Radio Lear

Radio Lear
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Welcome to Radio Lear, a captivating exploration of sound and thought that transcends conventional boundaries. In our unique way we invite you to embark on a unique journey curated by Max Sturm, a visionary artist and Creative Director. Discover the transformative power of sound as it intertwines with the principles of metamodernism, bridging the realms of art, technology, and human expression.

الحلقات

  1. قبل ٣ أيام

    Radio Lear Podcast – Traveling Through Sonic Environments

    This episode of the Radio Lear Podcast moves through a sequence of sonic environments that suspend ordinary time. The mix is less concerned with momentum than with drift, immersion, and gradual transformation. Across ambient electronics, electro-acoustic composition, kosmische repetition, contemporary classical music, modular synthesis, and post-rave atmospheres, the tracks gather into a contemplative structure that explores memory, landscape, transcendence, ecological consciousness, and the emotional residue of technological culture. The opening passage, beginning with Craven Faults’ “Stoneyman”, establishes the emotional terrain of the mix immediately. Craven Faults’ work has often been described as a form of sonic archaeology, rooted in post-industrial Yorkshire landscapes, abandoned infrastructures, and the lingering psychic weight of industrial memory. Critics repeatedly note the way his music stretches and distorts perceptions of time through hypnotic repetition and evolving modular patterns. The sound feels both ancient and futuristic, as though the machinery of a forgotten industrial age has begun dreaming. The steady pulses and layered sequences evoke railways, moorlands, ruined mills, and weathered stone, but also the strange continuity between human labour, memory, and landscape. This sense of temporal suspension continues through Laraaji’s “Holomin 1”, which introduces a more explicitly spiritual dimension. Laraaji’s music exists within traditions of meditative listening and ecstatic ambient minimalism. His luminous zither tones and gently unfolding harmonic textures create a moment of release from the pressure of everyday consciousness. In the context of the mix, Laraaji acts as a threshold figure, guiding the listener from geographical memory into interior contemplation. M83’s “A Necessary Escape (Part 2)” adds emotional cinematic scale and romantic melancholy. The movement from Craven Faults and Laraaji into M83 suggests a widening of emotional perspective, from landscape and stillness toward memory, longing, and emotional release. The track functions almost as an inhalation before the mix settles into its deeper reflective structures. Floating Points’ “Corner Of My Eye” introduces another key emotional register. Sam Shepherd’s work consistently merges jazz sensibilities, electronic abstraction, and emotional intimacy. Reviews of the track emphasise its intricate drumming, soft organ textures, and reflective atmosphere. The piece occupies a delicate space between improvisation and precision, warmth and detachment, reflecting a wider metamodern tendency to reconcile emotional sincerity with technical sophistication. Kieran Hebden and William Tyler’s “Secret City” expands the geographical imagination of the mix. Tyler’s cosmic Americana and Hebden’s minimal electronic sensibility combine into a drifting psychogeography of imagined roads, absent communities, and invisible infrastructures. The music evokes movement without destination, landscapes experienced not as fixed places but as emotional states. Throughout the centre of the mix, artists such as Max Cooper, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Dopplereffekt, Fire-Toolz, and Djrum deepen the exploration of technology as both alienating and transcendent. Max Cooper’s “A Sense Of Getting Closer” reflects his longstanding interest in emergence, systems theory, neuroscience, and emotional cognition. His work often treats electronic sound as a means of exploring human consciousness itself, not simply as entertainment. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s contributions are especially significant in shaping the emotional architecture of the mix. Her modular synthesiser compositions frequently dissolve distinctions between machine systems and organic life. Tracks such as “Everything Combining” and “I Miss the Way You Swim” suggest fluidity, interconnectedness, ecological awareness, and biological intimacy. Her music imagines technology not as cold machinery but as a living extension of natural process. Dopplereffekt’s “Multiverse Wavefunction” introduces a colder, more austere form of speculative listening. Rooted in Detroit electro traditions but heavily informed by scientific and cosmological concepts, the track shifts the mix toward abstraction and post-human speculation. Yet even here there remains an emotional undercurrent, a fascination with mystery and unknowability rather than technological domination. Fire-Toolz destabilises the atmosphere further by introducing fragmentation, overload, and digital mysticism. The collision of ambient textures, shoegaze atmospheres, metallic intensity, and devotional aesthetics reflects the psychological condition of contemporary online existence: overstimulated yet yearning for transcendence. Rather than resolving this contradiction, the music inhabits it fully. The Orb’s appearance reconnects the mix to the psychedelic lineage of British ambient culture, where humour, dub, rave, and cosmic drift coexist. Their presence acts almost as a memory trace of earlier utopian electronic cultures, reminding listeners that ambient music has long functioned as a social and psychological refuge from acceleration and fragmentation. The closing section of the mix gradually moves toward emotional openness and release. Marconi Union, John Metcalfe, Ava Rasti, and the collaboration between SAGES, Ólafur Arnalds, and Loreen guide the listener into quieter and more reflective spaces. These tracks emphasise dusk atmospheres, emotional vulnerability, memory, and reconciliation. The final pieces feel less concerned with exploration than with acceptance. Across the entire sequence, the mix alludes to a deeper sentiment structure that connects many of these artists despite their differing genres and cultural contexts. There is a recurring search for forms of transcendence within late technological culture. Rather than rejecting technology, the artists seek ways of re-enchanting it. Modular synthesisers become ecological instruments. Digital systems become vehicles for emotional reflection. Repetition becomes meditative rather than mechanistic. There is also a consistent concern with time. Many of the tracks employ slow transformation, cyclical structures, suspended resolutions, and gradual accumulation. This creates an experience of duration that resists the accelerated rhythms of contemporary digital life. Critics writing about Craven Faults, in particular, repeatedly describe his ability to “warp your perception of time” through immersive long-form composition. In this sense, the mix corresponds strongly with Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of music as a temporary release from the suffering generated by endless striving. Through sustained listening, the listener briefly steps outside ordinary instrumental consciousness and enters a state of contemplative suspension. The tracks do not resolve suffering or uncertainty, but they create temporary spaces in which reflection, stillness, and emotional openness become possible. This podcast therefore operates not simply as a playlist, but as a movement through overlapping emotional and cultural landscapes. Industrial memory, ecological consciousness, post-rave introspection, speculative cosmology, ambient spirituality, and contemporary classical melancholy all coexist within a wider metamodern sensibility: an attempt to recover meaning, sincerity, and emotional depth without abandoning the complexities and contradictions of contemporary technological culture.

