On a flight to Washington DC last month, I discovered I felt okay above the clouds. No shivering or hyperventilating or fighting back tears. Christ, how long had it been since I boarded an airplane without trembling or praying to something I’m not sure I believe in?
After some mental rummaging, I realized my last normal flight was in 2009 from Helsinki to Istanbul on a chaotic airplane with ashtrays in the armrests. A few weeks later, I flew to Detroit because my mother was dying, and that’s when it began: the panic attacks and dread, the inability to do anything except monitor every mechanical noise and atmospheric shudder. For fifteen years, I was strangely insane, my brain intent on torturing itself rather than letting come what may. Hypverigilence is a core feature of anxiety, but there’s also ego: I alone knew my flight was uniquely doomed. The airplane required my attention to stay aloft.
I thought about this when the result of last week’s election became clear. As I stared at the reddening map of America, I wondered why I’d invested so much time monitoring the polls and listening to punditry, diligently following every gasp of two dying political parties, both driven senile by the craziest voices on the internet. So no more news for me. From now on, I will seek the holy silence of a life without opinion mongers, thought leaders, professional outragers, pundits, and faith dealers. Because true freedom is not thinking about the president every day.
As my government shifts from feckless to frightening, the idea of vnutrennaya emigratsia is circulating, the Russian strategy of internal exile to survive the idiocy of public life in bleak times. Liberation through rejection is a classic move, such as Voltaire’s advice to cultivate my own garden rather than wring my hands at the state of the world—or worse yet, to imagine this is noble or productive.
Better still, there’s Dada’s cognitive leap into the absurd, which set the stage for the dreamlife of Surrealism. From a stage in 1916, Hugo Ball's words echo into our time: “This humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect."
“Leave everything,” André Breton instructed a few years later. “Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow.” If logic produced catastrophic wars and rotting institutions, perhaps logic itself was the problem.
Internal exile sounds nice. It’s a trip I should have taken a while ago.
So we’re on this timeline now, and here are five ribcage-shuddering songs to greet the moment. Think of it as sage clearing or whatever prophets and healers do.
Tonight’s installment kicks off with the most badass beat I know, a beat that burns every other beat to ashes, followed by a track from Panasonic that becomes a cathartic buzzsaw. It was their final song. Then we steer into the supernatural with some Ectomorph sleaze and a low-end haunting by Demdike Stare, named for a witch whose gaze could either hex or cure, which might be another strategy for psychic liberation (see this video). Then we hit Grungerman’s “Fackeln Im Sturm”, a Gothic anthem from ’97 that translates to “torches in the storm,” and finally, we cool off with some end-of-days AM radio chatter that I recorded in the Mojave desert twenty years ago, a reminder that American paranoia is evergreen.
- Muslimgauze - Ryoji Ikeda Remix #6
Staalplaat, 2020 | More - Panasonic - Pan Finale
Gravitoni | Blast First, 2018 | More - Ectomorph - Crawl of the Cthulu
Stalker | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2018 | More - Demdike Stare - Metamorphosis
Elemental | Modern Love, 2012 | More - Grungerman - Fackeln Im Sturm
Profan, 1997
Listen below or better yet, let’s make mp3s great again. (And here’s a bloodless Spotify playlist without a scary AM radio rant or the best beat ever made.)
In other news, I'm sprucing up my website with some bold typography because I’m feeling punchy these days. It's still a bit of a mess, but that's okay because nothing matters or makes sense anymore—except doing whatever it takes to keep our torches burning.
Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.
Midnight Radio | Download
