I remember racing against the sun to reach the Badlands before nightfall but I didn’t make it because I kept pulling over to photograph rusty gas stations and lonely motels in towns with names like Alliance and Interior. When I finally arrived at the edge of South Dakota, the bluffs and spires lay out there unseen, crouching in the dark. In a bright motel lobby, a little radio behind bulletproof glass played the American hit parade. That night I dreamt of Natalie Wood on an endless loop, leaping and yelling “Hit your lights” on the edge of a cliff, her arms swinging through the headlights again and again.

James A. Reeves – Blue Motor Lodge

Here are two pitched-down dub 45s that meander through a field of mid-century blues and ballads, paired with big sheets of reverb, vinyl crackle, moments of silence, and five variations on the idea of a blue moon. Best served in headphones after dark.

01. A Rocket in Dub – Rocket #8 on 33⅓
02. Betty Lavette – Let Me Down Easy
03. Don Percival – One More Kiss
04. Roy Orbison – Crying
05. Dave “Diddle” Day – Blue Moon Baby
06. Pole – Fahren on 33⅓
07. The Cascades – Rhythm of the Rain
08. Françoise Hardy – Voilà
09. Dirty Beaches – Lord Knows Best
10. The Ronettes – Keep On Dancin’
11. Dirty Beaches – True Blue
12. Oscar Peterson – Blue Moon
13. Elvis – Blue Moon in Kentucky
14. Santo & Johnny – Blue Moon
15. Dean Martin – Blue Moon
16. Big American Loop #3

Two years ago I found a cassette at the bottom of a shoebox while cleaning out a closet. A label on one side said, “Jim Reeves Roast. June 1978 from Jim Jernigan.” When my grandfather retired from Sears, his colleagues threw him a big party. Apparently they roasted him and recorded it on a Sears cassette. Now that I own a Walmart tape player, I can finally listen to it. But I’m wary of this unexpected field recording. What if I discover a terrible side to my grandfather?

Late one night I ran the tape through my delay pedal while fiddling with the equalizer so I could catch the rough gist rather than the details of anecdotes I might rather not hear. Patches of conversation broke through: “And that’s how he made it out of marketing.” Laughter. “Last time he was ever given an expense account.” Overlapping voices. More laughter. Then the sound of silver dinging on glass, a call for attention:

“Do you remember New Orleans?”
“I always will,” said my grandfather.
“Boy, we got so drunk with them gals—”

I stopped the tape. But the New Orleans bit got caught in the delay pedal and made a nice loop which I paired with a bit of vinyl crackle, some rumbling feedback, and a pitched-down guitar from a dollar-bin record called Silva Y Villalba’s Antologia Musical Colombiana. The result is an eleven-minute track with some reverb, knob twiddling, and a bit of double-time delay at the end:

Big American Loop No. 2: Do You Remember New Orleans?

I plan to make one hundred of these loops and then I’ll select the best four and release them on vinyl. Ninety-eight more to go. And someday I’ll work up the nerve to give my grandfather’s roast a proper listen.

Two good memories: 1) Making cassette loops in high school, hunched over the plastic guts of a disemboweled Maxell, splicing together bits of brown magnetic tape and then piecing everything back together with a jeweler’s screwdriver. I remember hearing the murmur of my parents and sitcoms downstairs before putting on headphones to retreat into a jacked Funkadelic or Public Enemy loop.  2) One night I spent hours at the college radio station recording the hiss and crackle at the ends of old 45s, messing with the levels and thinking I was visionary. It was dawn when I pushed open the metal door of the Student Activities Building, and I listened to those loops nonstop for a week while walking along railroad tracks and brooding. I lost the tape after I moved out of the YMCA and I mourned as if I’d lost a masterpiece, although I’m sure I’d be embarrassed if it ever resurfaced.

I don’t have memories like these when I use digital software to make music. I copy and paste and drag and zoom in and adjust pixels to goose the volume and effects. This feels like work rather than play.

