"More than music, more than television: it's FM-TV!" Tonight, let us take you on an incredible journey through 1980s entertainment ephemera. FM-TV was Night Flight creator Stuart Shapiro's short-lived prime time cable companion series aimed at a slightly different demographic. Part two features a lost Doors documentary, interview with members of Journey, rare Cat Stevens performance and clips from Rock & Rule.

Tonight’s original episode comes from 1983, i.e. the early days of discovery on NF that often featured uncut performance footage. Here, we see Toyah’s 1981 show at London’s Rainbow Theatre with the irrepressible performer at the top of her game. Listen up for excellent tunes like "War Boys," "Neon Womb" and more. 

In tonight’s original episode of Night Flight, Annie Lennox shape-shifts through the video work of Eurythmics and own her own. The gender-bending music videos featured tonight find Lennox portraying an 18th century dilettante, 1960s-era flip wig singer, and in "Little Bird," a Cabaret performer playing her most challenging role yet: a confederacy of all her previous personas! Tonight, we salute a pop music chameleon of the highest order. As syndication-era host Tom Juarez tells us, Night Flight was the only TV show that dared to spend an entire hour one artist’s music video efforts. This episode is a perfect example of that!

A hapless hitchhiker (Larry Hankin) gets advice on his road technique from a fairytale frog.

Night Flight’s classic “Video Essays” were a completely unique programming concept for the era. Lead by Night Flight’s writer Stuart Samuels (an instructor at the Cannes Film Festival), editors crafted hypnotizing video collages sourced from public domain archive footage and lost video artifacts - all linked by a common theme. Tonight’s original episode is the Video Essay “Machine Medley,” an adventurous mix of industrial sights and sounds featuring SPK’s “Machine Age Voodoo,” Swinging Piston’s “I Love The Sound Of Machines “ and more.

Tonight, we travel back to the airwaves of 1991 for a compilation episode of syndicated Night Flight. This hour and a half episode covers European Rock and Guitar Gods. Let syndication host Tom Juarez be your guide as you travel through the music and visuals of Nina Hagen, Taco, Yello, Telephone and more!

Welcome back its time to climb into the video vault for Devo, and follow the bands career through their experimental clips. Night Flight looks at the hottest metal in 1986 with new Twisted Sister, Black 'n Blue, Autograph, Kiss and more metal masters.

In "Take Off to Comedy IX," enter Jackie Mason's mind with the brilliant compilation “The World According To Me,” Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi get Brian Wilson out of bed to go surfing in a long forgotten clip that was one of our most popular stories on the blog last year. Other gems include Divine’s “These Lips Were Made For Kissing,” Dweezil Zappa, Weird Al Yankovich and an original segment with comedian Ritch Shydner’s hilarious bit in the Night Flight studios.

A special on legendary rock band Bauhaus, dubbed the "originators of Goth Rock," featuring interviews with members, videos from later spin-off band Love and Rockets, as well as the solo career of frontman Peter Murphy.

"Boy isn't heavy metal a lot of fun!" says Mr. Bill at the start of Night FLight's special "Take Off" to Heavy Metal Comedy, (before an untimely death by anvil.) And Mr. Bill is right: Heavy Metal is a reliably comedic genre, intentional or not. This episode kicks off with Alcatrazz's "God Blessed," a satire of MTV that doomed its chances of airplay on that channel, (but of course got play on Night Flight), Keel's "Right to Rock", Accept's kaleidoscopic video for "Midnight Mover," Japanese rockers Loudness and Ireland's Mama's Boys.

"The sound of surf, sand and Sunset Strip..." Coming to you direct from the nerve center of the entertainment industry, tonight Night Flight "Takes Off" to the City of Angels. In this special syndication episode from 1992, we explore the troubadours and minstrels that help shape the musical legacy of Los Angeles and the California sound, from Folk to Surf, Rockabilly to Punk. Featuring The Beach Boys, The Doors, LA Guns, The Motels and more!

This video profile on Simple Minds features backstory on the Scottish act and multiple videos throughout the bands career arc. Night Flight mines the video vault for select cuts from the Pretenders.

