James A. Reeves
A writer and designer in the Middle West who makes midnight mix tapes and writes about faith in the digital age.

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The Stellar Sphere
I attempted to take a long-exposure of C. but she wouldn't sit still.

The Stellar Sphere

Let’s focus on the new.

Feels like the 21st century is just getting started but we’re already a quarter of the way through. I don’t think I’m going to survive it. I often think about a blurry voice I heard on the radio while driving through Texas: “We can’t wipe the blood from our eyes fast enough to see what’s coming next.”

One night C. and I sat among the dunes in Death Valley, stunned by the stillness save for the murmur of distant lovers and families. Two dunes over, a family bickered in Mandarin before the husband slowly slid away from his wife, inching down the slope. After sunset, we turned our attention to the stars. I felt so peaceful, stretched on the sand next to C. while gazing at the night. “Look, a shooting star!” she cried. “Or maybe a plane is going down.”

The first philosophers were astronomers, leathery desert creatures who squinted into the night and believed the stars were wise. Here's a sublime image of the afterlife from Posidonius, written two thousand years ago: “The virtuous rise to the stellar sphere and spend their time watching the stars go round.” Three hundred years later, Plotinus agreed. Our souls must join the stars, he thought, because “the heavenly bodies naturally inspire and make man less lonely in this physical universe.” Living in the final days of the Roman Empire, he turned away from “the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty.”

Or take the word disaster, the inversion of astro, a term that means a negative star, a kink in the heavens that leads to catastrophe.

Human fuckery has been going on for a while now, even if today it feels more dimwitted and earthbound. But the only difference is its delivery: the headlines and opinions that bleed through our screens and seem to seep through the floorboards, hijacking and poisoning the decent urge to bear witness.

Anyway, tonight I’m thinking about time, how difficult eras produce otherworldly philosophy, and whether there’s anything new or if this is just how it feels to get old. I suppose having artificial intelligence foisted upon us is new—every tool and device is now infected with a synthetic consciousness designed to take me straight to the mundane.

Only 48 days until my favorite day of the year, when night comes an hour earlier and I’m reminded that if we can make night fall sooner, we can do anything we want.

So let’s focus on the new. I’ve stitched together five favorite songs released this year. The first comes from Biosphere’s The Way Of Time, which samples a 1951 radio adaptation of Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ 1926 novel The Time Of Man, set in central Kentucky, and the collision of a vintage Southern accent with sleek synthesizers is more enjoyable than I expected. Then we have some solid class from Romance’s latest outing, this time an exercise in melodramatic noir, followed by my old friend S, whose latest Minor Hexachords album has softly crept up the charts and become some of my most heavily rotated music this year. It’s such a delight to be here to see and hear and love the righteous things the people in my life are making.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to deal with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who says heavy things like “the moment I am aware that I am aware, I’m not aware.” But synchronicities abound when I’m paying attention: last night I noticed my favorite song this month is called “Jiddu,” and it will take us home tonight. Listen below, or set your controls to the heart of this interstellar mp3.

  1. Biosphere - The Way of Time
    The Way of Time | 2025 | Bandcamp
  2. Romance - Leave Her to Heaven
    Love Is Colder Than Death | 2025 | Bandcamp
  3. Minor Hexachords - Minor Concession
    Brinkmanship | 2025 | Bandcamp
  4. Sa Pa - Nonspiration
    Ambeesh | 2025 | Bandcamp
  5. Rue des Garderies - Jiddu
    2025 | Bandcamp

Also includes bits of Rebekah Del Rio and David Bowie, along with the optimal dosage of static and reverb.

A few months ago, I made some noise about a Midnight Radio book hitting the streets in August—but it seems this book has other plans and wants to be longer and stranger than these dispatches. I’m beginning to appreciate the value of letting a project tell me what it wants to be rather than the other way around, so I’m going to hang out with it until the end of the year.

Until then, I offer you this portrait of M. rocking a Midnight Radio t-shirt, proving yet again that Midnight Radio is where relaxed comfort meets refined style. (And if you've ever wondered if failure can be a form of liberation, M. has you covered.)

