1
Last night I dreamt my mother was alive and serving a delicious tea brewed from stones. I woke up pondering the feedback loop of life: is there anything we eat or drink that wasn’t once alive?
This morning C. turned me on to Simon Critchley’s argument that “it’s impossible to be an atheist while listening to the music you love.” This sounds right because I spent my high school nights making cassette loops, hunched over the plastic 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.
2
But why does talking about God feel so tacky? Strange how the grammar of damage is so vivid and precise, endlessly inventive—torched, shanked, concussed—while the vocabulary of peace remains squelchy and limp, reduced to cloudy words like serenity and bliss. I do not know how to speak about faith without feeling embarrassed, annoyed at the saccharine pitch in my voice. Language fails. Hell can be described in a thousand ways, but heaven remains impossible to grasp.
3
Thinking about God is hard. Deciding to live with a powerful ghost is not for the faint of heart.
My first memory of God: crouched on the yellow linoleum of the kitchen, maybe six or seven years old and feverishly rubbing a white crayon into a dark piece of construction paper while the Iran Contra scandal unfolded above me on a little black-and-white on the countertop, back in the days when politicians could be shamed.
When I had finished, I scribbled “God” in the bottom corner of my drawing, and I remember feeling a little crazy while doing it. But the strongest part of this memory is my certainty that I had uncovered what God looked like and not understanding why my mother wasn’t more impressed.
What inspired this in a little kid?
4
My childhood scribble came to mind while reading Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy, which outlines a fleshy, breathing creature who was just as messy as the rest of us, prone to laughter, jealousy, and despair. I dig how Stavrakopoulou captures the psychology of three thousand years ago:
“The cosmic membrane separating the earthly from the otherworldly was highly porous and malleable, so that divinity in all its myriad forms could break through into the world of humans, whether it was perceived as a strange scent on the wind, a fleeting shape glimpsed from the corner of the eye, or felt at a powerful place in the landscape.”
So I’ve been thinking about the cosmic membrane, which Madeline Miller’s Circe plays with beautifully. Her generous retelling of Greek myth was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years.
As I listen to tonight's broadcast now, I realize it got messy when I wasn't looking, which might make it one of my favorites. Revelations and mental rearrangements always seem to occur when I’m not paying attention.
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 | More - Belong - A Walk ( 22% slower)
Common Era | Bandcamp - Slowdive - Mousakka Chaos (20% slower)
Souvlaki, 1993 - Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24 (25% slower)
Garbage, 1995 | Bandcamp - Sosena Gebre Eyesus - Save Us from Our Death
The World Is But a Place of Survival: Begena Songs from Ethiopia | Bandcamp - cv313 - Depths of Perception (Excerpt)
Depths of Perception, 2022 | More - My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (45% slower)
Loveless, 1991 | More - My Bloody Valentine - Instrumental B
1988, featuring a Public Enemy sample | More
Dusted with static and murmurations from Spiritualized, Dean Martin, and always and forever, Nancy Sinatra. Here's a powerful mp3 and a fleeting podcast link.
Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.
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