In this 1983 Video Gallery, Night Flight Take’s Off to Politics. “Rock Music has always had a strong political connection,” Pat Prescott says. This tour of rock politics takes us through the '60s with Bob Dylan, Hendrix, and The Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace A Chance.” After this tour of protest rock Night Flight, takes on Politics in the Nuclear Era with campy twist, fast forwarding to the ‘80s where we find ourselves enjoying the incredible experimental animation of Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier,” Men at Work’s ominous tune “It’s A Mistake,” and a little known promotional clip for the 1982 film WarGames by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Welcome to Night Flight! Tonight, we “Take Off” to Elvis. Ever since his 1956 debut, Elvis Aaron Presley has provoked more passion, more controversy and more adoration than anyone else in the history of Rock. Literally, the King. Fine Young Cannibal's Roland Gift sits down with Night Flight to discuss the sacredness of Elvis and the riskiness of their cover "Suspicious Minds."

What’s on the menu for tonight? Fish Heads! Our 1988 “Take Off” episode of Night Flight is a special salute to… Food? “Whether you slice it or dice it, chew it or spew it” Pat Prescott proclaims, “you can’t live without it!” Kicking off with Weird Al Yankovich’s “Eat It,” and including tunes from The Fat Boys, Tom Petty, Barnes and Barnes and a myriad of food-related, public domain interstitials, this episode is a pure cup of instant weird. Including the the notorious 'pot brownie' recipe from 'The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook!

In this original episode from October 30th, 1987 Night Flight presents two independent shorts as a part of our "Short Film Showcase" segment. The first up is the criminal-comedy “The Lemon Man,” by Super 8 auteur Michael Legge, followed by the mysterious experimental animation called “Xidu,” by Australian filmmaker Michelle Mahrer.

Eclectic music video magic from Amazulu, The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite & Thrashing Doves

Born Innocent makes the case for Redd Kross as the seminal West Coast band of the last half century. Their influence reaches across the genres of punk, college rock, grunge, metal and indie rock. Through more than four decades Redd Kross have been nothing but happily, outrageously, and courageously themselves. Director Andrew Reich conducted dozens of new interviews and had unfettered access to home movies and archival footage featuring the Runaways, X, and Nirvana, and members of Melvins, the Go-Go’s, and Black Flag.

Born to a family of fiddlers in Texas, film actor Caleb Landry Jones was instead drawn to the psychedelia of Syd Barrett’s solo work. Throughout his acting career he remained steadfast in his commitment to recording music, amassing hundreds of demos out of his family barn. Director, musician and Sacred Bones collaborator Jim Jarmusch heard these demos and suggested Jones approach the label, culminating in the release of his debut album The Mother Stone in 2020.

Los Angeles, CA-based Electro-punk act on Dais Records.

Experimental hip hop group Shabazz Palaces makes a foray into “final-days funk” on Exotic Birds of Prey, an unsettling exploration of the coldest and darkest edges of their sound.

Axis: Sova began as the experimental psych-rock solo project of Chicago artist Brett Sova, who wrote and recorded much of the bands early output before settling on a full lineup. Since 2018 the band has consisted of Sova with Tim Kaiser on guitar and Jeremy Freeze on bass.

Vår, formerly known as War, was a lofi post-punk act from Copenhagen. The group drew influences from darkwave and goth groups of the early 80s with blown-out, lo-fi recording techniques associated with the early 2010s. Vår’s Sacred Bones, No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers, arrived in 2013 and the group disbanded the following year.

Born and raised in Bucharest, Romania, Borusiade aka Miruna Boruzescu started DJing in 2002 as one of the very few female DJs in the city’s emerging alternative clubbing scene.

Tonight we take off to indie label Drag City, home of artists such as Cory Hanson, Prison, Edith Frost and Dean Spun.

Magik Markers member Elisa Ambrogio released her pop-influenced solo debut The Immoralist on Drag City in 2014. The album paired her soft and distant vocals with pop arrangements, all imparted with the rough textures of her noise rock roots.

Don Giovanni is an independent record label from New Brunswick, New Jersey whose catalog includes Paisley Fields, Screaming Females, and Weakened Friends.

Seattle rock band La Luz finds their lineup and their sound in flux on their latest record News of the Universe, allowing them to explore new sonic territory.

Today we’re looking at independent record label Sacred Bones, including music videos from Lust for Youth, Lathe of Heaven and Khanate.

Today we’re looking at DAIS Records, whose roster of emerging and influential artists include AURAGRAPH, Cold Gawd, and Body of Light.