    ٢ س ٣٥ د

  2. ٢٥ مارس

    Art, Identity, and Rehabilitation – Creative Practice in Prison Contexts

    This podcast explores how art can play a meaningful role in the rehabilitation of people in prison. The discussion brings together Rob Watson, Xiaoye Zhang, and Charlie Birtles, recorded at the Brewhouse Arts Centre in Burton-on-Trent. Each contributor brings a distinct perspective, shaped by their work in community media, arts practice, and engagement with criminal justice contexts. A key focus of the conversation is how art creates space for reflection and expression in environments that are often restrictive and emotionally pressured. Drawing on their experience, the contributors describe how creative practices such as visual art, writing, and performance can help individuals process difficult experiences, manage emotions, and begin to reframe their sense of identity. Art is positioned not as a peripheral activity, but as a purposeful element of rehabilitative work. The discussion also considers how creative engagement can support communication and relationships. Art is seen as enabling forms of expression that are not always possible through conventional channels, offering a way for people in custody to articulate complex emotions and experiences. This, in turn, can contribute to improved relationships with staff, peers, and family members, and help to foster a more constructive environment. There is also a clear recognition of the practical challenges involved. The contributors reflect on the need for consistent provision, skilled facilitation, and institutional support if arts-based approaches are to have lasting impact. Short-term or isolated projects are seen as limited in their effectiveness, particularly where there is no pathway for continued engagement after release. Questions are raised about how the value of art is understood and assessed. While the benefits in terms of wellbeing, behaviour, and personal development are evident in practice, these outcomes are not always easily captured within formal evaluation frameworks. This creates a challenge when it comes to recognition, funding, and integration into mainstream criminal justice approaches. Overall, the podcast offers a reflective and practice-based discussion of how art can contribute to rehabilitation. It invites listeners to consider how creative work might be more effectively supported and embedded within systems that aim to reduce harm and support long-term change.

