The Intangible Labour and the New Folklore exhibition, taking place at Leicester Adult Education Gallery on Belvoir Street brings together artists, performers, and musicians who are interested in the kinds of work that usually go unnoticed. This is not labour measured in hours, wages, or output, but the quieter effort involved in creativity, care, endurance, and emotional commitment. The exhibition and the accompanying podcast explore how much artistic work happens below the surface. Artists speak about the time, risk, and personal investment involved in making images, performances, and music. Much of this labour leaves little behind once a moment has passed, yet it shapes how culture is felt and remembered.

Radio Lear, Leicester Emergent Arts Radio, is a metamodern sound platform broadcasting on the Leicester and Loughborough multiplexes. Combining AI-generated audio with artist-created soundscapes, it offers an experimental, PRS/PPL-free space for creative exploration. Supported via Decentered Media’s Patreon, it invites artists to collaborate, contribute, and expand the possibilities of artistic radio. The launch of Radio Lear marks a milestone in developing…

Distraction Therapy: carving space in the global noise. The mediascape is sprawling and incessant. Feeds fragment attention and pull it outward. Meaning is not given. It must be made. Isolation, in this context, is a threshold, not an exit. It is boundary-setting for reflection. By quieting the signal field, we create a room for listening where intuition can work. Music then acts as counterweight to dispersion, holding attention in coherent patterns rather than shards.

Distraction Therapy: the latest mix takes solitude as method. Not absence but a clearing. Step out of the outward world and a different light appears. Attention steadies. Breath lengthens. The inner room brightens. Isolation becomes a working space for imagination. With the signal field quiet, a single tone can widen into a horizon. Rhythm loosens its grip, so intuition can map new routes of awareness.

Broadcast radio is often dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of news bulletins, jingles, and chart rotations. Yet, its potential as an artistic medium remains vastly under-explored. Radio is not bound by walls or devices alone—it moves invisibly through cities and landscapes, enters homes and cars, and merges into the background of daily life. This omnipresence gives radio qualities that make it uniquely suited to challenge cultural uniformity and creative inertia.

In the age of constant notifications and algorithmic playlists, it is easy to overlook the peculiar power of broadcast radio. Unlike streaming services that respond to our every click, radio flows outward, covering whole regions with its signal, indifferent to whether we are listening closely or only half-aware. This quality gives radio an artistic dimension that challenges how we perceive sound and music.

This episode of Distraction Therapy explores the tension between existential and spiritual identity. Existentialists frame identity as a negotiation of meanings, while essentialists root it in archetypes and symbols. Drawing on Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jung, the post shows how metamodernism seeks a reconstruction after deconstruction, holding semiotic play and symbolic depth in creative tension. Identity today is argued over in two tongues.

This episode of Distraction Therapy explores Carl Jung’s vision of the Pleroma and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. It considers how differentiation and imagination give shape to the soul, and how Abraxas symbolises the unity of opposites. Framed through metamodern thought, the episode reflects on music and sound as early practices of perception and aesthetic experience, helping us navigate beyond postmodern fragmentation toward new forms of meaning.

This Distraction Therapy music mix blog explores Carl Jung’s idea of the Pleroma and Differentiation as a creative process. Drawing on Jung’s Red Book and Seven Sermons to the Dead, it reflects on how new forms emerge from the unconscious when opposites are distinguished and given form. Using metaphors of water arising from hydrogen and oxygen, it shows how metamodern aesthetics embraces transcendence and transformation, producing art and music that is more than the sum of its parts.

When Carl Jung entered into the work that became his Red Book, he described it as a confrontation with the soul. He did not set out with a plan or strategy. Instead, he allowed images to rise, gave them voice, and held dialogue with them until they revealed meaning. Jung called this practice active imagination, but he also spoke of it more simply as listening: “I must let myself be carried along by what occurs… it is the path of what is to come.” Here the journey is not outward but inward, and the traveller’s task is to remain present to whatever emerges from the depths.

To live in our contemporary world is to stand on a rope bridge stretched across a deep ravine. On one side lies the rock of tradition, firm but immovable; on the other, the shifting sands of relativism, unstable and endlessly dispersing. If we clutch too tightly to the stone, we become rigid statues, trapped in inherited dogma. If we sink into the sand, we are swallowed by endless uncertainty.

For this episode of Distraction Therapy, we’ve tuned our focus toward the creative energy that arises from philosophical resistance. At the heart of this mix is an echo of one of the most bitter intellectual feuds in European philosophy: Arthur Schopenhauer’s contempt for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. More than an academic rivalry, their opposition symbolises two divergent ways of understanding the world—ways that continue to reverberate through contemporary art, music, and the spaces in which we gather.

In this episode of the Decentered Media podcast, I sit down with Kajal Nisha Patel to explore how creativity, care, and communication intersect in meaningful and unexpected ways. We talk not only about Kajal’s long-standing work as a visual artist and community practitioner but also about what it means to resist the pressures of productivity in favour of something slower, more embodied, and socially rooted.

In this episode of Distraction Therapy, we consider a question that refuses to go away: What is the purpose of the artist? Not the profession. Not the job description. But the role—philosophically, psychologically, and spiritually. Arthur Schopenhauer’s answer, drawn from The World as Will and Representation, is as uncompromising as it is clarifying. For Schopenhauer, the world is driven by the Will—a blind, ceaseless, and irrational force that animates all desire, all striving, and ultimately all suffering.

In this episode of The Distraction Therapy, we return to an idea that’s both ancient and urgently needed—art as a space for transcendence. Drawing on Arthur Schopenhauer’s radical notion that music is not just entertainment but a portal to something beyond the grinding machinery of life, we ask: what would it mean to take music seriously again—not as a tool, a service, or a box to tick—but as a doorway to a different mode of being?

When Nietzsche introduces the figure of the tightrope walker early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it’s more than a theatrical flourish. It’s a moment loaded with symbolism, a moment that places the reader not just on the threshold of a new philosophy, but on the rope itself—between what was and what might be. Zarathustra, descending from his mountain to bring humanity a new vision, is interrupted by this performer crossing a rope strung between two towers.

On the evening of 18th June 2025, the Real Ale Classroom in Leicester played host to an event that proved you don’t need large rigs or towering speaker stacks to make an impact. The Tiny Gear Concert, organised as part of a continuing series of local experimental sound gatherings, brought together a group of adventurous performers who showed that constraint can be the mother of invention—and that intimacy can be more powerful than scale.