Midnight Radio

I've been pondering my love of reverberations. Last week, I received a request from a very kind listener: the filmmaker Grace Wang suggested a Linda Rondstadt track, and my first impulse was to drown it in static and reverb. Why?

Perhaps the answer is simple: echos and fog generate mystery. In 1973, the painter Gerhard Richter said, "I've never found anything lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas, you can perceive as many trees as you want."

For years, I’ve been writing a novel about a noise that belongs to either God or a demon. Along the way, I’ve become convinced the trick with storytelling is to create a situation where whatever the reader might imagine is infinitely more compelling than anything I might describe. "Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door," Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre. "When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster."

A lack of mystery might explain why today's ultra-high-definition, motion-smoothed devices evoke nausea. There's no room for the imagination. Analog media is better for hauntings: a whisper in the crackle of an old record, a face emerging from snow on the television set, a sinister voice on a reel-to-reel. Ghosts don't feel at home in mp3 files or LCD screens.

The connection between reverb and mystery is clear to me, but I’m curious why reverb sounds like memory. There's a direct link in my brain between a voice drenched in echo and, say, a rainy night seven years ago at a dim sum joint that felt as if it'd been concocted in a dream: diner chrome and pleather mixed with Chinese lanterns while a 1970s sitcom played on a Zenith over the bar. Sure, the past tends to blur, but my vision of the future isn't exactly crisp, especially when I can’t stop watching the news these days. This season finale of America is freakier than anything I might imagine.

But here are five early autumn classics that always mellow me out.

1. Gas - Pop 02
   Pop | Kompakt, 2000 | More
2. Aphex Twin - #19
   Selected Ambient Works Volume II | Warp, 1994 | More
3. Midwife - Forever
   Prayer Hands | Antiquated Future, 2018 | More
4. Sonic Youth - Superstar
   If I Were a Carpenter | A&M, 1994 | More
5. Seefeel - Filter Dub
   Quique | Too Pure, 1993 | More

And yes, this mix is soaked in reverb, much of which is the residue that's been accumulating from prior episodes—plus the requested Linda Rondstadt and a dash of Lee Hazlewood. Listen below, or get your freshly-mixed mp3 here. (Or a Spotify playlist if you're square.)

Thank you for listening. And reading. The request lines are always open.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/five-early-autumn-classics/

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

When I got sober eleven years ago, they told me to take it a day at a time, although this cliché comes with a silent, contradictory wish: a day at a time so I will never drink again and wreck my only life. I’ve also learned the hard way that the only way to avoid a panic attack is to not worry about having a panic attack. And if I do not want to squander this life as a cheap cynic or an insufferable zealot, doubt and faith must exist in equal measure. 

These paradoxes can probably be unwound all the way back to the Buddha’s claim that “non-practice is my practice, the attainment of non-attainment.” But I like to think of the rare zone between two opposing conditions as the Tannhäuser Gate.

Enough philosophy. Onwards to tonight’s maximum-strength Blade Running mix. It opens with a sequence of neon-soaked synthesizers, then we’ll take a breather before ramping up to an end-of-days song that sounds like klieg lights sweeping across a fiery sky. As usual, this mix comes packaged with a heavy dose of reverb and some fractured ballads.

1. Blanck Mass - Chernobyl
   Blanck Mass • Rock Action Records, 2011 • More
2. Alessandro Cortini - Gira
   Forse • Important Music, 2013 • More
3. M83 - On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain
   Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • More
4. Blade Runner interlude
5. Kristoffer Lo - Front Row Gallows View
   The Black Meat • Propellor Recordings, 2016 • More
6. Bremen - Entering Phase Two
   Bremen • Blackest Ever Black, 2014 • More

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.

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.

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

The sound of distant traffic shushing through late-night rain might be one of the most relaxing sounds I know. The same goes for a drowsy radio talking about light drizzle at the airport. But my favorite soundtrack for contemplation is slow-motion techno.

