Can Radio Be Re-enchanted? James Reeves of Midnight Radio

Freud's notion of the "unheimlich," which was translated into English as "Uncanny," might have more literally been translated as "un-homely," which suggests the eerie sensation of the familiar warping into the unfamiliar. "Uncanny" comes from old Scottish meaning not known or safe or prudent. The uncanny for Freud was something previously known becoming unknowable, so that it was the haunting presence of the past but not the past as intentionally remembered.

When nostalgia for the past is the promise of a return to a halcyon Eden when everything was in its right place, then it is the stuff of fascist regimes. But when nostalgia accidentally returns what had been carefully repressed by the primary naivete of innocence, then it becomes unintentional and uncanny.

James's nostalgia for the late radio of his youth growing up in the Detroit area isn't nostalgic because it includes what algorithmic radio has repressed. His Midnight Radio project is an open platform where anything can happen because it includes the otherness than algorithms cover-over with averages. Some folks turn on the radio to hear what is familiar and comforting, but others turn it on to encounter the novel as the failure of the familiar. The mystics speak of the "Far-Near," which is when elsewhere speaks locally. 

Indeed, we are prediction machines whose intentions are to reduce uncertainty, but their is some uncanny drive in us, which Freud morbidly named the "Death Drive," for the irreducible ambiguity of the Other because it is the unpredictability, or the "deterritorialization," of otherness that makes all things new. Radio used to be a place where the far could be brought near. James's Midnight Radio lets elsewhere speak in the clearing that he has made in himself for the Other, so let the otherness in us recognized and the otherness in him, which is the solidarity of twoness rather than of the One.

https://youtu.be/wevx36qH2bM