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  3. ٢٤ مارس

    Art School – Studio 17 and the Practice of Staying Together

    There is a particular kind of space that does not announce itself. It is not defined by its walls, nor by the tools arranged across its surfaces, nor even by the works that accumulate over time. It is defined instead by a continuity of presence. Studio 17, as described in this conversation, is one such space. It is less a studio in the conventional sense than a long-held conversation, unfolding across decades, carried by those who have entered, left, returned, and remained. What emerges from the voices of the artists is not a singular narrative of artistic production, but a shared condition of being alongside others. The studio offers proximity. Not only physical proximity, but a kind of attentiveness. Artists speak of sensing one another, adjusting to rhythms that are not imposed but felt. There are moments of quiet, moments of conversation, moments of withdrawal and return. The space holds these variations without demanding resolution. This rhythm is not incidental. It is cultivated through time. Over thirty years, the studio has sustained a collective identity that is neither fixed nor fragile. It persists because it allows for difference. Artists arrive with different practices, different histories, and different levels of confidence. Some return to art after long absences. Others begin tentatively, discovering their voice in relation to others. The collective does not erase individuality; it provides the conditions in which individuality can emerge. There is a practical dimension to this. Materials are shared. Advice is given when asked. Work is seen, responded to, and occasionally challenged. Yet what is described goes beyond collaboration in any formal sense. It is closer to mutual recognition. The presence of others becomes a form of support that is not always verbalised. It is there in the background, shaping the atmosphere of the work itself. For some, this shared environment becomes transformative. Confidence develops not through instruction alone, but through participation. To be accepted within the space, to exhibit alongside others, to contribute to a shared history, alters how one understands oneself as an artist. The studio becomes a site of transition, where private interest becomes public expression, and where personal practice acquires a social dimension. The longevity of Studio 17 suggests that this form of collective life answers a deeper need. It offers continuity in a field often marked by precarity and isolation. Artists describe the difficulty of sustaining practice alone, the challenges of motivation, the uncertainty of recognition. Against this, the studio provides a steady ground. It is not immune to change. Members pass away. New members arrive. The character of the space shifts. Yet, the underlying structure remains intact, carried forward by those who continue to gather. The retrospective exhibition, marking thirty years, becomes more than a display of work. It is an act of remembering. Works by those no longer present are held alongside those of current members. The exhibition does not resolve the passage of time; it makes it visible. In doing so, it reinforces the sense that the studio is not simply a place of production, but a repository of shared experience. What is striking is the absence of instrumental language. The artists do not speak primarily of career progression, market success, or institutional validation. These concerns are present, but they are secondary. The emphasis falls instead on enjoyment, on learning, on being part of something that endures. Art is described as a way of inhabiting time, of finding meaning in the act of making, and of connecting with others through that act. In this sense, Studio 17 resembles an art school that has escaped its formal boundaries. It retains the essential qualities of a learning environment, but without the temporal limits or hierarchical structures that often define institutional education. Learning continues indefinitely, shaped by experience rather than curriculum. The collective becomes both teacher and archive. To listen to these accounts is to encounter a different model of artistic life. One in which the shared space is not merely supportive, but constitutive. It shapes the work, the artist, and the relationships between them. It suggests that the conditions in which art is made are inseparable from the art itself. And that sometimes, what endures is not the individual work, but the space that makes such work possible. Art School, as a series, begins here. Not with theory, but with practice. Not with abstraction, but with the lived experience of artists who have chosen, over many years, to remain in proximity to one another. The lesson is not stated directly. It is held in the space between them.

