Ghosts and Gods

1

Here are my all-time favorite lyrics:

A piece of brain in my hair
The wheels are melting
A ghost is screaming your name

They come from M83’s “Don’t Save Us from the Flames”, and like Rutger Hauer’s monologue about C-beams glittering in the dark, this handful of words conjures an entire world—alien yet somehow known.

I’d like to hear a ghost scream my name. Every now and then, I crave proof that there’s some magic in this fallen world. But if it were to arrive, I’d probably be terrified. Or else you’d find me on a street corner with a sandwich board, screaming at the sky. I’ve never understood the person who claims to have peeked behind the veil yet continues to send emails and worry about their checking account.

Ghosts are scarier than demons, I think, because they’re a presence rather than a desire. They simply are. It’s up to us to live with them.

2

The twenty-first century has some terrible lyrics:

Recommended for you
Because you liked
Here’s something we think you’ll enjoy
Based on your interests
Curated for you.

Every day is a fight for control. Algorithms gnaw at my agency, hijacking even something as mundane as deciding which TV show to watch, something I used to be able to figure out on my own.

Sometimes it feels like a gut punch, the sight of us weaving along sidewalks and hallways like ghosts, gazing into an illuminated piece of glass. At some point the screen became the world, and now we're haunting it.

But there was a time when people believed sin might cause the stars to fall out of the sky, therefore only the virtuous should practice astronomy. So who knows what the future holds.

3

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go, then it unfurls into its own strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge.

“My brothers, my father, my mother—they all wanted to be understood. But as soon as I truly understood them, they started to hate me for it. To them, being known was the same as being controlled.”

Better than any thinkpiece about the future, Kawakami conjures the horror and wonder of our species giving way to another as a felt experience that left me shaken in ways both satisfying and horrified. She might be writing from the year 5000 and telling us the news.

4

In 1977, Roland Barthes described listening as “an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the ‘underside’ of meaning.” He believed this attentive mode was religious in the literal sense because it binds—or ligatures—the listener to “the hidden world of the gods, who, as everyone knows, speak a language of which only a few enigmatic fragments reach men, though it is vital—cruelly enough—for them to understand this language.”

I encountered this argument in Ben Raitfliff’s Run the Song. He applies it to classical music, but I think it captures the spectral quality of dub techno, how it strips the body to its essence and raises it as a shadow: machine drums that once sounded like the future become a heartbeat thump, reverberated like the chug of blood in the veins, sometimes paired with the skeletal snap of a high-hat or snare, always drenched in tape hiss that reminds us hauntings are analogue, not digital.

There’s some of this in tonight’s broadcast. After extending a loop from Suicide until it becomes a dirge, we’ll encounter the heavyweight churn of Variant’s “Foil”, followed by the Superpitcher remix of “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, a pitched-down dose of AM radio glory, and finally, Basic Channel’s landmark “Inversion”. The original burbles along at a swift 132 beats per minute yet its extended phrases of metallic shimmer approach ambient terrain. This is what Barthes’s sacred fragments sound like to me.

Suicide - Cheree
Bronze, 1978 | More
Variant - Foil
Dreaming Thru Vector | Echospace Detroit, 2014 | Bandcamp
M83 - Don’t Save Us From the Flames (Superpitcher Remix)
Before The Dawn Heals Us: Remixes and B-Sides | Gooom, 2005
Gerry Rafferty - Down the Line (30% slower)
City to City | 1978 | More
Basic Channel - Inversion (46% slower)
1994 | Boomkat

As always, these tracks are laced with echoes from Nancy Sinatra, the Paris Sisters, the Zombies, the Righteous Brothers, and more. I think they pair especially well with pitched-down and fuzzed-out dub techno. Listen below or download this pale blue mp3 before it turns to vapor.

Hooray for the first anniversary of Midnight Radio! Thank you for celebrating with me—and for the notes of encouragement that have carried me along and made this a reassuring ritual throughout this unfortunate and humiliating season. I’ve never managed to keep a public-facing endeavor going for such a long stretch, but I intend to keep doing it until I’m dead or bored, whichever comes first.

In the meantime, I’m compiling the first year of writing into a little book, cleverly titled Midnight Radio Volume 1, and it will include other bits and bobs about faith, ghosts, and reverb. I’m still fiddling with the design, but if everything goes according to plan (which it probably won’t), it should be available in August.

Speaking of "Don't Save Us From the Flames," a couple of years ago, I used it to soundtrack this video mood board of the ghost story I've been writing and rewriting for years.

In other news, C. and I were invited to create a futuristic temple at the McConnell Center for the Arts in 2027. It’s an excellent space here in Columbus, Ohio, and we’re looking forward to filling it with neon and echoes, assuming there’s still an Ohio and we’re not eaten by robots before then.

But the most exciting thing arrived in a small box from Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Looking ahead to the Ides of July, longtime friend of Midnight Radio, Michael Donaldson, recently mentioned he’d appreciate some more hiss-soaked reverberations along the lines of Variant’s "Foil"—this will be the next episode, and it might be several days long.

Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.