Over the years, slowing down my favorite songs has become a spiritual practice, and I’ve come here tonight to preach the poetics of pitched-down electronics. It’s a rebellion against time, a way to slow down the clock and peek into its gears. There is fascinating information in the heartbeat of a half-speed machine: gunk and grain, the unexpected pleasure of negative space. When I die, I’d like to spend eternity nestled in the bass of Pole’s "Modul". Until then, the best I can do is slow it down and make it last a little longer. And so this episode of Midnight Radio is devoted to the glory of slow-motion machinery, featuring five all-time favorites from the 1990s stretched out until they’re nice and roomy. For me, hearing the title track from Plastikman’s landmark Consumed at half-speed feels like a revelation.

Ventriloquism began as a religious practice. The word comes from Latin for “speak from the stomach”: venter (belly) and loqui (speak). The ancients believed the sounds produced by the belly belonged to the dead, and the ventriloquist would interpret these growls and grumbles because people thought they told the future. So who’s to say what’s spiritual today?

Tonight's mix is below, or you can download it here. It's doused in plenty of reverb and sprinkled with some doo-wop and torch songs by Nancy Sinatra, Ricky Nelson, Skeeter Davis, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers. (Here's a Spotify playlist if you'd like to hear the original songs at their normal speed.)

1. Richie Hawtin - 07 13-00 (54% slower)
   Concept 1 | 1996 | More
2. Pole - Modul (56% slower)
   1 | Matador, 1998 | More
3. Autechre - Yulquen (48% slower)
   Amber | Warp, 1994 | More
4. Basic Channel - Radiance II (44% slower)
   Radiance | Basic Channel, 1994 | More
5. Plastikman - Consumed (50% slower)
   Consumed | Minus, 1998 | More

These five songs rewired my brain when I first heard them 25 years ago, back when I had faith in the Information Superhighway and the new millennium. What will my nostalgia look like 25 years from now? I try to imagine myself as an old man, telling the kids about the good old days when every street corner had a Chase bank and a CVS, how we carried pieces of glass in our pockets that made us cranky. But in the meantime, let’s install roadside plaques across the nation that describe its hauntings and spiritual visions. Put a sign in front of a grain silo that says it’s a sculpture by a conceptual artist named Olive Garden. Return some myth to this fallen world.

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.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about driving fifty thousand miles back and forth across America. “Motorist” was part of my bio. I owned a radar detector. Then last year, I experienced a big budget panic attack on Interstate 15 while boxed between two semi-trucks. Soon I couldn’t even look at a highway ramp without seeing spots and getting dizzy. I began to research my routes in advance, telling myself I preferred the scenic route, even when going to the mall. I studied satellite images to ensure there would be side streets and shoulders, nothing that would leave me feeling boxed in again. My world got small.

Panic is an attack on reason. The world sparkles like it might evaporate. Arms go swimmy. The body feels like it’s been turned inside out, and the heart jackhammers against bone, trying to escape this mess. It’s a hell of a thing to experience at eighty miles per hour. Under these conditions, it's impossible to practice the tools I've learned for surviving the 21st century: breathe through the nose, tune into the moment, and remember that I belong to the deathless, that I'm a little beacon of joy beyond body and form. No, the lizard brain takes control: I scream. I hyperventilate. I swerve toward the nearest exit.

Why must the mind torture itself? They say a panic attack is residue from our Stone Age brains, a glitch in the wiring, although I fail to see how such a reaction would save me from a tiger. Or maybe panic disorder is a Jungian arrow pointing to an unsettled problem, and my anima needs alignment. But my hunch is that it’s genetic. My mother suffered terribly from agoraphobia. She avoided the highway, even as a passenger, and now this is happening to me. My inheritance.

So I’m giving psychology a shot, and it was long overdue. Gutting it out wasn’t getting me very far. My therapist taught me how to give myself a panic attack in twenty seconds flat, which is a fun party trick. He wants me to do this five times per day, and I do. At night, I drive the Midwestern highways, trying to get my interstate mojo back. Each day, I feel a bit better, even though the world feels a little more insane.

Perhaps my highway panic reflects a loss of faith in the human project. Because you have to kid yourself a little when you get on the freeway, not think about it too hard—all those speeding vehicles with distracted, angry, and anxious creatures at the wheel. You're relying upon blind faith they won’t hammer their brakes or punch the gas. And there might be a lesson here.