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  4. ٣ مارس

    Morphic Resonance and The Deep Memory of Sound

    Each Radio Lear mix is assembled as more than a sequence of tracks. It is an attempt at recollection. Not nostalgia, not revivalism, but recollection in a deeper sense: a turning again toward forms that may never have vanished, only fallen silent beneath the noise of modern life. Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance proposes that memory is not stored solely in brains but inheres in fields of pattern and habit. Forms, once established, become easier to repeat. The past is not inert. It presses forward, shaping the present through resemblance. Whether one accepts the hypothesis literally or metaphorically, it offers a compelling aesthetic image. Culture, too, may possess habits. Songs, rituals, gestures, and myths may persist as fields of resonance, awaiting reactivation. Radio Lear’s name gestures toward one such field: the legend of King Lear, rooted in the mythic landscape of the British Isles. Shakespeare’s Lear is not only a tragic monarch but an archetype of dislocation, pride, madness, and eventual insight. “Ripeness is all,” says Edgar near the end of the play. Ripeness implies a season, a rhythm, an organic unfolding. It suggests that meaning ripens within time, not outside it. Lear’s tragedy unfolds against heath and storm, on open land, within elemental forces. The sacred landscape is not backdrop but participant. If morphic resonance suggests that patterns strengthen through repetition, then myth itself may be understood as a cultural field. Carl Jung described the collective unconscious as containing “the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution.” Archetypes are not learned as facts. They emerge. They recur. They shape imagination across generations. Jung’s language and Sheldrake’s language differ, yet both point toward a continuity beneath conscious awareness. Cultural memory may not reside only in archives and textbooks. It may be carried in symbol, rhythm, and tone. Music operates precisely at this level. Shakespeare, in another late play, writes: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Sound enters us before concept. It moves through pattern and repetition. In a mix, motifs reappear. Textures echo. Harmonic atmospheres recall earlier fragments. The listener may not consciously register the return, yet something feels familiar. This is not unlike Jung’s archetypal recurrence. Nor is it unlike the strengthening of habit that morphic resonance proposes. The British Isles are layered with such habits. Wells dedicated to saints. Standing stones aligned to solstice light. Ballads carried across centuries. Wordsworth sensed this when he wrote of arriving in life “trailing clouds of glory.” William Blake compressed the same intuition into a line: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” Both writers evoke continuity between the minute and the cosmic, the present and the primordial. Landscape and imagination interpenetrate. Yet modern urban life often appears dislocated from these rhythms. We move through spaces designed for efficiency rather than ceremony. Seasonal markers blur. Ritual becomes optional, then marginal. Intergenerational transmission weakens as mobility increases and communities fragment. Why has the city, which gathers so many people together, so often failed to sustain shared cultural practice? Why does collective memory appear to thin rather than deepen amid digital abundance? One answer may lie in habit. If cultural forms strengthen through repetition, then the erosion of ritual interrupts their field. Where there is no shared song, no repeated seasonal gathering, no narrative told and retold, the resonance attenuates. It does not disappear entirely. It recedes. The heath remains beneath the asphalt. The old wells remain beneath the pipes. A metamodern approach does not reject modernity nor retreat into romantic reconstruction. It oscillates. It recognises irony yet seeks sincerity. It acknowledges fragmentation yet reaches toward coherence. In this oscillation, morphic resonance becomes a useful metaphor. If patterns can be strengthened through renewed repetition, then cultural practice can be reactivated without naïve revivalism. A Radio Lear mix, then, becomes a modest ritual. It gathers contemporary sound art, experimental composition, field recordings, spoken fragments. It allows ancient archetypes to refract through electronic timbre. The legend of Lear becomes not a museum piece but a living question. What happens when pride dissolves into storm? What remains when identity strips away? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,” Lear cries in despair. The line carries cosmic vulnerability. Yet from within this vulnerability, recognition arises. Morphic resonance suggests that repetition is not redundancy. It is intensification. Jung suggests that archetypes surface when conditions permit. English writers across centuries have sensed that imagination is rooted in place. If these intuitions converge, then cultural memory is neither purely psychological nor merely historical. It is relational. It is enacted. The question, then, is not whether the past survives. It is whether we choose to participate in it. Modern urban life may have become dislocated from intergenerational habit not because myth has vanished, but because ritual has become optional. When seasonal cycles no longer structure communal time, when sound becomes background rather than shared event, the field weakens. To curate a mix is to risk re-patterning. To name it after Lear is to invoke a lineage. To draw upon sacred landscape, archetypal narrative, and contemporary experimentation is to operate within oscillation rather than certainty. If there is such a thing as cultural morphic resonance, it will not be summoned through assertion. It will be strengthened through attentive repetition. Perhaps the deeper question is this: what would it mean for urban culture to remember itself? Not to replicate the past, but to re-enter its habits with awareness. If music can hold a field of resonance, then listening becomes participation. And in that participation, myth may once again find voice in the storm. Notes 1. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5, Scene 2. 2. C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Vol. 8. 3. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1. 4. William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” 5. William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence.” 6. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1.