I’m not a musician, but I like to make loops while I write. Sampling old records or punching out a bassline and letting the machines run while I scribble in my notebook, occasionally getting up to add another layer or adjust the delay. There’s something remarkably stabilizing about this ritual; I may have finally found a replacement for smoke breaks.

With digital software, there are too many possibilities. Ableton Live is a gorgeous tool, but a single folder has over 12,675 different drum samples and my eyes glaze as I scroll through files, paralyzed by choice. I’m beginning to recognize that this new world of infinite options demands limitations, even if they’re artificially imposed. More importantly, I miss the memories and chatter that bubbled in the back of my head while working with tape decks and knobs and cables. I don’t hear these thoughts when I sit in front of a monitor.

And so I picked up a couple of pedals from Guitar Center and bought a cheap tape recorder at a Walmart in Mississippi (it was the last one, sitting on the bottom shelf, covered in years of dust). My first effort is a busted loop built from a bit of sludgy Coltrane with a shot of Connie Francis, plus a wall of static and feedback. I let this loop run all afternoon, gathering steam before pressing the red circle for eleven minutes.

Big American Loop #1: Connie and Coltrane at the End of Time

Not much happens besides shifting some levels and fiddling with the delay, but I think it’s a nice groove for writing. Or at least thinking about writing.

Many thanks to Oliver Blank for the guidance.

Here’s the first half of the set that I played last week at T-Lot’s Night Market. Pretty straightforward with lots of snare drums to keep you clapping along. The original Black Devil Disco record is so beautiful that I had no choice but to let it run for ten minutes.

James A. Reeves – Behind the Discotheque 95 minutes

01. Nicolas Jaar – Time for Us
02. Dub Kult – Cluster Fuck
03. Mark E – Good Times (Edit)
04. Lonely C & Baby Prince – Your Mom’s House
05. The Dirtbombs – Sharevari
06. Quarks – I Walk (Superpitcher Remix)
07. Black Devil Disco Club – 1978 Side A: H Friend / Timing, Forget The Timing / One To Choose
08. Invisible Conga People – Cable Dazed
09. Chromatics – Night Drive
10. Rhythm & Sound – Never Tell You
11. Kraftwerk – K2 (Ruckzuck)
12. Kraftwerk – Numbers/Computer World
13. Linear Movement – Way Out of Living

This is my first mix in over a year and it feels good to make one again. This installment is aimed squarely at the midnight hour, and it’s best enjoyed on a porch or fire escape. Back in high school, I got in the habit of staying up late thanks to the Electrifying Mojo, a Detroit DJ whose eclectic sets featuring Parliament, Kraftwerk, and Cybotron helped kickstart techno music. Mojo was one of the first DJs to put Prince on the air, he interrupted songs with social commentary from “the mental machine,” and he always rocked the fifteen-minute version of “Flashlight.” I discovered Mojo near the tail of his career late one August night in ’92 and my musical landscape exploded as he turned me on to Al Green, A Tribe Called Quest, Devo, Joy Division, Stetsasonic, and Funkadelic. I’d stay up through the night, hunched over my tape player, rocking the pause/record switch and making mix tapes culled from Mojo’s show. The 120-minute Maxell cassettes were the best for this.

Twenty years later, I’m staying up late down here in New Orleans, sitting on the porch ’round midnight while I catch up on my reading and try to write another book. Lately I’ve been thinking about those deep summer nights with my little Panasonic radio back in Michigan, and so I’ve put together this sprawling track list of favorites for your possible enjoyment.

