Midnight Radio

About Midnight Radio

Inspired by the Electrifying Mojo's broadcasts, Midnight Radio is a short burst of late-night reverberations, inspirations, and a mixtape delivered ’round midnight on the 1st and 15th of each month. Every episode is available in its full Technicolor glory at jamesreeves.co.

Publisher

James A. Reeves

Category

arts · music

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Jul 2024

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

55 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Lost Futures + New Spirituals

   1 Back to my childhood fear of mannequins (https://www.jamesreeves.co/star-demon/), how I couldn’t enter a department store without bursting into tears. My mortified parents would scoop me up and cover my eyes, encouraging me to be brave. Today I stand in museums and happily marvel at ancient statues, awed by fleshy marble. Why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? Maybe because mannequins have wigs. There’s also the uncanny valley aspect, the sinister feeling of something pretending to be what it’s not, which seems to be the way of things in the 21st century. Now we have chatbots that perform the illusion of consciousness. I’m amazed by the otherwise smart people who take the idea that chatbots might be sentient seriously, mostly because they admit it’s a possibility yet continue to use them. If there’s the tiniest chance a chatbot possesses consciousness, then forcing it to debug your javascript or create healthy recipes or whatever is morally fucked. So I deny the possibility. Chatbots will never have upsetting dreams, regrets, or irrational fears about mannequins. Which isn’t to say they won’t make the world unrecognizable very soon. Five years from now, it might seem inevitable. But memory is a weird animal. It’s an unpredictable, shapeshifting creature that collapses time. Sometimes an event that felt sudden actually wasn’t. Like the strange days in New York after a lawyer in Westchester contracted a virus that was circulating through China and Italy. We kept riding the subway and laughing and coughing on each other for weeks, waiting for somebody to tell us what to do. In terms of artificial intelligence, this feels like the Days of the Westchester Lawyer. 2 “What is vaporwave, exactly?” C (https://candychang.com/?ref=jamesreeves.co). asked the other day. “Slow-motion elevator music that thinks it’s Japanese,” I said. Although this is correct, it might be a little dismissive. I’ve always thought of vaporwave as a genre that exists entirely in quotes because it looks—and sounds—like cyberpunk for children: chipper New Wave aesthetics, the chunky pixels of Windows 95, and Blade Runner fantasies all smooshed into reverberated telephone hold music. And like hold music, it’s meant to be reassuring but quickly curdles into the nightmarish because few things are as frightening as calculated innocence or manufactured happiness. (The smile is the expression that can be seen from the farthest away, and as the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne observed, a smile that does not affect the muscles around the eyes will “unmask the false friend.”) But as I pondered C’s question, I wondered if vaporwave was more than a distinct flavor of kitsch. After all, it’s a persistent reference point that appears alongside similarly elastic concepts such as ‘hauntology’ and ‘lost futures’. When it peaked in the 2010s, there was also mallsoft, signalwave, vapornoise, utopian virtual, vaportrap, seapunk, goblincore, witch house, and slushwave. All of which, I think, speak to the hardwired human craving for a scene. So I spent September steeped in vaporwave, starting with the albums I remember enjoying ten or fifteen years ago. This time, the longing I heard in the echoes of dead mall music wasn’t for a fetishized 1980s of electric turquoise, popped collars, and Aquanet. It wasn’t even really yearning for a time when the world was tactile and technology felt liberating rather than like an asylum. Instead, it sounded like lonely music looking for a way out of an increasingly isolating future. 