I had to ask Chat GPT how to delete my Instagram account. Living in the twenty-first century feels not only slightly embarrassing but increasingly like an ultimatum: embrace the future without complaint or be left pining for the textures of the past. But there’s always a third way.
1.
Near a decommissioned military base between the Chocolate Mountains and the Santa Rosa range, there’s a candy-colored hill shellacked with religious slogans, the handiwork of a man who dedicated his final years and nine thousand gallons of paint to writing God is Love and Jesus I’m a Sinner in shades of pink and red that make your eyeballs scream. He painted Salvation Mountain after his homemade hot air balloon failed to carry him to heaven, leaving him earthbound in the Mojave desert, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I was only planning to stay for a week,” he told a tourist before he died. “But it was a very good week.”
2.
There’s nothing on County Road 59 in western Nebraska except sleepy cattle and miles of sky. When the silhouette of Stonehenge appeared on the horizon, I thought I was hallucinating until I parked on the shoulder and laid my hands upon the thirty-six Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles stacked into arches that track solar and lunar events—a man’s memorial to his dead father.
3.
Further north in Wisconsin, there’s a wrought-iron spaceship known as the Forevertron, a forbidding contraption assembled from lightning rods, two Thomas Edison dynamos, debris from the local ammunition factory, and a decontamination chamber retrieved from Apollo 11. The Forevertron was built by a frustrated demolition man who wanted to create rather than destroy. One night, he rechristened himself as a Victorian inventor named Dr. Evermore. “I was rather upset with the world,” he explained. “So I decided to send myself back into the heavens on a magnetic lightning forcefield.”
I love this genre of old men speaking to the heavens (and occasionally attempting to launch themselves there) by building candy-colored mountains, car-wreck calendars, and junkyard rockets. I'll probably join them someday, and I hope you have your own Forevertron that you're tinkering with. In the meantime, we have five songs tonight, each promising transcendence in its own way.
First off, the blistering pleasure of Earth’s guitars that ride the line between the sacred and the demonic, followed by a synth-and-vocal workout from The Field that sounds like a crumbling memory of a warehouse party on the brink of the void. Then comes the centerpiece, which C. and I have decided is our favorite genre for 2025: “preposterous yet strangely compelling.”—and I-F’s “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass” fits the bill perfectly. It’s gloriously dumb and a technical triumph that conjures a much nicer future. After this late-20th-century masterpiece, the only logical option is to drop into some static-ridden Joy Division, which I’ve glitched and reverberated when the spirit moved me, followed by Temple ov Saturn's "Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary"—Joan Pope’s music sounds like an incantation that threatens to summon something ominous, which might help us prepare for the rest of 2025.
- Earth - Coda Maestoso in F(flat) Minor (Autechre Remix)
Legacy of Dissolution | No Quarter, 2005 | Boomkat - The Field - Made of Steel, Made of Stone
Infinite Moment | Kompakt, 2018 | Bandcamp - I-F - Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass
Fucking Consumer | Disko B, 1998 | Bandcamp - Joy Division - Day of the Lords
Unknown Pleasures | Factory Records, 1979 | More - Temple Ov Saturn - Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary
Last Stand at Ankh Sanctuary | 2019 | Bandcamp
Also includes a healthy serving of reverb, a relevant snippet of David Bowie, and Neil Diamond’s "Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show" in slow-motion. Listen below, use this hyperlink to score a high-grade mp3, or if you must, here's a Spotify playlist without the fun stuff.
Some recent inputs: The Lazarus Project is one of my favorite television shows: smart, mind-bendy sci-fi that remembers to be fun. The British know how to make a conspiratorial tech thriller much better than Americans (see also The Capture). The first two songs from this Matchess record have been my morning soundtrack all week, and thank you to Philip Sherburne's newsletter for introducing me to her work. I'm also happy I found Adam Greenfield's dispatches again. Reading-wise, I've started Samantha Harvey's Orbital, and I'm getting the sense that not much will happen in this novel besides hanging out on a spacecraft in the most lyrical way possible, which isn't a bad way to spend some time.
It was a Sunday morning when C. told me that Kessler’s Syndrome might kill us all because sooner or later, all the space debris speeding around above our heads will start colliding, which could produce a chain reaction that mucks up the magnetosphere and we’ll get vaporized by solar wind. Or something.
A few hours later, a friend called to tell me octopuses are from outer space. He thinks they will become the dominant species after artificial intelligence determines humans are an illogical lifeform and wipes us out. This produced a delightful new euphemism for a scary future, e.g., after the technological/climate/nuclear disaster, there’ll be nothing left but Juan’s Octopus Word. It cushions the blow.
I’m so thankful for the interesting people in my life—and thank you for reading and listening. The request lines are open. (I hope you'll request something, otherwise we’ll have a subzero dub session because here in the Middle West, it’s fuck-you degrees outside.)
Midnight Radio 14 | Download
