry into my writing and other personal pursuits: I’d better be having a good time because I’m sure as hell not doing it for the money.

Basic Channel - Phylyps Trak II
Chain Reaction, 1994 | More
In January of ’95, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall to check out a hip-hop show I’ve long since forgotten. But I remember the militant thump thump that drew me upstairs to the dark third floor with windows that overlooked the city. I’d never seen humanity like this: club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit, all lock-stepping in a perfect grid, their heads bowed before the bassbin like an altar, which soon I learned it was.

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 few weeks ago, a Very Kind Listener asked for a soundtrack to accompany “being awake at 3am with a heart accumulating microcracks like the tibiae of the greenest of Marine recruits on a forced march with a pack that weighs as much as they do.”

This seems like a good time to honor this vivid request because there’s a lot of heartbreak going around at various scales. Individual. National. Maybe even planetary. The humiliations and insults of living in an exhausted age take a toll, and I admire how our Very Kind Listener captures this sensation in the image of a heart gradually breaking beneath the weight.

Slowly, as they say. Then all at once.

There are a few ways to tackle this, radio-wise. The obvious move would be to queue up some sad-sack ballads and call it a night. But grief rolls heavy. Heartbreak is hot-blooded. Sometimes it sounds less like weeping and more like a scream. So I’ve stitched together five all-time heavyweight favorites, chosen because they sound very much involved with the human condition. When Kim Sun’s voice drops at the two-minute mark, you’ll know if this is for you. These voices have lived heavy. They understand that grief is the price of love.

Everything worthwhile rests on a knife’s edge, which brings us back to the Tannhäuser Gate, that strange zone between wakefulness and sleep, suspended between doubt and faith—and I hope this half-hour captures the bleary sensation of tuning a radio in the hour of the wolf, hoping to hear a voice that knows what it’s like. Sometimes wisdom is tonal, and sometimes it’s concrete, like when O. V. Wright sings I want to go to heaven but I’m scared to fly.

1. Kim Sun + Shin Jung Hyun - The Man Who Must Leave
   Beautiful Rivers And Mountains | 1973 | More
2. O.V. Wright - Everybody Knows
   (If It's) Only For Tonight | Back Beat Records, 1965 | More
3. Chen Mei Feng - 誰能知道我的情 (Who Can Know My Love?)
   Singapore, 1969 | More
4. Dilber Doğan – Yıkılla Köyler (Destroyed Villages)
   Yıkılada Bizim Köyler | 1988 | More
5. M83 - Farewell/Goodbye + Je Vous Hais Petites Filles
   Before the Dawn Heals Us | Mute, 2005 | More

Also includes several layers of crackle and reverb, along with echoes from Skeeter Davis, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Nancy Sinatra, The Paris Sisters, and more.

Listen below—better yet, keep it classy and download this state-of-the-art MPEG Audio Layer 3. Or here’s a joyless Spotify playlist if that’s your thing, but you won’t get any crackle or reverb or Al Green easter eggs, and you won’t hear Chen Mei Feng sing “Who Will Know My Love?”

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/the-heart-accumulates-microcracks/

On a flight to Washington DC last month, I discovered I felt okay above the clouds. No shivering or hyperventilating or fighting back tears. Christ, how long has it been since I boarded an airplane without trembling or praying to something I’m not sure I believe in?

My last normal flight was in 2009 from Helsinki to Istanbul on a chaotic airplane with ashtrays in the armrests. Three weeks later, I flew to Detroit because my mother was dying, and that’s when it began: the panic attacks and dread, the inability to do anything except monitor every mechanical noise and atmospheric shudder. For fifteen years, I was strangely insane, my brain intent on torturing itself rather than letting come what may. Hypervigilence is a core feature of anxiety, but there’s also ego: I alone knew my flight was uniquely doomed. The airplane required my attention to stay aloft.