    ١ س ٧ د

  5. ١ فبراير

    Intangible Labour’s Ritual Cleanse

    The enactment of Intangible Labour’s Spiritual Cleanse unfolds with a familiarity that is older than the institutional languages we now use to describe art, work, or care. What takes place in the Adult Education Centre and the surrounding streets of Leicester is not merely a performance, nor an intervention, but a ritualised action that resonates with the deep grammar of Ancient Greek worship. Its power lies precisely in its refusal to separate the aesthetic, the civic, and the spiritual into distinct domains. In Ancient Greek culture, ritual was not a retreat from everyday life but its intensification. Processions moved through the polis, carrying fire, song, and symbolic objects, not to escape the city but to re-bind it. The presence of flame in this enactment, tended carefully and publicly, recalls Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, whose fire anchored both household and city. Hestia had no grand temples or myths of conquest. Her sanctity was quiet, continuous, and infrastructural. To keep the fire alive was to sustain communal life itself. The Spiritual Cleanse mirrors this logic. The fire is not spectacular; it is carried, guarded, and walked through traffic, side streets, and the rhythms of an ordinary evening. This is not theatre staged against the city, but ritual enacted within it. In Greek terms, it resembles the thysia and the pompe, acts where movement, offering, and collective witnessing mattered more than belief or explanation. Meaning arises through participation, not interpretation. The cloak, marked and re-marked with symbols of everyday life, functions as a contemporary analogue to the ritual garment or votive object. In Greek practice, objects accumulated meaning through use, inscription, and repetition. They bore the sediment of collective life. Here, the symbols of working-class existence, beer cans, footballs, eyes, cigarettes, are not ironic signifiers but offerings. They name what usually remains unseen, much as ancient ritual named forces that exceeded language but structured daily existence. What is being cleansed is not a space in any hygienic sense, but a social condition. Intangible labour, care work, emotional work, unnoticed maintenance, has no altar in modern bureaucratic culture. Greek ritual, by contrast, gave form to precisely those forces that could not be measured or owned. Catharsis was not psychological release but communal rebalancing. To walk, to sing, to tend fire, to mark cloth, was to realign the visible and the invisible. There is also a distinctly Greek seriousness to the playfulness of the enactment. The roller skates, the hazard sign, the casual humour, echo the way ancient ritual often incorporated inversion, satire, and embodied joy. Sacred games were not solemn abstractions but lived contradictions. Nietzsche’s question, “What sacred games must we create?”, hangs quietly over the performance, not as theory but as necessity. In a metamodern context, the Spiritual Cleanse does not attempt to resurrect a lost pagan past, nor does it parody ritual as spectacle. It oscillates between sincerity and knowingness, between myth and municipal reality. Like Greek ritual, it assumes that meaning is not invented by individuals but emerges when bodies gather, move, and attend together. What remains after the fire is extinguished is not an artwork in the conventional sense, but a memory of alignment. For a brief time, the city remembers itself as a living body, sustained by labour that cannot be itemised. In this sense, the enactment does exactly what ancient ritual once did. It restores attention to what holds the world together, quietly, persistently, and without applause.

