Radio Free Heaven: A Mix Inspired By Philip K. Dick and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick’s underappreciated final novel, is framed by death. It begins with a singularly famous death—the assassination of John Lennon in 1980—and follows the reverberations of that event backward in time to the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 60s and 70s, where Episcopal Bishop Timothy Archer is in the midst of a crisis of faith. The book is a characteristically Dick-ian smoothie of thematic contradictions: sacred/popular, surreal/mundane, historical/fictional, faith/gnosis.

Radio Free Heaven is a loose adaptation of the novel into the medium of the mixtape. As Transmigration is fundamentally inseparable from its specific time and place, the following mix is focused on contemporaneous music, Bay Area artists, and topical archival recordings, but I also broke that rule once or twice when it was called for. Thank you for listening and, as Angel Archer says: have fun with your thoughts.

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