I thought about this when the result of last week’s election became clear. As I stared at the reddening map of America, I wondered why I’d invested so much time monitoring the polls and listening to punditry, diligently following every gasp of two dying political parties, both driven senile by the internet. So no more news for me. From now on, I will seek a life without opinion mongers, thought leaders, professional outragers, pundits, and faith dealers.

True freedom is not thinking about the president every day.

As my government shifts from feckless to frightening, the idea of vnutrennaya emigratsia is circulating, the Russian strategy of internal exile to survive the idiocy of public life in bleak times. Liberation through rejection is a classic move, such as Voltaire’s advice to cultivate my own garden rather than wring my hands at the state of the world—or worse yet, to imagine this is noble or productive.

Better still, there’s Dada’s cognitive leap into the absurd, which set the stage for the dreamlife of Surrealism. From a stage in 1916, Hugo Ball's words echo into our time: “This humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect."

“Leave everything,” André Breton instructed a few years later. “Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow.” If logic produced catastrophic wars and rotting institutions, perhaps logic itself was the problem.

Internal exile sounds nice. It’s a trip I should have taken a while ago.

So we’re on this timeline now, and here are five ribcage-shuddering songs to greet the moment. Think of it as sage clearing or whatever prophets and healers do.

Tonight’s installment kicks off with the most badass beat I know, a beat that burns every other beat to ashes, followed by a track from Panasonic that becomes a cathartic buzzsaw. It was their final song. Then we steer into the supernatural with some Ectomorph sleaze and a low-end haunting by Demdike Stare, named for a witch whose gaze could either hex or cure, which might be another strategy for psychic liberation (see this video). Then we hit Grungerman’s “Fackeln Im Sturm”, a Gothic anthem from ’97 that translates to “torches in the storm,” and finally, we cool off with some end-of-days AM radio chatter that I recorded in the Mojave desert twenty years ago, a reminder that American paranoia is evergreen.

1. Muslimgauze - Ryoji Ikeda Remix #6
   Staalplaat, 2020 | More
2. Panasonic - Pan Finale
   Gravitoni | Blast First, 2018 | More
3. Ectomorph - Crawl of the Cthulu
   Stalker | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | More
4. Demdike Stare - Metamorphosis
   Elemental | Modern Love, 2012 | More
5. Grungerman - Fackeln Im Sturm
   Profan, 1997

Listen below or better yet, let’s make mp3s great again.

In other news, I'm sprucing up my website with some bold typography because I’m feeling punchy these days. It's still a bit of a mess, but that's okay because nothing matters or makes sense anymore except doing whatever it takes to keep our torches burning.

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

Yesterday, one of my students turned me on to a delightful bit of Japanese slang from the Meiji era: tsundoku, the phenomenon of acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them. I’m glad there’s a name for this hobby of mine. It’s heartening to know this was also an issue in nineteenth-century Japan.

But these days, I’m only reading about crosstabs and herding. This habit has become so compulsive that I’ve needed to create a situation that physically prevents me from checking the latest election news by pairing a keyboard with a tiny screen no less than 36” away. It’s an embarrassing yet effective solution: keep the internet out of arm’s reach.

Why am I so hopelessly addicted to the latest news? Because the mind craves certainty—and this is the crux of so many of my troubles: the inability to live in the grey.

For years, casting a vote has felt like choosing between murder and suicide, and for most of this election, I was enjoying this season finale of America as bizarro entertainment. But in September, I found myself experiencing something I hadn’t felt in years: hope. I’ve never felt as connected to a candidate as I do with Kamala Harris. She seems like a genuinely happy, recognizable, consensus-driven, grey-area person operating in good faith. She seems like somebody who’s been in a supermarket before.

I don’t agree with Harris on everything, but only a child expects the world to conform to their will. Besides, policy is a speck in the rearview mirror these days. Right now, Americans must choose between living in a shared reality or the hallucinations of a vicious game show host. I don’t know what we’ll decide.

Which brings me to tonight's playlist. As we teeter on the edge of several unpleasant possible futures, I thought it might be nice to stitch together five of the most reassuring songs I know, starting with these lyrics from Union Jack’s There Will Be No Armageddon:

There will be no Armageddon. There will be no sudden ending. We will see our children grow, and theirs grow after them.

