Midwinter 2025 Void Contemplations
Cat videos, parapolitical podcasts, vintage heavy mellow mixes, and other cold comforts.
First thing! As of January 2025, Basking in Gravity is on hold. Our monthly heavy mellow yin yoga sessions have been happening second Sundays at Healer in Indianapolis, but we’re in the process of reconfiguring the experience. Hopefully we’ll be back up and running sometime in March or April? Stay tuned to this Vøid Contemplation Tactics newsletter or watch Healer’s socials for updates.
Also while I have a couple social media accounts I haven’t been looking at them often so apologies if you sent me something and I didn’t write back. I logged off after accidentally following a fact-checking clickpath that ended up at a chart showing how many more people were deported repatriated “removed” under Biden and Obama than during Trump’s first term. Fact check: Ethnic cleansing campaigns in Gaza, United States, and around the world often benefit from broad bipartisan support.
So I’ve been watching basketball games and bird videos with the cats, playing beautiful and aimless open-world video games, walking around in the IRL slush, reading extremely depressing and very weird science fiction, and listening obsessively to Radiohead bootlegs. All mundane but comforting activities that offer a gentle deja-vuey balm, narratives that dissolve into abstraction, experiences that are simultaneously new and familiar. Suffering and change are the only inevitables, but at least the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder seem to find great joy in playing basketball so beautifully together. Although of course we have to wait three days to watch Pacers games despite paying for an NBA League Pass subscription, see preceding commentary on the inevitability of suffering.
The weekly Inter-Dimensional Music heavy mellow FM radio meditation project has also been running slowly, but we’ll resume new broadcasts next week as long as there are no more home “studio” SNAFUs. Although to be honest it’s been stalled mostly because I am tired and aimless. Part of this is the usual Muncie Winter Blooze. The Pacific Northwest has aestheticized and monetized its gloominess much more effectively than we have, but the Midwestern Rust Belt lays claim to four of the 10 cloudiest cities in the US according to NOAA (RIP?) data that I saw on some website that I accidentally closed already.
Our Ohio neighbors in Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo are gloomed-down more than 50% of the year, while fellow Hoosiers an hour up the road in Fort Wayne suffer under cloud cover 186 days of the year. It’s one thing if there’s crispy snow to go crunch around in, but more often than not our winters are characterized by temps that hover just above freezing, making for slopped-up mud walks by day and slick roads overnight. It’s easy to stay inside, even when openly fascist tech bros and other right wing partisans aren’t looting the federal government at the direction of the Republican party as the culmination of a multigenerational project that has been unfolding in plain sight since World War II or so, depending on how much you rely on the cold comfort of parapolitical podcast commentary.
Here are three ID Music Flashback Clas-s-sicks from February 2021 that have been airing on Marfa Public Radio and WQRT Indianapolis over the last few weeks. They’re streaming in the old Mixcloud archive from when the site offered unlimited storage space. If you’d prefer to download them, hit me up and I’ll hook you up. Each features language from Alan Watts, alongside guided meditation from me. You can also find the original Watts recordings in Out of Your Mind, a collection of his lectures and dharma talks available in this public archive.
More to come, and hopefully sooner rather than later? Until then . . .
An hour of cold, damp ambience; oily tears, non-alcoholic nyabinghi, and alcoholic Zen from Alan Watts. Guided meditation from your host.
Pulse Emitter – Space Frost
Grave Upheaval - II-IV
Primitive Man - Oily Tears
SUNN O))) - 606Day2_LM Song6
NKISI - Secrecy
Luke Stewart - 1
Ras Michael & The Sons Of Negus- Don't Sell Daddy No Whiskey
Jamire Williams - (Interpretation 14)
Marissa Nadler & Stephen Brodsky - In the Air Tonight
Gnarl - Cold Rain Will Fall
An hour of blackened ambient synths, volatile cosmic jazz, and screwed and chopped reggae. Commentary throughout from Alan Watts, with guided meditation from your host.
Indricothere / Geryon - One Million Years
Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra - Helmets of Our Poisonous Thoughts #16 / Awaken the World [Sardegna, Italy]
Shabaka and the Ancestors – ’Til The Freedom Comes Home
Al Cisneros - Yerushalayim
Steel Pulse - Rollerskates (DJ Screw - Chapter 012 edit)
Infinite Spirit Music - Rasta
Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics - Anglo Ethio Suite
Indricothere / Geryon - One Million Years
An hour of "dark-doom-psychedelic-ritualcore" along with language from Alan Watts. Guided meditation from your host.
Sentinels of the Arctic - Huldufólks Souk (Trade in Twilight)
Senyawa - Istana
Philip Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble - On The Beach
Locrian - The Great Dying
Krallice - Aspherance
Princess Difficult - Symphony Of Emotions
I JAHBAR, prod. BIG FLYTE & VELKRO - LIGHTER THIEF
Actress - Rims
Sentinels of the Arctic - Vættir (Tomten II)
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