Midnight Radio

James A. Reeves

5.0 (3)
ARTS
UPDATED SEMIMONTHLY

Inspired by the Electrifying Mojo, 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. Some episodes will be available in partial form as a podcast. Many will not. But every episode of Midnight Radio is available in its full Technicolor glory at jamesreeves.co.

16H AGO

Night Flight to Vienna

Read the full post with notes on the lectio divina. I'm writing this on a Vienna-bound airplane. A full moon shines over the Atlantic, which is roiling away down there in the dark, and I suppose I'm inside a piece of deadly hardware. I've been keeping a simple journal where I try to write a sentence about my life each day even though I sometimes forget. But I'm hoping to remember in Vienna, where C. and I will visit the Venus of Willendorf, Bruegel's Tower of Babel, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 16th-century fever dreams. I love flying at night, cocooned in a netherworld beyond space and time, and tonight we'll listen to the music that has been soundtracking this sensation. This hour-long installment kicks off with a synthesizer chorus from Richie Hawtin's 1993 debut as F.U.S.E. Then comes a soulful slab of dub techno that my friend Earl casually sent me the other day, which bleeds into a wonderfully fuzzy track from A New Line (Related)—the territory between cozy and spectral is tough to locate, but these two songs live in its downtown. Then we'll take a cold plunge into some deep winter chug with slow-motion glaciers from Monolake, cv313, and the Field (god, those drums at the 41:40 mark). F.U.S.E. - Night Drive Dimension Intrusion | Plus 8, 1993 | BandcampMy Friend Earl - Snowblow 2026 | BandcampA New Line (Related) - Crewe Away Crewe Away | Sound in Silence, 2025 | BandcampMonolake - Cyan (44% slower) Hong Kong | Chain Reaction, 1997 | BandcampTropic of Cancer - Dive (Wheel of the Law) The Sorrow Of Two Blooms | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | Boomkat The Field - Leave It (31% slower) Yesterday and Today | Kompakt, 2009 | Bandcampcv313 - Beyond the Clouds Reprise II (19% slower) Beyond the Clouds (Reprised) | Echospace [Detroit], 2011 | BandcampWe return to land with a brief pitched-down snippet of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" because I really enjoyed The Bone Temple. A quick shout-out to M for introducing me to Critchley, the lectio divina, and many other new flows of intensity. And a tremendous thank you to everybody who has been testing Spite and taking time to send such helpful feedback. I'm genuinely shocked and delighted by the interest in this grouchy mp3 player—there are 3 The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

1 hr
JAN 16

Darkly Euphoric

Mike Doyle is here with us tonight to inaugurate the First Very Special Guest Episode of Midnight Radio. “Hi, I’m Mike. I’ve been a culture enthusiast my whole life. Obsessed with learning and sharing, my dream job was to be a magazine editor. I DJ’d my junior high dances and was editor of my high school newspaper, which led to co-founding the DJ groups Dorkwave and Dethlab, and the blog Burnlab, and contributing to design sites Core77 and Archinect when the internet was exciting. I’m also an exhibit designer, designed albums for Solvent and Matthew Dear for Ghostly International, and produced music events in Detroit because nobody else would fly artists like MOTOR and Vitalic at the time. At the Godspeed You! Black Emperor show in Detroit recently, James asked if I’d like to do a guest mix for Midnight Radio. I was thrilled, but wanted it to be collaborative: I’d submit a playlist and James would do his editing magic. And here we are.” And here’s the question I will ask all Midnight Radio guests: Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? Please describe your metaphysics in 150 words or less. To which Mike replied, “Do I believe in God? No. Not the Christian god that’s watching you masturbate. I am fascinated by the invisible forces of the universe. If I could choose a superpower, it would be to see, hear, and feel all the waves outside the visible and audible spectrums.” With new waves in mind, here are some songs he loves. Liars - No. 1 Against the Rush WIXIW | Mute, 2012 | BandcampCold Cave - Double Lives in Single Beds Love Comes Close | Heartworm Press, 2009 | BandcampTelefon Tel Aviv - You are the Worst Thing in the World Immolate Yourself | BPitch Control, 2009 | BandcampThe Horrors - Sea Within a Sea Primary Colours | XL Recordings, 2009ERAAS - Fang ERAAS | Felte, 2012 | Bandcamp Adult. - Tonight We Fall The Way Things Fall | Ghostly International, 2013 | BandcampA Place to Bury Strangers - Love Reaches Out (GIFT/Reality Delay Mixes) See Through You Rerealized | 2023 | BandcampThis mix has become an ideal companion for cold January night drives and early morning runs. I’m so glad Mike reminded me of ERAAS, who produced some of the sleekest yet underrated synthpop I’ve heard. He selected “Briar Path” but I made an eleventh-hour switch to “Fang” because it’s a personal favorite and I wanted to loop its drums. Also swapped in a couple of remixes that transform "Love Reaches Out" into an M83-style anthem that delivers some good advice for surviving what looks to be another dreadful year: Love reaches out to everyone, not as much as it'd like to, but you gotta keep the dream alive. There’s something very satisfying to me about the fact that this mix is exactly 33 m The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

