I’m trying to wring as much billable time from my skillset as I can before I’m obsolete. It's a race against the robots and I’m exhausted.
I almost didn’t send this dispatch tonight, but I haven’t missed delivering an episode yet. If I do, this enterprise will probably end. It’ll be easy to let things slide. Worse yet, I’ll probably return to my perfectionist tendencies in which I sit in some dark sad corner of my brain and gnaw at my soul until everything is *perfect*. But there's no such thing. So let it go. Move along to the next thing. Perhaps my black-and-white rules when it comes to Midnight Radio are helping me become a grey-area kind of guy.
Everything is a paradox. Wisdom lives at the threshold of the Tannhäuser Gate.
Here’s a quick and knotty mixtape I made for tomorrow morning’s run, built from my favorite songs for lumbering along the river this summer—and lumber is the operative word. Laced with static and fried chatter, these tracks move like I do: sighing and lurching like a tired beast. But wait until the bass hits at the 41-second mark. It makes living in 2025 feel worthwhile.
Sixsixsevenfortyseven’s Wounded Dogs is one of my favorite albums this year, a low-frequency exercise in patience, just like running or any repetitive act that hunts for freedom through repetition. An Egyptian low-rider comes next, followed by some metropolitan Detroit sleaze. This sequence lopes along until we get to Drissi El-Abbassi belting from the 1980s in Algeria. Look at this album cover. He was born to make us sweat. But his voice gets shredded by Autechre’s “Clipper” as we drop into more frigid and fractured terrain before winding down with a touch of Digital Underground. Here’s the hyperlink to tonight’s broadcast, or listen below.
I often think about this line from Richard Powers’s Orfeo: "Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough."
Meanwhile, I'm reading Madeline Miller’s Circe, which is so lyrical it’s turning my eyeballs lavender. But lines like “all that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars, it leaves only ash behind” are well-earned when recasting the myths of Prometheus and the Minotaur. I look forward to getting into bed with this book each night before dozing off to the final days of Petra, where incense was invented.
More and more, I enjoy fragments and collisions, the hairpin turn from one idea to the next. This is what it feels like to be alive in the 21st century when every day brings a new headfuck.
A question woke me up this morning as a thunderstorm rolled in: it’s raining, but what does “it” refer to?
I should go to bed.
- Sixsixsevenfortyseven - I Stood There
Wounded Dogs | Youth, 2025 | Bandcamp - Jana & El Nashmy - 3al Bayez
Place: Egypt | Air Texture, 2025 | Bandcamp - Erika - Tomorrow's Fires (Whodat Remix)
Anevite Void Remixed | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2025 | Bandcamp - DVA Damas - Wet Vision II
Wet Vision | Downwards, 2015 | Boomkat - Drissi El-Abbassi - Zedti Laadab Aliya
Nashazphone | Bandcamp - Autechre - Clipper
Tri Repetae | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp - Broken English Club - Prayer Space
Suburban Hunting | Cititrax, 2015 | Bandcamp - Plastikman - Contain
Consumed | Minus, 1998 | Bandcamp
Thank you for listening. We'll kick off September by listening to other people's dreams, and the request lines are open.
Midnight Radio 28 | Download