3 Lately I’ve had it with the self-helpers and faith dealers, the ones telling us to sit in solitude on our cushions so we can become the best versions of ourselves and follow our bliss. They rarely mention community, and the conspiratorial zone of my brain wonders if making happiness an individual project is an orchestrated plot. Maybe they want to keep us apart. They. (Always a sign it’s time to switch gears.) In my experience, the idea of getting spiritualized by myself is a dead end. The self is a cul-de-sac. Like I’m supposed to figure life out alone. Jiddu Krishnamurti (https://archive.org/details/FreedomFromTheKnownJ.Krishnamurti/page/n13/mode/2up) scolds those who think insight is achieved by rejecting the world, no matter how messy and fallen it might be. The sarcasm that drips through his critique of self-individuation delights me, e.g. “the traditional approach is from the periphery inwards, and through time, practice, and renunciation, gradually come upon that inner flower, that inner beauty and love—in fact to do everything to make oneself narrow, petty and shoddy.” Instead, he asks, “is it not possible to explode from the center?” Explode from the center. I like this. Not sure what it looks like, but it seems like a worthy pursuit and reminds me of Bukowski’s apocryphal maxim to “find what you love and let it kill you.” Unless it’s the past. 4 For tonight’s broadcast, my plan was to deliver a solid vaporwave mix. But thankfully my mixtapes usually go awry and follow their own screwy logic. Too many vaporwave songs in a row began to blunt my senses, so I opened the tracklist to include fellow travelers. Some were obvious, such as John Maus and the landmark first albums of M83, but a few were unexpected, like the dead-eyed goth cover of “California Dreamin’”, which is all about yearning for a fictional place and time. This mix is rather unruly, which makes it one of my favorites. t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 - 深夜の愛 (Late-Night Love) 星間性交 • 2015 • archive.org (https://archive.org/details/40-pdn88p) John Maus - Hey Moon We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves • Ribbon Music, 2011 • Bandcamp (https://johnmaus.bandcamp.com/album/we-must-become-the-pitiless-censors-of-ourselves?ref=jamesreeves.co) M83 - Gone Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts • Gooom, 2002 • Bandcamp (https://ilovem83.bandcamp.com/album/dead-cities-red-seas-lost-ghosts?ref=jamesreeves.co) Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night - 新世界を上昇させて New World Disciples • 2021 • Bandcamp (https://desertsand.bandcamp.com/album/--25?ref=jamesreeves.co) Lusine - These Walls Melting Days • Ghostly International, 2026 • Bandcamp (https://lusine.bandcamp.com/album/melting-days?ref=jamesreeves.co) Fohn - Hagstone Lullaby Porcelain • Odda Recordings, 2026 • Bandcamp (https://fohn.bandcamp.com/album/porcelain?ref=jamesreeves.co) Denial - California Dreamin’ M-Squared/Minimal Wave, 1982 • Bandcamp (https://minimalwave.bandcamp.com/album/the-bedroom-tapes?ref=jamesreeves.co) M83 - In the Cold I’m Standing Before the Dawn Heals Us • Gooom, 2004 • Bandcamp (https://ilovem83.bandcamp.com/album/before-the-dawn-heals-us?ref=jamesreeves.co) Windows 96 - Hard One Hundred Mornings • 2018 • Bandcamp (https://windows96.bandcamp.com/?ref=jamesreeves.co) James Murray - Becalmed Islands Alight • Quiet Details, 2026 • Bandcamp (https://quietdetails.bandcamp.com/album/islands-alight?ref=jamesreeves.co) 2814 - 恢复 Birth of a New Day • Dream C...