34 min
JAN 2

First Things

Three songs that possess the righteously serene energy I fantasize about cultivating in the first minutes of a new year. Then the actual year starts happening. But playing this mix each morning should keep the dream alive. Read the full post. Kali Malone - Spectacle of Ritual The Sacrificial Code | Ideal Recordings, 2019 | BandcampAbul Mogard - Desires Are Reminiscences By Now The Sky Had Vanished | Ecstatic, 2015 | BandcampAutechre - VLetrmx21 (65% slower) Garbage | Warp, 1995 | BandcampThe request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

34 min
12/16/2025

Holiday Lullaby

Here in the Middle West, we’ve already enjoyed two excellent snowstorms, which augurs well for a proper winter. Although the year is winding down, the future is still coming fast and dumb. The people in charge are hellbent on giving us artificially intelligent colleagues and companions, and they’re banking on a heavy assumption: that we value the sense of a relationship more than a living person. That we will privilege the feeling over the fact. They might not be wrong. For the past year, C. and I have been playing with a scenario that gives this fork some teeth. Read it here. * * * The first seven songs are table-setting for Me-Sheen’s “Sonic Lullaby,” one of the most beautiful songs in my canon. I came across it in 1997 on one of those ponderous “Excursions in Ambience” CDs with hellacious cover art and it’s been living in my head ever since. But first we kick off with Julianna Barwick’s “Prizewinning”, a song that’s somehow lulling and thrilling at once. It never fails to leave me cheering and C. plays it all the time, so it’s definitely a winner. There’s also a spiritualized vocoder workout from Matchess, a nugget of AM radio gold, and a powerful burst of dub techno from Vril—I hope to be reincarnated as the low-end whir on “Infinitum Eternis Anime” and join the rings of Saturn. And tonight there’s plenty of reverb to carry us into the holidays, along with fragments of some 1950s Welsh miners singing carols because I’m feeling festive. Julianna Barwick - Prizewinning The Magic Place | Asthmatic Kitty, 2011 | BandcampMatchess - Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes Sacracorpa | Trouble in Mind, 2018 | BandcampVril - Infinitum Eternis Anime Anima Mundi | Delsin, 2018 | BandcampAir - Le Soleil Est Près de Moi (28% slower) Premiers Symptômes | Parlophone, 1997Eagles - I Can't Tell You Why (20% slower) The Long Point | Asylum Records, 1979Voices From the Lake - Max Live at MAXXI, 2015 | BandcampMe-Sheen - Sonic Lullaby Electronic Membrain | Reflective, 1995Rhos Male Voice Choir: Psalm 23 / Holy Night + Vril loop Carols From The Welsh Mines, 1958 | MoreFor upbeat holiday music, please attend last year’s Professional Holiday Party. Thank you for listening. The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

51 min
12/02/2025

Slow Gold

Like my thoughts on egg foo young and tornados, tonight’s broadcast is all over the map—but I’m increasingly fond of intensely personal playlists that ratfuck the algorithm. We kick off with a Breakfast Club anthem pitched down into Sisters of Mercy gloom, followed by a heavy slice of Detroit electro I bought in '95 and played to death, entranced by its bottomless growl. Years later, I heard this track on a compilation CD and realized it was meant to be played at 45rpm. This might be the godhead of my passion for slowing things down, and the ritual continues with a song from ’74 that reminds me of my parents’ kitchen and the big romance they had when they were young. Then comes a dub techno staple that sounds like a beautiful machine at 40% speed, which gives way to a Swans track I love. It came to mind after reading Adam Greenfield’s delightful piece about wanting to eat God while watching them perform—and I discovered “Leaving Meaning” degrades into a lovely ambient song if you fiddle with the equalizer and douse it in reverb. Then we head to heartbeat city, here we come. Simple Minds - Don’t You Forget About Me (38% slower) The Breakfast Club | 1985 | MoreWill Web - Spacewalk (30% slower) Cosmic Driveby | Direct Beat, 1995The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe (20% slower) Hollies | EMI, 1974Vladislav Delay - Huone (46% slower) Multila | Chain Reaction, 2000 | BandcampSwans - Leaving Meaning (20% slower) Leaving Meaning | Mute, 2019 | BandcampPole - Hafen (40% slower) 2 | Kliff/Matador, 1999 | BandcampAphex Twin - #1 (Cliffs) (42% slower) Selected Ambient Works II | Warp, 1994 | BandcampThe Cars - Jacki (31% slower) Heartbeat City | Elektra, 1984Thank you for listening. The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