But who are these insomniacs and mutants who ride the suburban highways after midnight? I try to imagine their lives: the blonde in a Honda blowing kisses to herself in the rearview, the exhausted man with purple skin in a rusty pickup, the kid with wraparound shades on my bumper, teeth flashing like he wants to gnaw it. It’s enough to rattle the best of us, which brings us to tonight’s broadcast: five reassuring songs for midnight driving—sleek and glossy, something that sounds like the sight of neon washing across your hood.

The other day, my friend M. told me I might enjoy a band called the Glass Beams. Fortunately, I misheard their name, and that’s how I discovered my new favorite band, the Glass Beads: slick Ukrainian cold wave that kicks off tonight’s mix, followed by Tropic of Cancer’s heavenly reverb, then Robert Görl’s ‘Mit Dir,’ which might be the most perfect song ever made on this planet. Forty-one years later, it still sounds like the future. Then we have a deep cut from the high priests of night driving, Chromatics, before concluding with a glorious detour through Japan circa 1985. While stitching this mixtape together, I discovered C. has very strong opinions about her night driving soundtrack, and I thank her for making it better.

1. Glass Beads - City of Anger
   Therapy | Fabrika Records, 2020 | More
2. Tropic of Cancer - Court of Devotion
   Restless Idylls | Blackest Ever Black, 2013 | More
3. Robert Görl - Mit Dir
   Mute, 1983 | More
4. Chromatics - Lady Night Drive
   Cherry | Italians Do It Better, 2018 | More
5. Tomo Akikawabaya - A Dream of No Pillow
   The Invitation of The Dead | Minimal Wave, 1985 | More

Also includes reverberations of some sad-sack country music via Jack Greene and Hank Williams, a few grainy loops, and some paranoid ramblings I recorded from AM radio. You can download it here or listen below. If you prefer Spotify, here's a playlist, although you won't get any reverb or radio chatter.

Sometimes the sunlight filters through the sliding doors at Target in a way that reminds me of church. A honey-red radiance floods the self-checkout lanes and soaks the mannequins in Women’s Apparel. We pause our carts, and for a moment, there’s a hush.

Welcome to the second installment of Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs delivered 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month. I’m not sure who coined the term “death prom,” but it is a crucial sound in my life. The first and only mention of it I’ve found comes from Joe Colly’s 2011 review of Alex Zhang Hungtai’s important work as Dirty Beaches, which transforms mid-century Americana into spectral karaoke.

Death Prom should be a proper genre. But it’s more than a catchall for anything that evokes a saccharine 1950s ballad or girl bands named after jewels, their voices reverberated and ghostly. Here are my guidelines:

• Time is a factor. Listening to Roy Orbison in 1961 is not Death Prom, but hearing it bleed through the walls of a cheap motel in 2024 is very Death Prom.
• The urtext for Death Prom is Suicide’s "Surrender", a 1988 confection that injects a 1950s slow dance with dread.
• A doo-wop ballad from a long-dead one-hit wonder fighting its way through the radio static is the ultimate Death Prom sound.

Death Prom makes you feel a little seductive, perhaps leaning against a wall outside the party while you take a cinematic drag from a cigarette. But Death Prom also contains grief, bringing to mind Roland Barthes’s argument that every photograph is inherently morbid because it captures a moment lost to time. And Death Prom sounds like a faded photograph: a romanticized snapshot of youthful longing that exists only in hindsight. Most of all, Death Prom is about reverb; it's the sound of elegant decay and vapor trails.

It’s tempting to classify Death Prom as nostalgia, but I think its trajectory is forward-facing because it carries the dreams of the past into the present. It is a haunting.

And it's a fitting soundtrack for this unsettled season, in which everything seems to be happening at once yet also feels weirdly static. In a similar vein, I’m currently reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a sprawling, somewhat fractured novel in which the same airplane with the same passengers lands twice. This line resonated: “But when the remote control batteries are dead, we just keep pushing harder. It’s only human.”

