Thanks to a glitch on my part, this newsletter was “published” on October 3, 2025, instead of October 3, 2024, which is when it originally went out. Buttondown doesn’t let me amend the pub date. If you’re looking for the latest RADIOLIO missive, click here, then scroll down. (Or if you’re already on the archive page, keep it moving.)

⋆｡°✩ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 ⋆｡°✩

Before I knew it, the future had arrived. All those long-ago entries in my digital planner, and some spontaneous ones too. Hit after hit after hit. A funeral and a wedding. A (band) breakup and a backstage jaunt and a book announcement. Recovery comes slowly. I say I wait for ordinary life to tuck me back under its tidy cloche, but I also do my best to escape routine. I ache to be in the world, of the world, for the world. To catch autumn’s eye, savor summer’s parting kiss, before riding the slow turn into the Bay’s brittle wet winter.

Anyway, music. Quick recap, in September, I went to four shows:

Happy Valentine’s Day to the lovers and the haters alike. How can it be that the last RADIOLIO Megamix dropped late last summer… A five and a half month hiatus… I would apologize but there’s been plenty going on in the world that’s demanded my attention, and yours, too.

I started working on this mix as I was wrapping up RACK FOCUS. Because of that one’s narrow scope, I had a lot of loosies rattling around and began gathering them. The title for this mix comes from the chorus of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed,” which was released as part of the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack. (I was going to start writing about my thoughts on the film and then remembered I’d already done that.)

The state of the union is bad. I know it, you know it; we hear the fear of/for our years ahead as, well, a kettle’s shrill whistle in the background of our days. Each person’s proximity is different but the high whine can and does collapse space and time.

IN:

• deep cleaning

• privacy

• using the creative scraps you’ve kept pressed between the pages of your personal files for “that right moment”

• carrying clippers on your person so you can forage flowering branches and vines

• leaving extra on top of the tip

• greeting wild animals like they’re old friends

  

• reading books you already own

• requesting books for your local library (here’s the link to OPL’s page)

• off the cuff (but polite and precise) requests

• feeling grown (distinct from feeling grown-up)

• explaining the real reason you don’t want to do something instead of circling an obviously bs excuse—or rather, respecting time, yours and others’

• FKA twigs, “Keep It, Hold It”

• 努力学粤语

• doing the nice thing for the fact of having done it

• writing without a thesis statement

• writing without a goal except to become a better writer

• writing without having or giving an explanation beyond “because I could and can”

• Hildegard, “Bach in Town”

• holding yourself accountable

• cooking with lemon juice and zest (I’ve been making an extremely modified version of this recipe with all the Meyer lemons I’ve been acquiring)

• vegetables as snacks

  

• homemade clothes and accessories (ex: this incredible tote by Diane); I’ve been wearing a scarf I knit (rather badly) some years ago and I think I could do a lot better now so wish me luck :^)

• playing the silly public game

  

• engaging with creative work that you don’t like, but that you find ways to learn from

• not overthinking syntax unless you’re being paid

• finding your place on the Pineapple King genealogy

  

• opera karaoke

• public displays of attention

• telling someone who’s funny that they’re funny (even if they know it)

• pulling a card even if you’re scared of what you might draw

  

• 这些蛇年菜 (LNY party theme was “tubes”)

  

  

• 这个蛇年快乐表情

  

OUT:

• the OUT portion of the IN/OUT format

“mutual aid los angeles (MALA) has put together a spreadsheet with valuable resources for people affected by the ongoing los angeles wildfires and wind storm. the sheet is constantly being updated with resources such as shelter info, animal boarding info, addresses for distribution centers, volunteer opportunities and so much more.” (source)

MALAN Fire & Wind Storm Resources : Available Resources

Stay safe out there. I’m thinking of you.

RE: current affairs, I don't have anything to add to the noise. Reach out to your friends and strangers alike.

Sometimes, it helps to have a project. After both of us randomly started listening to Tori Amos recently, my friend Jasmine asked me if I might put together an intro playlist for Kate Bush and Björk. Because they're two of my big three, I figured, fuck it, I'll throw the other—Enya—into the mix with them.