Chilean psych band Föllakzoid, known for their hypnotic rhythms and Andean folk and krautrock influences, was formed by childhood friends Diego Lorca, Domingo García-Huidobro, and Juan Pablo Rodríguez in 2008 as a trance experience, jamming on a single song for two hours in their first practice session. This free-form approach to playing and performing influenced their early output, working for years on their self-titled Sacred Bones debut EP released in 2011.

Georgia-based Robert Lester Folsom released his first studio album, Music and Dreams, in 1978. Although it did receive some local attention on its initial release, the record had limited pressings and Folsom was unable to complete a follow-up album during that time. Here’s the Anthology Records documentary about the artist, created to accompany the label’s reissues projecs.

The current band of the Stereolab frontwoman, Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble incorporates some of Sadier’s longest and closest collaborators, Emmanuel Mario, Nina Savary and Xavi Munoz.

Flore Laurentienne is the vessel of Quebec-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Mathieu David Gagnon. The classically trained musician incorporates elements of post-minimalism, early progressive rock, and the compositional art of fugue into his work.

The sonic world Helado Negro builds an aura vivid enough to be seen.

Sunshine Soup, directed by multitalented designers / artists Misha Hollenbach and Johann Rashid, is a non-linear film keyed to the outer-boundary music created by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe & Ariel Kalma Hollenbach and Rashid captured extensive footage surrounding the recording of We Know Each Other Somehow. Using handheld HD and 8 mm cameras, they later processed the images with a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI). With its responsive, meditative perspectives and refracted, sun-bleached compositions, Sunshine Soup becomes the visual companion to the transformative musical principles explored throughout the collaborative album.

Wand’s Cory Hanson rides into the high desert on a glossy melody through lustrous mists of instrumentation: acoustic, wah-electric and steel guitars, acoustic and electric drums. bass and piano. Pale Horse Rider explores myths and truths of a country on the way down, viewed through a deep-focus lens trained on the city from the deserts on the east; a terminus of unoccupied residential parks and streets fading into craggy footpaths to nowhere, where our passage is seen as diligent, ephemeral and grotesque by turns, forgiven and made beautiful again by the sound. Directed by The Coconut Brothers Liquid Light Projections by The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show Music & Sound FX by Dr. Coconut Filmed by Casey Hanson, Asal Shahindoust, Dr. Coconut and Keith Ballard Live Sound Engineered by Zac Hernandez

The Los Angeles-based quartet Allah-Las came together in 2008 while its members were working at Amoeba records. Allah-Las eventually found their way to Mexican Summer for the release of Calico Review in 2016, cultivating an array of global influences. These disparate and collected sounds would come together on the band’s fourth full-length, Lahs, an ode to the band's traveling lifestyle, released on Mexican Summer in 2019.

Dope Body are a Baltimore area post-punk noise rock group. Their Drag City debut, Natural History, a reference to the venue that first hosted the group for a one-off, meshed the band’s myriad sonic influences into an intense 35 minute experience. After briefly breaking up in 2016, the band reformed in 2019, culminating in two full length releases in 2020.

Wand’s Cory Hanson rides into the high desert on a glossy melody through lustrous mists of instrumentation: acoustic, wah-electric and steel guitars, acoustic and electric drums. Pale Horse Rider explores myths and truths of a country on the way down, viewed through a deep-focus lens trained on the city from the deserts on the east; a terminus of unoccupied residential parks and streets fading into craggy footpaths to nowhere, where our passage is seen as diligent, ephemeral and grotesque by turns, forgiven and made beautiful again by the sound. Directed by The Coconut Brothers Liquid Light Projections by The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show Music & Sound FX by Dr. Coconut Filmed by Casey Hanson, Asal Shahindoust, Dr. Coconut and Keith Ballard Live Sound Engineered by Zac Hernandez

Settle into Tonstartssbandht’s music and let it rock heavy from all sides. The music melds with the personal, tangible nature of the city climate, telling a stunning tale. Discovered on the road and distilled at home, the music conveys experience and subtlety, scars exposed to carry the chronicle. The music, the music, the fucking music.

Today we’re covering DAIS Records, who focuses on artists “new and old,” including SPICE and Stephen Mallinder.

Danish rock band Marching Church began as a side project of solo musical experiments for Elias Bender Rønnenfelt of Iceage. After the success of the band’s debut album on Sacred Bones, This World is Not Enough Rønnenfelt brought in Iceage bandmate Johan Weith and trumpeter Jakob Emil Lamdahl.

“Take Off” to Chicago-based independent label Drag City featuring music videos from Bill Callahan, Ty and Denée Segall, Circuit des Yeux and Smog.

