It’s summer and with the heat comes the irresistible clench of kinetic forces, a whirlwind tug of hair and sweat and clinging clothes, eyes staring for hours into hypnotic spirals of oscillating fans that make you yearn for linear motion, a pulse, a push, a pull. Before you know it you are speeding down zig zag lightening bolt highways at 85 mph on a road trip joy ride to the kingdom of nowhere. You gaze out your window at a landscape haunted by monuments to forgotten heroes, paradises constructed from rubber bands, towns tottering on the fragile memory of some obscure historical pastime, utopias constructed then abandoned.

Sometimes the past becomes so degraded that it fades into an ectoplasmic abyss that thickens the air around it with its darkness. Sometimes it slips in stealthily under the un-batting eyelashes of kitsch. Other times it merges into a flash of light and endows the present moment with revelatory sparks of divine wisdom. Either way, when the past transmutes into a spirit form that possesses the present so seamlessly, a new time is created, and that time is GHOST-MODERNISM.

These are the top 20 radio hits of that time: pop-odes to sub-aqueous pyramids, imaginary political figures, chaos, mania, flashes of light, electric lives, moccasined gods, serpent deities of Bahamian voodoo, and murdered lovers whose crosses dot the haunted highway and endow it with everlasting power.

Taraka Larson’s Haunted Highways and Hymns for a Ghost-Modern World Mixtape

∆ SIDE A ∆

1. Dancing Gods- Silver Apples
2. Keinsein- Teeth Mountain
3. Pyramid of the Sun in the Heavens- Peace In
4. Electriclife- Psychic Ills
5. Oceans- Indian Jewelry
6. Laughlines- Cocteau Twins
7. Haunted Graffiti- Ariel Pink
8. Nasirli Eller- Selda
9. Big Sound- Amon Düül
10. Governer Rhodes- Jandek

∆ SIDE B ∆

1. Kuujen halti kuuterhan- Lau Nau
2. In Caroline- Amen Dunes
3. Blue Basket- Unknown (Cambodian Cassette Archives- Sublime Frequencies)
4. Bounce Four- Gary War
5. Flash of Light- Silk Flowers
6. Cheer Up!- MCSquared
7. Tummyache- Sleep ∞ Over
8. Exerpt from Radio Calcutta- Unknown (Radio India- Sublime Frequencies)
9. Dambala- Exuma
10. That’s All For Everyone- Fleetwood Mac (screwed by Taraka Larson)