I spent my high school nights making cassette loops, hunched over the 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.

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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.

1. Slowdive - Machine Gun (50% slower)
   Souvlaki, 1993 • More
2. Belong - A Walk (22% slower)
   Common Era • Bandcamp
3. Slowdive - Mousakka Chaos (20% slower)
   Souvlaki, 1993
4. Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24 (25% slower)
   Garbage, 1995 • Bandcamp
5. Sosena Gebre Eyesus - Save Us From Our Death
   The World Is But a Place of Survival: Begena Songs from Ethiopia | Bandcamp
6. cv313 - Depths of Perception (Excerpt)
   Depths of Perception, 2022 | More
7. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (45% slower)
   Loveless, 1991 | More
8. 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. 

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