I've been pondering my love of reverberations. Last week, I received a request from a very kind listener: the filmmaker Grace Wang suggested a Linda Rondstadt track, and my first impulse was to drown it in static and reverb. Why?
Perhaps the answer is simple: echos and fog generate mystery. In 1973, the painter Gerhard Richter said, "I've never found anything lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas, you can perceive as many trees as you want."
For years, I’ve been writing a novel about a noise that belongs to either God or a demon. Along the way, I’ve become convinced the trick with storytelling is to create a situation where whatever the reader might imagine is infinitely more compelling than anything I might describe. "Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door," Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre. "When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster."
A lack of mystery might explain why today's ultra-high-definition, motion-smoothed devices evoke nausea. There's no room for the imagination. Analog media is better for hauntings: a whisper in the crackle of an old record, a face emerging from snow on the television set, a sinister voice on a reel-to-reel. Ghosts don't feel at home in mp3 files or LCD screens.
The connection between reverb and mystery is clear to me, but I’m curious why reverb sounds like memory. There's a direct link in my brain between a voice drenched in echo and, say, a rainy night seven years ago at a dim sum joint that felt as if it'd been concocted in a dream: diner chrome and pleather mixed with Chinese lanterns while a 1970s sitcom played on a Zenith over the bar. Sure, the past tends to blur, but my vision of the future isn't exactly crisp, especially when . . . well, I can’t stop watching the news these days—this season finale of America is freakier than anything I might imagine.
But here are five early autumn classics that always mellow me out.
- Gas - Pop 02
Pop | Kompakt, 2000 | More - Aphex Twin - #19
Selected Ambient Works Volume II | Warp, 1994 | More - Midwife - Forever
Prayer Hands | Antiquated Future, 2018 | More - Sonic Youth - Superstar
If I Were a Carpenter | A&M, 1994 | More - Seefeel - Filter Dub
Quique | Too Pure, 1993 | More
And yes, this mix is soaked in reverb, much of which is the residue that's been accumulating from prior episodes—plus the requested Linda Rondstadt and a dash of Lee Hazlewood. Listen below, or get your freshly-mixed mp3 here. (Or a Spotify playlist if you're square.)
Thank you for listening. And reading. The request lines are always open.
Midnight Radio 006 | Download