Sadly, we're making more daylight every year because we broke the weather, but I hope tonight’s broadcast provides a moment of reprieve from this overheated summer. After a brief station identification featuring the Electrifying Mojo, we'll move through five essential ingredients of my Death Prom canon, including a pair of ballads from Detroit and Indonesia that seem to exist without any frame of reference or biographical information. Which is very Death Prom.

1. Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best
   Badlands | Zoo, 2011 | More
2. The Larados - Now the Parting Begins
   Detroit, 1957
3. Annie Rae - Bang Bung Ranggaek
   Indonesia, 1970
4. Suicide - Surrender
   NYC | Chapter 22, 1987 | More
5. Richard Swift - Would You?
   Ground Trouble Jaw | Secretly Canadian, 2008 | More

Also contains fragments from Skeeter Davis, The Teddybears, The Paris Sisters, The Righteous Brothers, Bobby Vinton, The Moody Blues, and Elvis Presley.

The mixtape is below, or you can download it here. If you prefer Big Streaming, here’s a Spotify playlist, but it doesn't contain half as much reverb or whispering at the edges or an earworm from Annie Rae.

Thank you for reading. And listening.

So there’s this guy with a belly that pokes out of his Harley Davidson t-shirt like a grin, and the other day, he walked up to me and said, “First thing I do every morning is send God a knee-mail,” and I hate him so much for saying this because now it’s lodged in my head whenever I try to pray. Maybe telling you will help me exorcise it.

Welcome to Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs + a brief ramble delivered 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month. Our debut broadcast begins with a stone summertime classic and some underrated Japanese dream pop, followed by a humid laser workout, a touch of Suicide, a river of Michigan space rock, and mountains of glorious reverb.

Now, about that summertime classic: there are nights when I listen to “Jesus Children of America” for hours, getting lost in its plush bassline before Stevie Wonder delivers a righteous inventory of America’s soul. He challenges those who claim religion as faith: “Tell me, holy roller, are you standing for everything you talk about?” He captures the hell of addiction: “Are you happy when you stick a needle in your vein? Tell the truth now.” And he sings like the world’s about to come undone at any moment: “You’d better tell your story fast.”

Three days after the song was released, Wonder was asleep in the passenger seat after a show in South Carolina when a truck loaded with timber hit its brakes. A log smashed through the windshield, and Wonder spent four days in a coma. “We brought one of his instruments—I think it was the Clavinet—to the hospital,” said a friend. "For a while, Stevie just looked at it. You could see he was afraid to touch it because he didn’t know if he still had it in him. He didn’t know if he could still play. And then, when he finally did . . . man, you could just see the happiness spreading all over him. I’ll never forget that."

That was fifty years ago. Wonder lost his sense of smell, but he found God. “Everything is the way it is supposed to be," he said. "The accident, losing the sense of smell — everything that has ever happened to me is the way it is supposed to have been. I wrote ‘Higher Ground’ before the accident. Something must have been telling me that something was going to happen to make me aware of a lot of things and get myself together.”

I’m still getting myself together. It’s a never-ending project. Last year, I made an album to accompany my bouts of late-night writing. I’m doing my best to be less self-righteous. And I moved from Vegas to Ohio.

Now for tonight's broadcast: after a brief station identification, we'll hear the Electrifying Mojo tell us to flash our headlights because he's our spirit animal for this endeavor, then we'll drop into a loop or two before moving through five songs that work best during a heatwave:

1. Stevie Wonder - Jesus Children of America
   Innervisions | Tamla, 1973 | More
2. Sugar Plant - Rise
   Happy | 7th Heaven, 1998 | More
3. Actress - Hubble
   Thriller, 2009 | More
4. Suicide - Cheree (Remix)
   Suicide | Bronze Records, 1978 | More
5. Füxa - Karmaloop
   Accretion | Mind Expansion, 1998 | More

The mix is below. If you prefer Big Streaming, here’s a Spotify playlist, although it’s not nearly as interesting as the static and reverb of the proper midnight broadcast, which also includes some advice at the nineteen-minute mark for how to relax circa 1963.

Liner notes: https://www.jamesreeves.co/heatwave/