James A. Reeves – Midnight on Dauphine (101 minutes)

01. Little Red, 22, Tangle Eye & Hard Hair – “Early in the Morning” (Angola prison ca. 1947)
02. Stars of the Lid – “Austin, TX Mental Hospital”
03. The Cranes – “Beautiful Friend”
04. Black Sabbath – “Planet Caravan”
05. Serge Gainsbourg – “Melody”
06. Bob Vaught & The Renegaids – “Surfin’ Tragedy”
07. The Blue Hawaiians – “Martini Five Oh”
08. Al Green – “Simply Beautiful”
09. Irma Thomas – “Ruler of My Heart”
10. Füxa – “Dreamlanding”
11. Jeanette – “Oi Tu Voz”
12. Parva – “Mosem-e Gol”
13. Prince – “Purple Rain”
14. Bohren & Der Club of Gore – “Street Tattoo”
15. Vangelis – “Blade Runner Blues”
16. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “The Dead Flag Blues” Part I
17. Mojave 3 – “My Life in Art”
18. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “The Dead Flag Blues” Part II
19. Datacide – “Flashback Signal”
20. Mississippi Fred McDowell – “Roll and Tumble”

Additional samples: Electrifying Mojo; Kraftwerk’s “Numbers”; various field recordings of helicopters and traffic.

In 2009, I was driving along the very bottom of Texas in the summertime and everything was bright white and hot. These were days of fresh grief, and I drove with no destination in mind. I was heavily addicted to talk radio at the time but I couldn’t listen to it by the sea. I scanned the dial for an oldies station while the Gulf of Mexico crashed to my left in big waves. That’s when I heard the song below, a woman’s beautiful voice singing like some well-worn memory. I pulled to the side of the road and nearly buried the car in a sand dune. I recorded the end of the song with my telephone and then the radio signal faded to silence.

The tune sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Maybe it’s an old standard that everybody knows. Perhaps it’s something nobody’s heard before. I have no idea. Here’s what I recorded that day:

Unknown Beautiful Clip

I keep returning to this fragment, letting it loop when I write or study and it’s gradually taken a mystical tone for me. While studying Constitutional Law last week, I began tinkering with the snippet, adding a little reverb here and some fuzz there. I ended up with this eleven-minute soundtrack:

James A. Reeves – Texas Radio Drift

It starts off like a badly tuned radio and turns into what (I hope) sounds like a beautiful song seeping through the floorboards or drifting from an apartment down the hall before decaying into six minutes of pure reverb. I wanted to make something that feels like falling asleep in the sun or the high-pitched whine of powerlines in the afternoon heat. This track is still rough, but I think there are some pleasant parts towards the end. Suggestions are welcome and if you’d like to take a crack at making it better, let me know and I’ll send you the master file.

I run at night because nobody can see me cry. Although I’ve been running for a little over a year, I’m still not very good at it. I flounder and wheeze. I moan. If you’re on Kent Avenue around midnight and you see a guy in ratty sweatpants clutching his left leg and going all red in the face, that’s probably me. Hello.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been tinkering with a playlist that I play nearly every night when I run. Now I submit it to you. This isn’t a wall-to-wall deejay techno mix with four-to-the-floor carpeting. There’s some breathing room and meandering fuzz. And the Rolling Stones. Plus several moments of static and thunderstorms. And a ton of reverb. I fucking love reverb in my headphones.

James A. Reeves – Music for Night Running Mix
1 hour, 12 minutes

01. Chromatics – Running Up That Hill
02. M83 – Teen Angst (Montag Remix)
03. Ester Brinkmann – On Ne Vit Pas
04. I-F – Space Invaders are Smoking Grass
05. Rolling Stones – Gimme Shelter
06. Can – Oh Yeah
07. Joy Division – Heart & Soul
08. Cybotron – Cosmic Raindance
09. Perspects – They Keep on Dancing
10. Autechre – Second Scout
11. M83 – Don’t Save Us From the Flames (Superpitcher MIx)
12. Prince – Controversy
13. Adult. – Skinlike (Equation Mix)
14. Vitalic – Poney, Part One
15. Hua Yang – Radio Broadcasting

Some late night music for looking out of a motel window at blinking neon signs. Or for driving down an empty road while streetlights loop across the windshield. These songs also work well for running emotionally down the middle of the street at one in the morning: melancholy, cold, and sparkly with some generous reverberations.