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  6. ٢٣ يناير

    Discussing Our Intangible Labour

    There is a quiet defiance running through the conversations gathered in this programme. It is not staged as a manifesto, nor framed as a critique in the usual polemical sense. Instead, it emerges obliquely, through lived experience, shared anecdotes, hesitations, laughter, and moments of recognition between artists who have learned, often painfully, how art persists outside the smooth surfaces of institutional culture. The Intangible Labour exhibition, taking place at the basement gallery of the Leicester Adult Education centre on Belvoir Street, does not announce itself as a corrective to the contemporary arts system, yet it implicitly asks a difficult question: what has been lost as artistic practice has become increasingly administered, professionalised, and governed by technocratic norms? Listening to the artists speak, one hears not a rejection of structure per se, but a growing fatigue with systems that mistake compliance for care, metrics for meaning, and visibility for value. Much of what is described in this discussion never appears in funding reports or strategic plans. The hours spent applying for opportunities that lead nowhere. The emotional toll of rejection. The social labour of navigating spaces where class, accent, embodiment, or neurodivergence quietly disqualify you before your work is even seen. The constant oscillation between being told to treat art as a business and being reminded, often harshly, that it will never quite be one. This is the labour that remains largely unacknowledged, yet it shapes artistic life more profoundly than any single exhibition or sale. From a metamodern perspective, this matters because we are living through a period of cultural recalibration. The postmodern critique of grand narratives and institutional authority has done its work, but it has left behind a vacuum often filled by managerial rationality. In the arts, this has taken the form of bureaucratic substitution: where meaning once arose from shared cultural practices, it is now increasingly inferred from process, compliance, and professional signalling. What the artists in this programme articulate, often indirectly, is a desire to move beyond both naïve romanticism and hollow proceduralism. The exhibition itself offers a clue as to how this might be done. There is no prescribed route through the space, no explanatory apparatus telling the viewer what to think or how to behave. Works are encountered rather than consumed. Live music drifts through the gallery, not as an accompaniment but as an act of presence. Text appears where it needs to, and remains absent where it would only close down interpretation. In this sense, the exhibition functions less as a managed experience and more as an invitation to form one’s own path. This approach resonates with a broader metamodern sensibility: a willingness to hold structure and openness in tension, to acknowledge systems without surrendering to them, and to rebuild meaning through situated, relational practices. Rather than rejecting institutions outright, the conversation gestures towards something quieter and more difficult: the cultivation of small, resilient cultural ecologies grounded in trust, shared effort, and mutual recognition. What becomes clear is that independence here does not mean isolation. On the contrary, the strongest theme running through the discussion is community, not as a branding exercise or a networking outcome, but as something that forms through making, showing up, and staying with one another over time. Friendship, collaboration, and shared risk become forms of infrastructure in their own right, substituting for systems that often feel extractive or indifferent. In this light, the idea of ‘intangible labour’ takes on a deeper significance. It names not only the hidden work of being an artist, but also the invisible processes through which culture renews itself: the passing of skills, the holding of space, the courage to remain experimental in environments that reward conformity. These are not inefficiencies to be streamlined away. They are the very conditions under which art remains alive. For Radio Lear, this conversation sits at the heart of an ongoing enquiry. What might it mean to treat broadcasting, exhibitions, and cultural platforms not as delivery mechanisms, but as shared spaces of attention? How might we support artistic practices that resist being reduced to outputs, while still engaging the realities of funding, infrastructure, and sustainability? There are no simple answers offered here, and that may be the point. Instead, the programme invites listeners to dwell in uncertainty, to recognise the costs of over-management, and to imagine forms of cultural life that are neither nostalgically pre-institutional nor resignedly bureaucratic. In doing so, it suggests that the future of the arts may depend less on better systems, and more on our willingness to revalue the human, relational, and often unmeasurable work that sustains them.