The result isn't as long as a normal RADIOLIO megamix, but it travels. I've used the "Sunset"/"Hyper-Ballad" transition before but it's too good not to revisit. I didn't mean to finish the mix with three final songs, but sometimes the obvious choices are the right ones.

Magdalena Bay
The Fillmore
2024.9.3
💿

who up picking their scabs
letting the nail dig in like a shovel
turned slyly just under the skin of the earth
the soil as body as code word condition
constructing
decomposing
demanding
updating

i think i would like it
even if i weren’t chasing another, dearer sound
the lilted voice and lifted pout
all angels emerge from bubble and trouble
whipped froth and dark-eyed wonder
they know the power, they twirl it like a coy strand
a slipped ribbon
a bony baton
wrapped up in high res rainbows
new model
new aspect
new network condition
unrendered
unrended
surrender
i do,
he ido
unceded
in memory
read only by the voice in your head

✦󠀠󠀠󠀠

In high school, I sucked up to my AP econ teacher by name-dropping Sasha & Digweed and their Northern Exposure mixes. In college, I was typecast as an ecstasy dealer at Beyond in San Bernardino, and, long before the org was as much of an institution as Insomniac, once attended a mini-HARD fest at Club Nokia, now the Novo, where (separately) I also saw Miike Snow (had to leave the show early because I was nauseated by the combo of fake smoke & maybe undercooked Kraft microwavable mac ‘n cheese), Robyn (<3), and Mark Ronson in his Business Intl. era (one of those songs is still a custom ringtone on my phone, set for my high school friend Alex).

Basically, I happened to be in the right place (southern California) at the right time (early 2010’s) to witness electronic dance music’s* dizzying ascent to Big Pop Supremacy, but my interest in that kind of high BPM offering began many years ago. As a kid, I played a lot of Dance Dance Revolution, specifically Extreme 2, and hang on, I did a cursory search about the game to look up the soundtrack and a forum (!) walkthrough came up, with this opening salvo:

Damn. Um, anyway, I loved the songs I heard/played through DDRX2, those propulsive and primitively (effective) emo-otional odysseys that also reminded me of a lot of the ecstatic techno used in Gundam openings and AMVs (that’s “anime music videos”) at the time. In fact, my all-time favorite AMV creator** exclusively used trance tracks for their BGM. Which is to say, I’m overdue for a dance/trance-forward playlist***, and I finally got my shit together to make one happen, just in time for summer’s last gasp.

Alvvays
Fox Theater
2024 8 16
🐟

isn’t this just what it is?
a decade between lives
we see each other like shadows
high fiving on parallel hallways
except under hot lights, over cold vents,
new history fights fungal creep
enough to remember the freeway exit
that straight hot slingshot
i like it i like it i left it behind
with the dry wind and the dry heat
with the dry cough and wet throb
of mourning forests, of plundered citrus, of love
interrupted—
i stood with you, i stand with you,
original +1, shy elegant sister,
nursing the scar left
by absence’s blister

✦󠀠󠀠󠀠

Thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!

Every time I visit Los Angeles, I remember what it’s like to be a girl. Shaved shins teetering on 4” heels with narrow toe boxes, hands tugging at the hem of a skirt that’s just long enough to count as a garment and short enough to turn every encountered smile into a leer or a frown. Sweat on the backs of my thighs, around the neck of my shirt, under my armpits, collecting in nooks and crannies of flesh that I would pinch or pick at in anxiety that there was too much, that it sat on my body in ways I tried to love but more often tried to disguise.

Most of my best friends in college were, and are, a gorgeous group of girls. In the decade since our graduation, my feelings about them haven’t changed at the core: I gaze upon them with a combination of adoration and pride, sometimes a worry that I’ll be the first to admit can be patronizing, and always a piercing longing for the world to be kinder to them, these fearless but often shy women, who speak a silly and sly secret language that’s only legible to me because I was one of its architects, once upon a time. A slow wink paired with a scheming grin; a disruptively cackling chorus of screaming; elbows linked with elbows, swaying caryatids drunk with confidence and a cobra’s coiled capacity for confrontation.

The one thing I don’t feel anymore, at least not the way I used to, is jealousy.

