News
Midnight Radio: Bodies Without Organs
I made a Midnight Radio episode with James! I offered some songs for him to mix together in his land of reverb. He asks guests this one question and here's my answer:
Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?
Yes. Watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was my first spiritual experience. It made me feel existentially connected to all of time, space, and life. That feeling pulled me out of despair and it was my first understanding of god: a widescreen kinship.
Now I feel spiritual in moments of communion—with a person, an artwork, a text, or a tree. I felt it making this episode with James. For decades we’ve been two little animals lost in time making stuff together, from janky stop-motion animations and fuzzy ambient music to public art and screenplays. We also rattle around on our own, and it’s been fun watching James make Midnight Radio. His process is loose but reverent. He tosses songs together, plays rough versions as we drive to the park, and then defers to the emerging forces. He’ll ask what I think and before we’re done bantering, he’ll say, ‘I know what it wants to become.’ It wafts through our home for days like something slowly baking until it becomes another Proustian madeleine.
One of my favorite episodes is Slow Gold (#35) where he stretched a Simple Minds track into buoyant goth. So I slipped him A Flock of Seagulls. He delivered by swelling the intro into an epic stadium show and following it with another slow-mo’d ’80s song that always makes me want to dance like a cartoon maniac.
I initially thought I’d put together a tracklist of tragic-astronaut-in-space music, which is my specialty, but the energies went somewhere more fun. In the spirit of James, I went where it wanted to go, and each version he played inspired more songs until we landed in a place that is very me but way cooler now in his land of reverb. I felt a charged back-and-forth towards something greater, and it makes me wonder if spirituality is always about resonance: being in relation and vibrating together.
In a time when it’s easy to feel disillusioned, I’m drawn to the punk philosophies of Zhuangzi and Deleuze. Zhuangzi describes riding “the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths,” which is the skill of being at home in the continuous flow of change. Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” is about obliterating conventions for dynamic fields of play. Both pursue spiritual freedom not through detachment but through deep engagement and transformation: be game for whatever forces happen to be around you and remain curious about what they can become.
James A. Reeves