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open. Could be red. Perhaps plastic. Maybe monster. Sky’s the limit.

Midnight Radio 30 | Download

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Midnight Radio 030: The Stellar Sphere
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Destroyer of Obstacles
Electrified Buddhas at the Ruriden Columbarium

Destroyer of Obstacles

An offering of static and fire.

The man takes his large fingers out of my mouth, snaps off his latex gloves, and says he needs to scrape the flesh from the roof of my mouth and sew it to my gums so my teeth won’t fall out.

You sound like a horror movie, I say.

He shrugs. It’s possible to use the skin of a cadaver, he says, but it doesn’t always bind well. I can’t tell if he’s fucking with me. Whoever made your braces when you were a kid really screwed the pooch, he says. I tell him I never had braces. My parents couldn’t afford it.

He wants me to pay thousands of dollars to let him carve up my mouth. Maybe I’ll torture you with the world’s worst GoFundMe page.

Anyway, I’m back in America.

A few days before this encounter, I was on the other side of the planet, where a monk held my notebook over a fire to protect it from demons.

The Goma ceremony, practiced by an esoteric sect of Buddhism, empowers a god of justice to burn away the destructive desires that clutter the path to enlightenment. It’s rooted in the fire worship of ancient Indian Brahmanism and Iranian Zoroastrianism, and in Japan, this god is called Fudō Myō-ō, or “the immovable or unshakable one,” but he has many names, including Immovable Wisdom King, the Violent Wrathful One, God of Justice, and Destroyer of Obstacles—all of which might be the same thing, depending on your point of view.

A dozen men in gray robes sat with their backs to us, some barely visible in the shadows. A bell chimed, followed by the squeal of a conch and a chant, soft at first, flickering at the edge of perception until it became an undeniable rhythm. Then came the drums. The temple shuddered with a taiko boom so deep it rattled my ribcage, its drummer like a dancer, boom upon boom until it sounded like the universe was coming undone.

And I remembered: music is a religious technology.

Smoke rose from a cauldron of flames as the chant quickened, almost frantic, until the air was saturated with voices, drums, and incense. We lined up with our offerings to be blessed by the fire. Purses. Telephones. Hats. Photographs of the living and the dead. I handed my notebook to the monk, who silently passed it over the embers and performed his ministrations.

For the past two weeks, my head has been filled with the recording I made of this ceremony. It took several days to accept that no amount of audio trickery—bass boosting, EQ, compression—could capture the holy reverberations of those taiko drums. It felt like staring into the sun, so I turned in the other direction, subtracting drums and layering traces of the chants until it began to sound like static. It became an exercise in contouring the edges rather than attempting (and failing) to capture the mystery of the thing itself. Which, I suppose, is the point of any art.

After days of listening to these looped chants, I began to feel pleasantly haunted, finding information in the static, a hymnal in the hiss as I carved two hours down to the eighteen minutes we have before us now. Here are the ingredients:

  • A drum loop from Woob’s “Odonna” (Woob 1194, 1994 | More)
  • Goma ritual chants, tape hiss, static, and fifty-two pounds of reverb.
  • Hiroshi Yoshimura – Adelaide (Flora, 1987 | Bandcamp)
  • Some in-house synthesizers and a kick drum that, late at night, sounds like something knocking from the other side of the veil.

Perhaps demons are ready for a reboot. The grifters, faith-dealers, dead-eyed influencers, and screamers are stripping our world for parts, and we crave justice—not the justice of our rickety institutions, but something cosmic that assures us the universe can balance itself.

In that temple, I suspended my disbelief and trusted that a dozen men chanting around a fire could conjure something holy. And for a moment, they did.

It’s strange to think that the mouth has a roof.

All kinds of things require surrender.

Listen below—or take a deep breath and download the ceremonial mp3. (And here's the original recording I made of the ritual. Use it however the spirit moves you, and if you make anything out of it, let me know.)

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

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