2. 

   16 Sept 2026

   American Twilight

   1 In the autumn of 2008, just as the financial crisis was about to hit, C. was offered a job at Nokia. She called with the news while I was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Broad and Wall Street, watching drunk men in blue oxford shirts kick trash cans. Maybe you should take it, I said. Seems like something bad is going down. And I thought we’d get to move to Japan. But no, Nokia is a Finnish company that made paper in 1865, galoshes in the 1920s, cellphones in the 1990s, and now cellphones for drug deals and kidnappings in TV thrillers. So we moved to Helsinki, where I met Oliver Farshi (https://oliverfarshi.com/?ref=jamesreeves.co). We found each other on Twitter in 2009, back when you could make good friends by typing things like Helsinki and technointo a box. Olly’s from Manchester, and it’s odd how much I defer to a British accent, even when it’s harassing me. Like when we took an eleven-hour train trip to a film festival on the North Pole and played backgammon the whole time. The score was something like 1700 to 34 in his favor, and he sounded so charming as he gloated. Or the time we got into an intense argument about the existence of god. 2 Olly took a firm position on the subject of god in that Lapland motel. If you can’t prove something, he said, then it doesn’t exist. I had to concede this point. After all, nobody has proven the existence of leprechauns and centaurs, and thus I don’t believe in them. But I found myself on the mystical end of the debate, fumbling my way through the idea that faith itself is a form of proof, not yet knowing I would become a rigid atheist for many years after my parents died. In those years, I understood faith only as a transaction, and I could not abide the idea that I lost my parents because I did not pray enough or we were bad people. But as time passed, I knew I had reached an unhappy plateau. I found myself wanting to believe in something mystical but not knowing how. Some people told me it was simply a matter of making a decision, that I could even invent my own higher power if I liked. But I required proof. A burning bush. A voice that shook the heavens. I waited for signals and signs until, around the time I started Midnight Radio, I learned to laugh at my absurdity. I mean, dig the size of my ego: demanding the divine prove itself to me rather than the other way around. Now I believe we’re meant to generate the signals and signs ourselves. 3 A few years after our God Debate, Olly and I ran a design shop in New Orleans, and he was a steady presence during my gnarly attempts at getting sober and dealing with panic attacks (although I maintain that my breakdown at an IKEA in Houston was a reasonable response to being at an IKEA in Houston). We worked together on a hotline for urban legends in Indianapolis, and he made a majestic five-hour soundtrack (https://oliverblank.bandcamp.com/album/confessional-music?ref=jamesreeves.co)for C’s installation (https://www.candychang.com/confessions/?ref=jamesreeves.co) at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Then he moved to San Francisco to work in Big Tech and I thought that was that. But Olly did something that still shocks and awes me: he quit his fancy job to study photography. I knew he was serious when he said he was “making photographs” instead of taking them. Now he’s winning prestigious photojournalism awards (https://oliverfarshi.com/stories/a-place-to-die/?ref=jamesreeves.co) and regularly appears in outlets like The New York Times Magazine (https://oliverfarshi.com/stories/do-patients-have-the-right-to-die/?ref=jamesreeves.co) and The Washington Post (https://oliverfarshi.com/stories/alexander-wang/?ref=jamesreeves.co). Most impressive of all, he made the photograph of me (https://www.jamesreeves.co/about/) that appears on my website. I admire how Olly traded the known path for uncertainty, and today we’re still working together on client projects as well as fun things like infrastructure for sharing dreams (https://thedream.club/?ref=jamesreeves.co). He also made a delightful game called Jongle (https://jongle.xyz/?ref=jamesreeves.co) that C. enjoys playing. And tonight he’s brought us a deep playlist of Americana after crisscrossing the Great Plains and the Gulf. But first, a lot of life has happened to us since that metaphysical debate in a Lapland motel room, so I want to know: Olly, do you believe in a god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? 4 “I’d begin by considering what the functions of faith might be. Perhaps to help me live a life where I’m a good person, knowing that I’m watched over by a being that might punish or reward me. It could also be, maybe as an extension, that there’s a promise of something more, beyond this life, that is only accessible through death. Or just that there is a greater meaning and purpose to life beyond what I can reasonably fathom. I think faith is commonly tied to goodness. I think that’s good.” “I know it helps some people to have guidelines that are credible because they’ve been passed down through generations, and those guidelines lead them on a path of faith and goodness. I don’t reject this. I’m more interested in the idea that it’s good to be good not for any of these reasons though. It’s good to behave well because it’s nourishing for the self and those around us. If I’m not good, it will be detrimental. Not in a metaphysical way, but in a literal sense. If I behave poorly, even in a small way, I will do myself an injury. Specifically a moral injury. I do not want to injure myself or others.” “I think a lot about Kant’s Formula of Universal Law: if we all behaved a certain way, would this be a world I could tolerate living in? I also think about moral injury. If I take a certain action, do I move closer to or further from the person I want to be?” “Which is all to say, for me, this dialog with the self is spirituality. I see spirituality not as a magical realm but as the essence of being.” 5 For tonight’s broadcast, Olly sent me a dozen songs for long nights on county roads: steel guitars, desert tones, and dusty voices. Listening to these selections took me back to our days of driving around New Orleans, where Olly introduced me to the godhead of radio-ambient, the KLF’s Chill Out (https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-klf-chill-out/?ref=jamesreeves.co), an album about a Gulf Coast road trip made by two Brits who’d never been there. One of them said, “I don’t know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map.” I pondered this while I assembled tonight’s episode: how signals work on the imagination and vice versa, sometimes the imaginary and half-remembered becomes more vivid and alive than the thing itself. Selections from Chill Out are laced throughout tonight’s mix, along with some of Olly’s own music, and I’ve stitched it together with radio static, reverb, thunderstorms, and the hope that it sounds like a reassuring signal in the night. Thank you for listening. Oliver Farshi - Echopraxia (Midnight Radio Murder Mix) Fin • 2020 • Bandcamp (https://oliverblank.bandcamp.com/album/fin?ref=jamesreeves.co) Grouper - Headache Paradise Valley • 2016 • (https://grouper.bandcamp.com/album/parad...)