James A. Reeves – Sundown Motel
81 minutes

01. The Moody Blues – Nights in White Satin Deram Records, 1967
02. Carl Craig – Landcruising Blanco y Negro, 1995
03. Convextion – Premiata Down Low, 2006
04. Burger/Ink – Elvism Matador, 1998
05. Substance & Vainqueur – Reverberation Scion Versions, 2007
06. STL – From a Distance Smallville, 2009
07. Rod Modell – Body Sonic Plop, 2008
08. The Velvet Underground – All Tomorrow’s Parties Verve, 1967
09. Intrusion – CV313 Morning Dub Intrusion, 2009
10. Quantec – Melted Snapshot, 2009
11. Maurizio – M6b Edit M-Series, 1996
12. The Ronettes – Keep on Dancing Intrusion, 2009
13. Echospace – Elysian Modern Love, 2007
14. The Paris Sisters – I Love How You Love Me Decca, 1961

“The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers . . . It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not.”

Rewind forty years and everything’s different and everything’s the same. Heavy on the reverb, here’s a simple fuzz mix for an hour and some change. These are fifteen well-worn songs for motoring through the back roads of the desert and crashing in cheap motels where you can hear the bugs zapping in the neon as you fall asleep and the radio says something strange like the streets are paved with gold and if someone asks you, you can call my name…

James A. Reeves – Delta Skylark 70
68 minutes

00. Introduction: Million Dollar Music and Some Rain
01. Love – A House is not a Motel from Forever Changes, 1967
02. The Byrds – Eight Miles High from Fifth Dimension, 1966
03. The Electric Prunes – I Had Too Much to Dream from Nuggets, 1973
04. Stevie Wonder – Jesus Children of America from Innervisions, 1973
05. David Bowie – Space Oddity from Space Oddity, 1969
06. Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit from Surrealistic Pillow, 1967
07. Shocking Blue – Love Buzz from At Home, 1969
08. Roger & the Gypsies – Pass the Hatchet from Pass the Hatchet, 1965
09. Quicksilver Messenger Service – Mona from Happy Trails, 1969
10. Cream – Sunshine of Your Love from Disraeli Gears, 1967
11. Diana Ross & the Supremes – Reflections from Reflections, 1967
12. July – Dandelion Seeds from My Clown, 1968
13. The Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs from Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967
14. 13th Floor Elevators – Slip Inside this House from Easter Everywhere, 1967
15. Funkadelic – Maggot Brain from Maggot Brain, 1971

Many thanks to the good people at Hytky for inviting me to deejay at the Rytmikaravaani festival. I had the opportunity to play some of my favorite songs very loud, show some photographs from America, and I had a ball. Most of all, thanks to the encouraging people who danced around and whistled and waved. Here’s a recording of the evening’s set:

James A. Reeves – Live from Helsinki
65 minutes

00. AM Radio Scan
01. Dungen – Fredag Subliminal Sounds, 2008
02. Moodymann – J.A.N. KDJ, 1997
03. Ben Klock – OK Ostgut Ton, 2009
04. Hot Natured – Electric Jones Wolf+Lamb, 2009
05. 40 Thieves – Don’t Turn It Off (Brennan Green Mix) Permanent Vacation, 2009
06. Soul Clap – Womack & Womack ‘Conscious’ Edit  Wolf+Lamb, 2009
07. Dapayk Solo – Hollis Mo’s Ferry, 2007
08. Staffan Linzatti – Quibble District of Corruption, 2007
09. Agaric – Goose Step Raum Musik, 2007
10. Max Mohr – Can We Get This? Playhouse, 2003
11. Atomly – Crave Atomiq, 2009
12. Maayan Nidam – Tengo Power Shovel Audio, 2009