For fifty years, we have awaited the future with a mounting sense of fear. Our path to the next millennium seemed certain to be lit by the bright lights of a nuclear conflagration. But now, as we raise our arms, we see that we have almost made it to the year 2000 and beyond.

These vocals come from The Lathe of Heaven, a 1980 film adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel. Union Jack released this song thirty years ago, back when many of us had faith in technology, and it’s very 1995. It noodles around in ambient-trance mode for a while, and I clipped out the bits that haven’t aged well—but I implore you, wait until the bass kicks in at five minutes and thirty-three seconds. It’s one of my favorite moments in the world, and I'd like to have it played at my funeral.

Next up is the song I tattooed on my arm thirteen years ago: “Ladies and Gentlemen We’re Floating in Space” by Spiritualized. The tattoo has grown blurry over the years, and I’ve blurred the song tonight, fusing it with the original Elvis Presley version (which was based on a French melody from 1784!) and lacing it through the mix.

1. Union Jack - There Will Be No Armageddon
   (1995 | More)
2. Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen, We’re Floating in Space
   (1997 | More)
3. T. Rex - Cosmic Dancer
   (Electric Warrior | Reprise, 1971 | More)
4. Air - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi
   (Premiers Symptômes | Source, 1997 | More)
5. Gyeongsu & June - Lead to Curse
   (All to None | Dear Dogs, 2024 | More)

Also features The Paris Sisters, Elvis, and more. Listen below or download a state-of-the-art mp3. Or here’s a boring unmixed, unreverberated Spotify playlist. Whichever route you choose, I hope these songs help smooth out the next 90 hours or so.

Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the end of Daylight Savings Time, my favorite day of the year because it brings the night closer. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Reset the internet to 2009.

Please take moody portraits of your desk in the six o’clock dusk and send them to me.

Thank you for tuning in. The request lines are open.

The first five minutes of every movie should be very noisy so we can comfortably open our snacks without bothering anyone. But enough politics. The request lines have been open for two months now, and C. has made a very special request: a soundtrack for painting.

She’s doing remarkable things with ink and a knife these days, and you can see some of her paintings on this brand-new website I designed + built for her. Sometimes I get to watch her work, and she moves fast and loose, belonging entirely to the moment as she swirls her ink across a massive canvas. Meanwhile, I hunch over my notebook like a troll, frowning over the placement of a comma and wondering whether I have anything to say, any words to offer, and if I do, worrying they might be misunderstood.

Is it possible to write the way she paints? Can I become less stilted on the page, maybe really let loose and get wild without writing bad poetry? Perhaps these midnight letters will degrade into abstract bursts and garbled scenes—conditions that feel like the headspace of being alive in the 2020s.

People on TV talk about how they’re going to vote for so-and-so because they seem like they’re going to win. At the superstore, a kid consoles his little sister by saying, “If you think too hard, you get scared,” which pretty much sums up the human situation.

But back to tonight’s soundtrack for C’s painting. She’s a tough customer with top-shelf taste, capable of decimating an artist’s entire discography with a single word. (Burial: “itchy”; LCD Soundsystem: “clownish”; My Bloody Valentine: “carsick”.) But I love that C. loves Cliff Martinez's film scores, which are stellar, even though he was the drummer in the worst band on planet Earth. He's also a native of Columbus, Ohio, which is our current home. Sometimes the universe aligns.

What is "taste," and where does it come from, anyway? Is it hardwired or learned? When it comes to C's taste, I'm certain of two things: a) she prefers greyscale synthesizers that tilt toward the tragic but has no patience for treacle; and b) she loves the maximalist howl of Godspeed You! Black Emporer’s “Moya,” a song, she says, “that makes you want to get on your knees and believe in something.”

So here’s an attempt to move from point A to B, and I hope you’ll find it a reliable companion for the times you'd like to catch your breath, swirl some ideas around, and maybe even pray to whatever gods or demons are helping you get through this decade.