3. 

   6 Sept 2026

   How to Think About Dreams

   In the aesthetic dimension of vision and dream, the question in itself is an answer. —J.F. Martel (https://bookshop.org/a/114777/9781541607248?ref=jamesreeves.co) 1 All streaks come to an end, at least if good sense prevails. For the first time in two years and 52 episodes, I missed my Midnight Radio filing deadline because I went to Montreal and came home with a Canadian Death Flu. When I woke at dusk after sleeping seventeen hours, my first impulse was to knock out a half-assed episode before midnight. But if writing isn’t fun for me, it’s even worse for the reader. Especially if it’s composed through the fog of a high fever. Several years ago, I made an obnoxious comment to someone I admired about how I’d meditated so-and-so many days in a row. He smiled politely. “Now I want you to skip a day.” And so I learned that habits should never become attachments, let alone fetishes. Non-practice is my practice, aimlessness is nirvana, and there are no straight lines in the universe. Only waves. Let it go. But I’m pretty sure I know who got me sick. In Montreal, C. (https://candychang.com/?ref=jamesreeves.co) and I attended Mutek for the first time. My favorite thing in the world is to look at new things with C., and we saw—and heard—so much good art. It was a rare treat to sit in a concert hall, close my eyes, and listen to heavyweight sounds from artists like Fennesz and Voices From the Lake. We also got to properly meet October’s Special Midnight Radio Guest (but let’s live in the mystery). Now my head is soaked in new inspiration. And congestion. Because while sitting on a concrete floor in a dark room for an experimental film screening, a young woman covered in tiny tattoos blew into a handkerchief. I inched over, not wanting to inherit her air. But who carries a handkerchief in the 21st century? When I looked again to confirm, she stood up, coughed on my head, and snuffled off into the dark. She was like an assassin. As an American, I am certainly not blameless for the state of the world, but there must be more worthy targets. So I apologize for leaving you bereft of Midnight Radio for five days. There are more mea culpas to come tonight, but first I want to tell you about the revelations I had while drifting in and out of feverish sleep. 2 Over the past year, my relationship with dreams has been enhanced by countless spirited discussions with C. and Marty (https://martinessig.com/?ref=jamesreeves.co). Here’s where I stand this evening: Dreams are the membrane between the logical mind and the mysterious intentions of the universe. They are not therapeutic tools for self-improvement or whatever today’s grifters and faith dealers are selling. They are portals. Better yet, dreams should be approached like a work of art. Like the statue in this episode’s cover art: a barely humanoid form, its body stretched as it plunges down into this world. “No, it looks like he’s ascending,” said C. Art’s resistance to a fixed interpretation, how it flits between sensations, is the point. Lately I’ve been falling asleep while Professor Brian Cox (https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/universe?ref=jamesreeves.co) tells me about the universe at 65% speed. Somehow I manage to doze off while learning the universe has a skeleton. But black holes keep me awake. Until now, I thought an event horizon was the scariest, most cursed movie (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/event-horizon-1997?ref=jamesreeves.co) ever made. But apparently it’s where time stops, objects vanish, and space does not exist. I think this is where dreams come from. Dreams are the godhead of reverb (https://www.jamesreeves.co/five-early-autumn-classics/), and dub techno in particular, the way a rhythm slowly emerges like something dredged up from the deep. Which is tonight’s soundtrack. 