DIIV
Regency Ballroom
2024 6 7
⚗️

i wore the parappa hat because it was neon orange
like the hoodie i’d bought as XXL and cut to crop
and, the stripe on the side of my leggings,
that fluoro orange, coloring fear, un/natural warning
you will lose it — something true — don’t approach
and don’t pretend you
didn’t see it coming

i keep flipping back the calendar of my life
how could i have prepared myself for
the paper cut (i didn’t see it coming)
though i’d been running the knife along my thumb
for days, even weeks, even months,
begging the air for a little more oxygen
a bit more burn
in the lungs
like a flame hanging on
by a ghost of breath
ah!
ah
a

i listen to “soul-net” while walking to the bus stop
while on the bus
while walking from the bus stop to wherever it is
i’m supposed to go
calendar event set days, even weeks, even months ago
regular appointments
like my cats throwing trash around in the morning
and my dog’s soft howl
force me out of bed
the blankets laid out neatly
as though nothing had slept in them over the night
i gaze in the mirror
red crescents under my eyes
red crescents being bombed
red moon rising
no, the phrase is “red sun,” to herald
blood in the night
blood, in the night,
and rust, in the morning

Miki Berenyi Trio
Great American Music Hall
2024 6 1
❇️

aquarium music filters through murmuring
as star-crossed fingers pluck the minuet
her voice runs a sieve
above the melody
capturing fuzz like a static cling

ethereal not weak, green velvet gossamer
ravenette mantle worn with a crooked grin
she’s seen things, she’s lived through nostalgia
& come out the other side as acid in vapor
the crimson days are over, the carmine remain
heady, pulling the blood back from gold gauzy years
how lucky they are, new light on old wounds
splits open, fresh dawn and fresh flowers

except: it’s not quite the same
the thrill takes a step back
a glance to the heavens, the inner ear whispering,
asking the monitor
can you still hear me
can you still hear me
can you still

✦

I can’t believe I got to hear “Love at First Sight” live. Miki forever.

Waxahatchee
Fox Theater
2024 5 18
🪵

a complicated love
among ordinary people
makes fools out of saints
& savants from country singers

‘cause there’s something about what happens when we talk
no idle hours, only “with” and “without you”
stripped of the treacle and left with the stain
a love like a splinter wet blood on the grain
that barbed wire pucker you grin through the pain
‘til glittery lip gloss is all that remains
of your strawberry watermelon coconut complaint
just a low-eyed glower that won’t meet your feint
a ghost of a person, a heartworm, a bane
& you’d come running, running, if they called your name

✦

Thanks for "listening." Stay tuned...!

Julia Holter
Great American Music Hall
2024 5 4
🌟

my body’s also responding to the frequency
of the syncopation machine
its ecstatic chorale
its sincere “Yay!”
like bumping hands with a stranger and
as if by instinct
or lost desire
curling the fingertips just to remember that
you can
you shouldn’t
you can step into snow and leave the first print
and throw the soft pebble just to make rippling—

intermission, lecture,
came back from walking the dog
(not a metaphor) only to watch
a tree tumble down
two doors down
rustling down
saw biting down
its motor kept rumbling so i have to assume
the fallen tree’s twin will also come down
as all things do
every arc bends toward justice, if lucky,
isolation, if not—

Flora Yin-Wong
The Spire
2024 3 28
🎋

epiphany in a chime of blood
like bamboo sliced lengthwise its
splintering quiver & the lid of a pot
left long on the burner
she puts her headphones on as though they're
seashells & she's
listening for fire
dull throb body beats
skittering, whittling,
caustic mass of cavern creeps that
cup the club within tilting monoliths

coal & collide
literal gong strike & trembling zither
strange inhabitants of stranger yet summoning

Happy vernal equinox to all :^) Like many of the bulbs and seeds that have been quietly awaiting warming soil temperatures, I too have been laying down the roots for (hopefully!) future germination, soon. I certainly hope to be more attentive to (about?) this newsletter. But in the meantime, here's another 123-song megamix for your perusal.

I started building this out last fall, off the bones of a previous playlist I'd made called "The Last Snow of Winter," which I'd assembled while I was at MacDowell almost exactly a year ago. If my most recent RADIOLIO playlist was themed around "emotional annihilation," this one's themed around, hmm, let's call it "emotional snowmelt / haunted room tone."

