Midnight Radio

James A. Reeves

5.0 (4)
Arts
Updated Semimonthly

Inspired by the Electrifying Mojo's broadcasts, Midnight Radio is a short burst of late-night reverberations, inspirations, and a mixtape delivered ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month. Every episode is available in its full Technicolor glory at jamesreeves.co.

Sep 6

How to Think About Dreams

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. cv313 - Forever in the Sky [Excerpt]Plays Sequential Space • Echospace, 2025 • BandcampTomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash - Anone NoneAt The Emerald Pool • Melody as Truth, 2026 • BoomkatFennesz - In My RoomAgora • Touch, 2019 • BandcampDonato Dozzy - Vaporware 01Plays Bee Mask • Spectrum Spools, 2013 • BandcampWindy & Carl with Optigan Conservatory - Coast StarlightWindy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory • Kranky, 2026 • BoomkatSisters of Mercy - Neverla...
Aug 16

A Torchlight Shining at the Bastards

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. David Sylvian - Preparations for a JourneyAlchemy: An Index Of Possibilities • Virgin, 1985 • BoomkatCaterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske - Intuition, NimbusAt Source • Light Years, 2026 • BandcampCinna Peyghamy - Glass Teeth 94Music For Tombak & Synth • Other People, 2026 • BandcampAndy Stott - Luxury ProblemsLuxury Problems • Modern Love, 2012 • BoomkatSylvester - I Need Somebody to Love TonightStars • Fantasy, 1979Agile Experiments - MysteriesHavana • None More Records, 2026 • BandcampKing Tubby & Yabby U - Tubby’s Vengeance (48% slower)Conquering Lion • Prophecy, 1975 Q-Burns Abstract Message - Uncertain T (52% slower)Mixed Emotions: Jazz In The Eighth Dimension Volume One • Eighth Dimension Records, 1995Radwan Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland - Walked and Walked سار و سارEternal Life No End ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها • Constellation, 2026 • BandcampTim Hecker - Music of the AirLove Streams • 4AD, 2016 • BandcampCabaret ...
Aug 2

Air Conditioning

1One 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. 2Sometimes 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. 4So 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. Training Chamber - Senza CorpoTriple Mirror • Downwards, 2026 • BandcampMnemonics - DepthsMnemonic Devices • Workshop Records, 2025 • BandcampHTRK - DyingLilac • Ghostly International, 2020 • BandcampJames Murray - ShallowsIslands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • BandcampBasic Channel - Radiance II (63% slower)Chain Reaction, 1995 • BoomkatAnthony Naples - PerixIn Studio Magic • ANS, 2026 • BandcampLa Marr - Good MagicMood Programs • Music From Memory, 2026 • BandcampRod Modell - Mediterranea II (Excerpt)Mediterranea • 2016 • Echospace 313James A. Reeves - Crocodile EyeCrocodile Eye • God Is All Mouth, 2026 YL Hooi - TitleUntitled • Altered States Tapes, 2021 • BandcampAphex Twin - Tha (112.5% slower)Selected Ambient WorksChristopher 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.
Jul 16

Open the Door of the Cosmos

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. JakoJako & Rødhåd - Passeri/HeloniasIn Vere • WSNWG, 2022 • BandcampLyder - BrackWeird.fishes • tunnel.visions, 2025 • BandcampRrose - Rib CagePlease Touch • Eaux, 2023 • BandcampSkee Mask - Session Add Compro • Ilian Tape, 2018 • BandcampPolygonia - Ceaseless MotionCeaseless Motion • Timedance, 2026 • BandcampThe Upsetters - Super ApeSuper Ape • Black Ark, 1976Prince Far I & The Arabs - Final Chapter/Shake the NationCry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III • Daddy Kool, 1980 • BandcampRas G - Been CosmicBack on the Planet • Brainfeeder, 2013 • BandcampSun Ra & His Arkestra - Door of the CosmosSleeping Beauty • El Saturn, 1979 • BandcampCarlos 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 • BandcampMandré - Solar Flight (Opus I)Mandré • Motown, 1977Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where the Hatred IsPieces of a Man • Flying Dutchman Records, 1971 • Wax PoeticsCannibal Ox - Iron GalaxyThe Cold Vein • Definitive Jux, 2021Binary Star - Reality CheckMasters of the Universe • 2020 • BandcampWata Igarashi - MineralMastery Quantum Sound • Houndstooth, 2026 • BandcampVince Staples and Lil Baby - East Point Prayer (Vocals only)Ramona Park Broke My Heart • 2022Erykah Badu - Out of My Mind, Just in Time (Vocals only)New Amerykah, Part Two (Return of the Ankh) • 2010Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.
Jul 2

