1.
Woke up the other day and the pain was gone. The torment of gum surgery had ended. My mouth felt okay. “Back to my old self,” I thought as I shuffled into the bathroom to get ready for dim sum with the in-laws. Might as well trim my beard. The guard on my clippers clattered into the sink and I accidentally mowed a three-inch wide slash across my face. Nothing to do but completely shave it off, and now my head looks too small. But it was a helpful reminder that everything changes and there’s no going back to the way we were.
2.
But sometimes it’d be nice to go back. Maybe to 2006 or so. Before the internet rotted our politics and stranded our culture in ever-narrowing rabbit holes made by black box algorithms. This is why I’ve spent the past month building an altar for the holy format of the MP3.
Apple has turned iTunes into a sluggish beast that harasses you into renting your music. Other music players don’t work how I want. I craved a dead-simple music app that 1) displays big album artwork; 2) allows me to share a library with C; 3) doesn’t feel like managing a spreadsheet; and 4) automatically delivers playlists to my telephone before I go for a drive or a run. All built on bulletproof XML files rather than proprietary mysteries in the ether.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so consumed by a project, but this is what happens when you have a dream. Before I got started, I asked some friends if they’d like to help. They wished me luck. “To hell with them,” I told C. “I’ll build it anyway and destroy Spotify and Apple.” C smiled and said that spite was an interesting reason to make something.
Spite is now ready for beta-testing. If you’d like to give it a whirl, let me know. If everything goes according to plan and I don’t accidentally mow a three-inch path through my code, Spite should be ready for the world very soon.
3.
If we ever do go back in time, I’d like to show you Burnlab because it was the best example of where the Information Superhighway should have taken us. When I moved from Michigan to New York City in 2001, my taste was deep but narrow: Basic Channel, Thomas Brinkmann, Plastikman, etc. Fellow metro-Detroiter Mike Doyle followed a similar path, but he was always a few miles ahead of me. His publication, Burnlab, turned me on to new ways of thinking about visual culture and opened me up to the spiky electro-goth of bands like Telefon Tel Aviv and Adult. I credit him with returning vocals to my life, priming me to fall in love with everything from Public Image Limited to HTRK.
Today, a quick search for Burnlab coughs up an alpha-fuckhead fitness venture and a startup that “develops sophisticated autonomous AI agents that can make intelligent decisions with minimal human intervention”—even though human intervention is the whole fucking point of being on this planet. These search results are a dismal yet accurate portrait of what we’ve lost over the past twenty years. But there’s no going back.
And this is why I’m especially delighted 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 | Bandcamp - Cold Cave - Double Lives in Single Beds
Love Comes Close | Heartworm Press, 2009 | Bandcamp - Telefon Tel Aviv - You are the Worst Thing in the World
Immolate Yourself | BPitch Control, 2009 | Bandcamp - The Horrors - Sea Within a Sea
Primary Colours | XL Recordings, 2009 - ERAAS - Fang
ERAAS | Felte, 2012 | Bandcamp - Adult. - Tonight We Fall
The Way Things Fall | Ghostly International, 2013 | Bandcamp - A Place to Bury Strangers - Love Reaches Out (GIFT/Reality Delay Mixes)
See Through You Rerealized | 2023 | Bandcamp
The title of tonight’s episode comes from Mike's post-Burnlab blog, a variant on Bruce Sterling's 2009 announcement at a conference in Copenhagen that days of dark euphoria were upon us: intense digital-driven pleasure that masks societal collapse and crisis. These seven glittering tracks fit the bill, and they've become an ideal companion for cold January night drives and early morning runs.
I’m 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. I also couldn’t work in Holly Herndon’s "Fade", Nick Cave’s "Spinning Song", or Chelsea Wolfe’s "Survive"—but if you listen close, reverberated traces of all three songs haunt this broadcast.
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 minutes and 33 seconds.
Thank you for listening.
Download | Podcast