Some particularly delicious moments:

• Radiohead, "Daydreaming" -> Kelela, "Sorbet"

• Chelsea Wolfe & Emma Ruth Rundle, "Anhedonia" -> Mitski, "The Deal" -> Slowdive, "Chained to a Cloud"

• Actress, "Memory Haze ( c 1 )" -> Amar Lal, "Only" -> Natural Wonder Beauty Concept, "Driving"

• TSHA, "Time" -> Carly Rae Jepsen, "Put It To Rest" -> Tinashe, "Treason"

• Doves, "Jetstream" -> The Mountain Goats, "Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise" -> Gigi Perez, "Sometimes (Backwood)"

• Lightning Bug, "I Lie Awake" -> Heart, "Soul of the Sea" -> Hot Chip, "Clear Blue Skies" -> The Moody Blues, "The Night"

• Taeko Ohnuki, "Sargasso Sea" -> Wand, "Blue Cloud"

RADIOLIO'S TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2023

... and some complementary pairings

Everyone who publishes year-end lists makes a big deal about how much work / thought / agony goes into compiling them. As someone who used to make those lists all the time, I can confirm that people will like, lose their minds working on this shit but that the payoff for all that hand-wringing is essentially nothing.

• Unless you're with various Times or a leading trade pub, the rest of us are shouting into the void with our delicately balanced curations, those considerations between commercial juggernauts and overlooked treasures.

Has anyone else been looking up chainmail on eBay? Every now and then I'll feel these tendrils of "something" pushing up through the zeitgeist and right now, it's armorcore (not to be confused with Armored Core), or maybe broadly medievalcore. Weavings worn through by time, beams of slanting light coming through decayed arrow slits in crumbling towers, hammered metal glinting with the deep, uneven burnish of age... That vaguely autumnal scene shift, pampas grass soaring into the shortening day, swaying shafts alighted with sweeping brushes of pale gold, gleaming bristles...ah!

A little life update, I'm in the middle of writing Book 2 right now. I've been describing my process as "seeing and transcribing visions." I learned this from writing Book 1: I write toward specific moments—highly stylized sequences that underpin the emotional stakes I've been laying down the entire time, driven home with a meticulously honed single spike, a vampire stake prepared for, uh, the phantom of the story...I don't know if I can complete the circle of this metaphor but "you get what I'm saying"? Even when I'm writing "contemporary realism," I'm completely uninterested in being realistic; I want to show you the impossible world.

Some back story ... My formal "media career" ended the winter of 2017, when I was laid off from my contract gig as the night editor at Cosmo.com. I'd inherited the post from Gina, who'd been my editor at my very first "media job," which I'd quit in part because I thought the higher ups in that company were treating her very badly and because I wanted to freelance (lol).

Before taking the Cosmo gig, I'd spent about half a year working at a poké and boba restaurant in Little Tokyo. I once served poké to Poppy (like, that Poppy), whom I later learned had jacked creation direction from a tentative collab with my friend April. Anyway, the best perk of the Little Tokyo job was that my boss would give me bags of salmon trimmings to take home, which I carried, unrefrigerated, on the hour or so bus and train rides back to my apartment in Los Feliz. I was lucky that I never got food poisoning, ha ha!

All of this is to say: the Cosmo gig was my last ditch gasp at media legitimacy. I got a Hearst email and had my stories syndicated across Elle, Marie Claire, Seventeen (lol). I reported on nonsense most of the time but I was also the person on duty when the Ariana Grande concert bombing happened, and the Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting, and the release of TSwift's Reputation (which, long story short, caused me to miss the last train from New York Penn Station to Newark Airport). I often wrote my requisite blog posts with a glass(es) of wine in hand; typos happened often, and I occasionally got angry emails demanding if I'd ever gone to school, if I even knew how to write, if the garbage I called writing made me ashamed to be alive, etc.

So when I got the news about the layoff, I was resigned to my fate. All those years spent following and unfollowing and following people on Twitter to get their attention, cold pitching editors objectively insane stories, written on the edge of what was probably mania, hoping that someone, somewhere, would bite, hadn't done shit for me. When the same editor who'd let me know about my firing later emailed me half a year later to offer me back that gig, I was relieved to be able to say, actually, I've moved on to something else. Otherwise, I knew there was a part of me that would've sat like a dog and happily eaten those scraps, then begged for more, as I'd always had when it came to the media industry, a meat grinder that largely only rewards writers who are no longer surprised by the taste of shit.

