Rutger Hauer sits crosslegged on a rain-soaked rooftop, a nail driven through one hand and a white dove in the other, as he delivers the greatest monologue in film history: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Forty-two words. The last lines have become iconic, but the magic lives in the first three sentences. These mythic names conjure entire worlds and leave the mind hungry for more. What are C-beams? Where is the Tannhäuser Gate? The internet is littered with baroque theories about cesium beams, medieval poets, and even Christ himself (as per that nail-pierced palm), but I prefer to live in the mystery.
Meanwhile, another overheated summer has ended, and we’re entering my favorite season, a time of longer nights and shifting gears. Lately, I’ve come to believe that anything worthwhile rests on a knife’s edge, balanced by a paradox that I can only compare to the delicate act of falling asleep—because it’s only when I do not think about sleep that I can fall asleep.
When I got sober eleven years ago, they told me to take it a day at a time, although this cliché comes with a silent, contradictory wish: a day at a time so I will never drink again and wreck my only life. I’ve also learned the hard way that the only way to avoid a panic attack is to not worry about having a panic attack. And if I do not want to squander this life as a cheap cynic or an insufferable zealot, doubt and faith must exist in equal measure.
These paradoxes can probably be unwound all the way back to the Buddha’s claim that “non-practice is my practice, the attainment of non-attainment.” But I like to think of the rare zone between two opposing conditions as the Tannhäuser Gate.
Enough philosophy. Onwards to tonight’s maximum-strength Blade Running mix. It opens with a sequence of neon-soaked synthesizers, then we’ll take a breather before ramping up to an end-of-days song that sounds like klieg lights sweeping across a fiery sky. As usual, this mix comes packaged with a heavy dose of reverb and some fractured ballads. Listen below or download it here. If streaming is your thing, here’s a Spotify playlist, but it’s not as fun, and there’s no end-of-days track.
- Blanck Mass - Chernobyl
Blanck Mass | Rock Action Records, 2011 | More - Alessandro Cortini - Gira
Forse | Important Music, 2013 | More - M83 - On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts | Gooom, 2002 | More
(Blade Runner interlude) - Kristoffer Lo - Front Row Gallows View
The Black Meat | Propellor Recordings, 2016 | More - Bremen - Entering Phase Two
Bremen | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | More
Thank you for listening. The request lines are open.
Midnight Radio 005 | Download