The Shimmer

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. Mister Baby - Canyon City BluesEP • 2023 • BandcampMidwife - AngelPrayer Hands • Antiquated Future, 2018 • BandcampSugar Plant - ImpureTrance Mellow • Pony Canyon, 1996 • BandcampHilary Woods - FaultsNight CRIÚ • Sacred Bones, 2018 • BandcampRomance & Not Waving - Shepherd's DreamWings Of Desire • Ecstatic, 2024 • BandcampFlying Saucer Attack - Instrumental WishDistance • VHF, 1994 • BandcampBrian Eno - Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960Ambient 4: On Land • EG Records, 1982Éliane Radigue - Kyema (Excerpt)Trilogie de la Mort • 1988 • BandcampWindy & Carl - The SunWe Will Always Be • Kranky, 2012 • BandcampTonight 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 b******t. 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.
Jun 16

The Age of the Holy Spirit

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 h******k 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...
Jun 2

Dream Theory

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. Pink Floyd - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (19% slower)A Saucerful of Secrets • 1968Flavor Crystals - Cetecea (Seefeel Adjustment)Five • 2020 • BandcampAnthony Calonico - CollapsingSpacious Heart • Music From Memory, 2026 • BandcampAna Roxanne - Wishful (Draft)Poem 1 • Kranky, 2026 • BandcampBlackwater - OaxacaNavigation • Ethbo, 2021 • BandcampBruce Springsteen - State Trooper (15% slower)Nebraska • 1982The Dengie Hundred - TamarBrackenbank • Ethbo, 2022 • BandcampRoly Porter - Al DhanabAftertime • Subtext, 2011 • BandcampSpiritualized - Electric Mainline IIElectric Mainline • 1993 • Archive.orgCocteau Twins - Cherry-Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)Otherness • Fontana, 1995Variant - The Setting SunThe Setting Sun • Field Records, 2009/2026 • BandcampMika Vainio - Set the Controls for the Heart of the SunOleva • Sahko, 2024 • BandcampThank you for reading and listening. 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.
May 16

Star Demon

My first memory is sitting in a high chair in front of a small Zenith television. The opening credits for a sitcom played, maybe Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley, and there was a shenanigan that involved kissing a mannequin. It scared the hell out of me, and I screamed until my father patted my head, called me “big guy,” and changed the channel. For years, my mom couldn’t take me into a department store because I was so horrified by mannequins. Much of our shopping at Sears took place with her hand over my eyes. Read the full post. Maybe it’s the simultaneous knowing and not-knowing that makes anything resonate. Tonight we have some half-understood Midnight Radio variants of six songs from Andrea Mazzariello’s War Footing playbook—rewired, filtered, and slowed down between 21% and 94%: Fair Is Foul Is Fair (Astronomical Dub)43:1 (Tranquil + Justified)Aspirational Gardening (Cosmic Harvest)80s Death (Redshifted + Microwaved)Post Nova (Initial Singularity)Pre-Post (Final Singularity)Andrea Mazzariello (words, keyboards, synths, programming, drums), Brady Lenzen (bass), Jason Treuting (drums and percussion), JC Sanford (brass), Dan Trueman (strings), Mike Williams (acoustic guitars), Andy Flory (electric guitars) 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.

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Inspired by the Electrifying Mojo's broadcasts, Midnight Radio is a short burst of late-night reverberations, inspirations, and a mixtape delivered ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month. Every episode is available in its full Technicolor glory at jamesreeves.co.

Creator

James A. Reeves
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

53
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2026 Midnight Radio LLC
Show Website

Midnight Radio