Yesterday, early evening, the sun low but brilliant in the sky, I picked up Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen and began to read it on the westbound, city-bound train, snaking below and then above the Town while taking in language that I'd last encountered over a decade ago. I think, though I might be wrong (my memory is...let's say "tricky"), that I first encountered Kitchen in a friend's book stack. Either Lisa or Diane, leaning Lisa, which means it was probably Diane but my heart (not my memory) says Lisa.

All I recall about that initial reading was that I liked the design of the standard English translation cover, and was struck by the name Banana. I still like the cover and am struck by her name—but now that I'm reading as a Real Adult, someone who (unlike the me from a decade ago) seriously works with language, it hits different. I didn't remember anything about the plot, which is tenderly compassionate about something that a lot of modern, more "progressive" writers still can't pull off, and on a sentence level, the English translation by Megan Backus makes me feel like a star-shaped leaf (perhaps even the tree star from The Land Before Time) swaying with a sighing motion as gravity rocks it, gently all the way, to a ground collaged with its fallen, decaying compatriots.

No playlist this week, because I'm tweaking the format of the newsletter. Instead of weekly mini mixes, I'm "moving toward" making megamixes like TOUCH GRASS, 1) because they're more fun to make, 2) you need time to let a playlist marinate / tweak the transitions, and 3) I can literally do whatever I want.

SO: a megamix a month, with other missives interspersed. I've already titled and queued the one for September: ⚔️ SWORD HILT HITS THE HEART. The theme is, loosely, emotional annihilation. (The Horn of Plenty version of "Shift" is on there.) I'm trying not to repeat songs across playlists but sometimes...you need that one specific bridge...

Lio Min

The previous RADIOLIO playlists have been consolidated into their own mini megamixes, for perusal here ("Intro" serves as an interlude...like changing the CD in the player or whatever simile you prefer):

via @fwbcollection

The most surprising thing about FWB Fest was that it felt like the kind of music festival that justifies the continued existence of music festivals. Thrown by the "DAO" ("decentralized autonomous organization") known as "FWB" ("Friends With Benefits," unaffiliated with either the movie(s) or the TV show(s) [???]) in the Southern California enclave of Idyllwild Arts Academy, FWB Fest superficially avoided all the things that make the modern festival-going experience a nightmare. The grounds were secluded but not remote; the canopy coverage of Idyllwild's thick groves shielded the crowds from the 90-100F day temps; aesthetic touches presumably provided by FORM, the production team that used to run the experimental art-music festival Arcosanti (on hold since 2020), transformed the forest into—

Let me be blunt: I spent the past weekend at "crypto's Woodstock," where a smattering of modern music’s avant-garde performed under the gently fluttering mushroom gill coverings in the sage-burned forests of inland southern California.

Here's the thing — I watched Sky Ferreira debut "Guardian" in 2014, but it didn't leave much of an impression and when I heard her sing it almost a decade later, I had a similar moment again of, "Okay."

It was just...a song, which over the years has since been folded into her overall mythology: the stage-fraught wunderkind who couldn't escape the ravenous riptides of fame and fortune that kept trying to draw her closer to the spotlight, even as she built dams and diverted tributaries and tried to build a legacy outside of the cultural moment that made her initially famous.

Hi! Over the past decade I've "had" a lot of "jobs" — mailroom clerk, boba barista, call center operator, the night editor of Cosmopolitan dot com (dark lol!), summer camp teacher, young adult fiction author (this is the part where I very politely ask you to buy my book BEATING HEART BABY from a local bookseller or to borrow it from your local library), flower hauler, and "more." But all of those jobs are/were second or third jobs on top of thee thing that got me into writing: music! journalism!

Many of you have bore witness to my downward spirals about particular songs, albums, and artists (don't talk to me about Utada Hikaru unless you've got Time), in feverish IRL rants or equally feverish URL missives. Like many of you, I use music as currency, as love letter, as mantra. I've devoted my life to enriching its altar, or something like that. Because my artistic practice in total, which has become the mutant backbone-foundation of my life, grew from the seed of music.