1. Cliff Martinez & Gregory Tripi - Sister
   (Only God Forgives | Milan, 2013 | More)
2. Cliff Martinez - I Drive
   (Drive | Lakeshore Records, 2011 | More)
3. Popnoname - Fembria
   (Pop Ambient | Kompakt, 2008 | More)
4. The Black Dog - Vertical Grip on Reality
   (Music for Photographers | Dust Science, 2021 | More)
5. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Aerial Views by Helicopter
   (Interim Report, March 1979 | 2021 | More)
6. Romance - Never Will/Hymn to the Sea
   (Fade Into You | Ecstatic, 2023 | More)
7. Dedekind Cut - De-Civilization
   (Tahoe | Kranky, 2018 | More)
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Moya
   (Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada | Kranky, 1999 | More)

Also includes reverberated snippets from T. Rex, Beach House, Lee Hazlewood, Johnny Mathis, Velvet Underground, Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vinton, and Chromatics. (There are three extra songs in this mix because I owe you a few after the single-minded focus of the previous installment.)

You can listen below or better yet, download a freshly pressed mp3. If you prefer a subpar experience without any transitions, static, reverb, or fun, here's a Spotify playlist.

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

There’s a New York Times headline that says “You Won’t Stop Thinking About This Clam Chowder,” which sounds like a fucking curse.

But I'm still thinking about reverb. Last night, it struck me that reverb is my Tannhäuser Gate, both there and not there, a threshold between the zones of shape and fog, definition and possibility. Sort of like my brain during the first hour of the day.

Here’s the routine: Wake up. Check the weather. Check the latest polls. Make some coffee. Check the latest polls. The other day, C. asked, “Did you see the news?” and I held my breath, bracing for scenes from another disaster, the latest inhuman act. She could tell me everyone in Nebraska disappeared last night. She could tell me anything, and I would believe it, for these are days of suspended disbelief.

I often think about Douglas Coupland’s confession that “around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.”

Coupland takes comfort in the idea that we’re in this together, that we’ve all been “neurally homogenised,” but this idea horrifies me on an elemental level, as if my soul is on the line. Sometimes it feels like an ultimatum: embrace a pixellated future without complaint or grieve for the textures of the past. Perhaps the only solution is a cognitive leap similar to how the Constructivists and Futurists plunged into the future a century ago, determined to fuse with the machine. Embrace speed. Groove on distraction. Let my thoughts get garbled and strange. Find god in the liquid crystal glow.

Until then, one of my favorite songs for concentration is Richard Hawtin & Pete Namlook’s “A Million Miles to Earth", an ambient classic that turned thirty years old this year. It’s an epic of sweeping chords with a very 1990s synthesizer pitched to a particular flavor of pre-millennium optimism—faith that technology would improve us, that history had ended, and global harmony was around the corner.

Last week, I slowed it down to sludge and tended to it while I worked on other things, occasionally adding a dash of Ronettes here, a pinch of Elvis Presley there. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred it 57% or 89% slower, so I smushed both versions together, stripped out the treacly piano bits, and installed some passages of static and reverb. Now it sounds like wave upon wave of a slowly freezing sea, and it has become a reliable companion for hour-long bouts of writing and pixel-pushing.

• Richie Hawtin & Pete Namlook - A Million Miles to Earth
  (57%—89% slower)
  (From Within | Plus 8, 1994)
• Radio static, reverb, highway traffic, and fragments of Skeeter Davis, Elvis Presley, Mojave 3, Tommy James & the Shondells, Everly Brothers, Paris Sisters, The Zombies, Righteous Brothers, Lee Hazlewood, and Patsy Cline.

Listen below, or better yet, here’s an mp3. If you’d like to hear the original version, here’s a Spotify link and a nifty video on YouTube.

If you have two more minutes to kill, please help me identify this wonderful song and/or the language it’s in.

Thank you for taking the time to listen. The request lines are open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/two-million-miles-to-earth/