“Take Off” to independent label Dais Records featuring music videos from Cold Showers, Pierce with Arrow, ADULT., and Xeno & Oaklander.

Dark analog dance songs for the post-modern era.

CMON, which stands for Confusing Mix of Nations, is a pop duo born out of the ashes of Brooklyn indie rock group Regal Degal. Shifting the focus towards more danceable tracks, the duo carried the atmospherics from their previous project into CMON, only now incorporating more elements of disco and pop into their recordings.

Margaret Chardiet’s industrial noise project Pharmakon blends slow rhythmic beats with guttural synth blasts and wailing vocals that are as disquieting as they are hypnotizing. Her live shows have been described as confrontational, interrogating the division between performer and audience, an emotional trance-like experience she has attempted to recreate on her more recent albums, 2017’s Contact and 2019’s Devour, released on Sacred Bones.

In 2016, Mexican Summer's sister label Anthology reissued two essential live albums from Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Tr-ad Grass Ah-k Sta-Nar), a 70s underground Swedish psych rock export, whose records have been hidden gems for collectors worldwide. To commemorate the reissues, Anthology Recordings produced a short, two-part documentary revealing rare interviews with surviving members of the band, presented together here on Night Flight.

Born on the island of Crete and raised in Athens, Platonos was one of the pioneers in the Greek electronic music scene of the 1980s, and remains active today.

Built to Spill’s frontman Doug Martsch recruited a new Brazilian backing band for Built to Spill’s latest record, When The Wind Forgets Your Name.

Founded in 2010 by Robert Alfons and Maya Postepski, the group uses ethereal synth pop tones mixed over surging industrial beats. With the release of their first album TRST in 2012, the duo went their separate ways and Alfons continued to record and tour under the name. As a solo project Alfons began incorporating more elements of acid house and techno into his next release Joyland in 2014, which debuted to massive critical and commercial success.

Australian Singer/Songwriter Indigo Sparke was born into a musical family and knew from a young age she wanted to perform. After teaching herself guitar, Indigo began establishing herself in the Sydney-music scene with quiet but commanding folk music, releasing her debut EP Night Bloom in 2016. Over the next few years Sparke would continue to build her profile in the contemporary folk world. Her first full-length album Echo arrived in 2021 on Sacred Bones.

Today we’re highlighting Sacred Bones Records, including music videos by SQÜRL, Mort Garson and Maria BC.

Altres are an electronic band from Dundee, Scotland originally formed in 1983. With influences ranging from Faust to Philip Glass, Altres’s unique brand of instrumental, improvised electronic music was all recorded live, with no overdubs.

Today’s video profile covers Brooklyn-based record label Sacred bones, featuring Mort Garson, Sextile and Maria BC.

“Take Off” to independent label Dais Records featuring music videos from Space Africa, Choir Boy, Xeno & Oakland and Death Bells.

Queens-based experimental rock duo Blues Control, composed of Russ Waterhouse on guitars and electronics and keyboardist Lea Cho, established themselves in NY with exciting live shows and a series of self released cassettes and vinyl.

Chicago-based psychedelic Krautrock group Cave began seriously recording music together in 2008. Cave is known for their hypnotic and droning instrumentals which have invited comparisons to bands like Can and Funkadelic.

Brooklyn-born and based experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain’s, 2021 album Fatigue demands introspection from ready ears with an array of keyboards, synths, and hauntingly delicate vocals while blending the sounds of gospel, jazz, and neo-soul to create a genre entirely her own. Cheek has dipped her toes in every corner of the arts, through her work at some of the most prestigious art institutions in NYC and collaborations with the likes of Naama Tsabar and Kevin Beasley.

Former geotechnical engineer Lucrecia Dalt's experimental compositions.

“Take Off” to Seattle-based independent label Sub Pop featuring music videos from Shabazz Palaces, Sunny Day Real Estate, Weyes Blood and TV Priest.

Cursive’s core trio of Tim Kasher, Matt Maginn, and Ted Stevens formed in 1995 and has since developed into one of the most consistent and ambitious bands in post-hardcore. Their latest album Devourer, the first for stalwart indie label Run for Cover, explores new territory within their iconic sound and features a suite of horror-themed music videos including the one for “Bloodbather” directed by Chelsea Stardust and starring Stranger Things’ Shannon Purser and Westworld’s Aurora Perrineau.