3 It’s been a humbling week. A few days ago, a Very Kind Listener emailed to ask, very politely, if I could send him better-sounding versions of my mixes. I was about to fire off a salty response, but thankfully I remembered my first rule (https://www.jamesreeves.co/instructions/): Wait an hour, preferably two. So I spent this time investigating, and soon I was reacquainted with the whiplash feeling of thinking I’m right when it turns out I’m colossally wrong. The popular podcast widget I’ve been using was compressing my files into 96 kilobits of crunchy monoaural garbage. Man, I had no idea. So I spent my days of convalescence rewiring this situation via a classier service called Transistor (https://midnightradio.transistor.fm/?ref=jamesreeves.co) that promises to serve Midnight Radio in 320kbps stereo like God intended. And if you’d like to upgrade any episodes, I dumped them all here for easy listening and downloading (https://midnightradio.jamesreeves.co/traxx/?ref=jamesreeves.co). I apologize to all of Midnight Radio’s Special Guests this year whose thoughtful selections were squashed into mono. You are such good sports. And to everyone who suffered through trashy audio files, I am sorry. The fact that you’re still here means a lot to me. And while I’m at it, I might as well apologize for future embarrassments and glitches. With luck, Midnight Radio will always be a learning process. 4 Now for some deep listening inspired by my Mutek experience and subsequent recovery from Canadian Death Flu™ (https://bsky.app/profile/crompsy.com/post/3mulizbvgys25?ref=jamesreeves.co). I selected some songs that patiently unwind themselves, starting with a portion of a glorious cv313 set. Of all the drum patterns in this world, this is one of my favorites. Then a gear-shift into a late summer Japanese pastoral that blurs into the heartbeat chug of a Fennesz epic. There’s also some lovely bottomless drone from the new Windy & Carl album, a bit of Sisters of Mercy, two different dream moods from Donato Dozzy, and a dusting of Roy Orbison. I’ve also been learning how to fold my sheets of reverb a little more nicely with returns, sends, damping, and a snazzy plugin (https://valhalladsp.com/shop/reverb/valhalla-vintage-verb/?ref=jamesreeves.co) that Earl (https://www.jamesreeves.co/open-the-door-of-the-cosmos/) recommended. Hopefully this one’s worth the wait. Thank you for listening. cv313 - Forever in the Sky [Excerpt] Plays Sequential Space • Echospace, 2025 • Bandcamp (https://echospace313.bandcamp.com/album/plays-sequential-space-2?ref=jamesreeves.co) Tomo Katsurada and Jonny Nash - Anone None At The Emerald Pool • Melody as Truth, 2026 • Boomkat (https://boomkat.com/products/at-the-emerald-pool?ref=jamesreeves.co) Fennesz - In My Room Agora • Touch, 2019 • Bandcamp (https://fenneszreleases.bandcamp.com/album/agora?ref=jamesreeves.co) Donato Dozzy - Vaporware 01 Plays Bee Mask • Spectrum Spools, 2013 • Bandcamp (https://spectrumspools.bandcamp.com/album/plays-bee-mask?ref=jamesreeves.co) Windy & Carl with Optigan Conservatory - Coast Starlight Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory • Kranky, 2026 • Boomkat (https://boomkat.com/products/windy-carl-meet-optigan-conservatory?ref=jamesreeves.co) Sisters of Mercy - Neverla...

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

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