48 min
11/16/2025

Absorb the Poison

An ode to Michael Clayton and the giddy renewal before death. Read the full post. "I took a deep, cleansing breath and I put that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself, As clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time. And Michael, the time is now." So the hour has come for some Tom Wilkinson and George Clooney interlaced with five pieces of profound bass and machine grind. And plenty of amniotic, embryonic reverb. Try to make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness.Richie Hawtin + Thomas Brinkmann - 96:12/24:00 VR Concept | 1998 | BandcampAs potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time.HTRK - Poison (Mika Vainio Remix) Ghostly International, 2013 | BandcampYes, the nudity in the parking lot was a mistake, I admit it. It was wrong. It was lame. It was obvious. And therapeutically, it was completely useless.TM404 - 202/303/303/303/606/606 Kontra, 2013 | BandcampIs that the correct answer to the multiple choice of me?Tropic of Cancer - Stop Suffering Blackest Ever Black, 2015 | BoomkatWhat makes this feel good is that I don’t know where this goes.µ-Ziq - Peppermint Aero Manzana | Balmat, 2025 | BandcampYou think you got the horses for that? Well good luck and god bless.The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

37 min
11/02/2025

The Heart Keeps Time

The clocks roll back an hour tonight, and it’s my favorite moment of the year. Not only does it bring the night closer, it reminds me that if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Remove days from the week. Reset the internet to 2009. Have a functional government. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest holiday with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Tonight’s soundtrack harmonizes with this idea of time. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been smudging my favorite mid-century vocals across a heartbeat drum and some loops that were trapped in my delay pedal. The result is an hour-long soundtrack composed for Grace Wang’s photography exhibition, The Heart Has Not Stopped, at Clark Centre for the Arts in Toronto. “Through dreamlike, layered images created with in-camera multiple exposures on film, Wang evokes fleeting moments of memory and time—an intimate meditation on a world both beautiful and unknowable.” The show runs through November 30. (If you can't make it, you can look at some of Grace's photos here.) Grace’s images combine the haze of memory with the shock of color and unexpected overlays that edge toward the spectral. I tried to capture this sensation by letting bursts of Patsy Cline, Rebekah Del Rio, Nancy Sinatra, The Platters, Yao Su-jung, Roy Orbison, and other familiar voices gradually unfurl. In addition to these samples, the final track was built from tape loops, pitched-down field recordings, and a couple of selections from the excellent Echospace sound library. Thank you for listening. The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

1 hr
10/16/2025

Hallucination Soundtrack

I spent my high school nights making cassette loops, hunched over the guts of a disemboweled Maxell, splicing bits of brown magnetic tape and piecing everything back together with a jeweler’s screwdriver. I remember the purple-black energies that burbled at the back of my mind, the shimmery thoughts that take hold while intently making something. Thirty years later, I suppose I’m doing this again with Midnight Radio, only now I’m stitching together songs in an overheated and disembodied world I wouldn't have recognized back then. Read the full post. We kick off with some slow-motion Slowdive. When I asked my friend S. if it sounded cool or cursed, he said "Both." Then comes a slow variant of a track from Belong's stone classic, Common Era, which towers above Loveless and Souvlaki when it comes to gazeability. Autechre's "Bronchusevenmx24" sounds like the heat shimmer on the horizon when the pavement warps and boils, a mirage that Italian sailors called vecchie signore che balla: old ladies dancing. The ladies are even more visible when it’s slowed down. And moving through the shimmer to fourth century Ethiopia, liturgies in the Christian church were accompanied by the benega, a stringed instrument "given to king David by God, and brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I, together with the Ark of the Covenant." But the singer's voice is the true instrument here, offering a fragile melody that brings to mind the thoughts of a kid taking apart cassette tapes. And finally, a chilled cup of stone tea with an excerpt from one of Stephen Hitchell's hour-long excursions before we wind down with some drowsy My Bloody Valentine. Slowdive - Machine Gun (50% slower) Souvlaki, 1993 • MoreBelong - A Walk (22% slower) Common Era • BandcampSlowdive - Mousakka Chaos (20% slower) Souvlaki, 1993Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24 (25% slower) Garbage, 1995 • BandcampSosena Gebre Eyesus - Save Us From Our Death The World Is But a Place of Survival: Begena Songs from Ethiopia | Bandcampcv313 - Depths of Perception (Excerpt) Depths of Perception, 2022 | MoreMy Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (45% slower) Loveless, 1991 | MoreMy Bloody Valentine - Instrumental B 1988, featuring a Public Enemy sample | MoreDusted with static and murmurations from Spiritualized, Dean Martin, and always and forever, Nancy Sinatra. The request lines are open. Enjoy life and get the full Midnight Radio experience delivered directly to your inbox ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month.

42 min

5

out of 5

3 Ratings

Inspired by the Electrifying Mojo, 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. Some episodes will be available in partial form as a podcast. Many will not. But every episode of Midnight Radio is available in its full Technicolor glory at jamesreeves.co.

Creator

James A. Reeves
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

21
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2026 Midnight Radio
Show Website

Midnight Radio