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  7. ١٣ يناير

    Intangible Labour and the New Folklore

    Intangible Labour and the New Folklore, which has opened at the basement gallery at Leicester’s Adult Education College on Belvoir Street, arrives at a moment when many of the forces shaping cultural life are increasingly difficult to see, measure, or name. The exhibition, and the accompanying radio conversation captured in this podcast, circles a shared intuition among the artists and curator: that much of what matters now happens beneath the surface of formal institutions, economic categories, and inherited cultural narratives. At its core, the programme is concerned with labour that leaves no obvious trace. Not labour understood as productivity or output, but labour as endurance, risk, emotional expenditure, and sustained attention. The artists speak of practices that demand time, vulnerability, and bodily commitment, yet often pass without recognition. This is labour that does not easily resolve into objects or outcomes. It persists as process, atmosphere, and residue. What gives the exhibition its particular charge is the way this labour is framed through folklore. Folklore here is not nostalgia or decorative tradition. It is treated as a living, unstable system of symbols through which societies encode struggle, danger, joy, and transformation. Fairy tales, work songs, punk, graffiti, disability performance, and improvised music are all understood as part of a shared mythic substrate. They carry knowledge forward not by explanation, but by repetition, distortion, and affect. From a metamodern perspective, this is significant. The exhibition neither returns uncritically to tradition nor rejects it as obsolete. Instead, it inhabits the oscillation between irony and sincerity that defines much contemporary cultural production. Folk forms are acknowledged as violent, exclusionary, and often brutal, yet they are also recognised as durable containers for meaning. The artists do not attempt to purify folklore. They work within its contradictions. Several contributors describe practices marked by physical and psychological risk. References to self-injury, illness, invisibility, and death appear not as spectacle but as quiet undertones. These elements are not deployed to shock. They function as reminders that cultural production is rarely neutral or cost-free. To make work, to perform, or to sustain an artistic identity often requires a negotiation with pain, exposure, and uncertainty. This negotiation itself becomes part of the work’s meaning. The emphasis on performance throughout the programme reinforces this point. Performance is identified as a form of intangible cultural heritage, but it is also presented as a mode of labour that disappears almost as soon as it occurs. What remains is memory, rumour, and the altered state of those who were present. This ephemerality resists capture and commodification, placing performance in tension with contemporary systems of documentation and circulation. Music plays a particularly important role in articulating this tension. From improvised flute playing to reworked popular songs and traditional work songs, music emerges as a carrier of collective feeling that exceeds language. It moves between joy and grief, irony and devotion, past and present. In metamodern terms, music here functions as a bridge between individual experience and shared myth, allowing contradictory emotional states to coexist without resolution. Disability art and practice introduce another critical dimension. Questions of visibility and invisibility recur throughout the conversation. Acts of disappearance, misalignment, and refusal draw attention to who is permitted to be seen, heard, or centred within cultural space. Rather than offering clear statements, these gestures destabilise the viewer’s expectations. They ask what forms of labour are ignored because they do not conform to dominant narratives of productivity, health, or coherence. What ultimately unites the exhibition is not a single theme but a shared orientation. There is a commitment to creating spaces that are open rather than explanatory, and to privileging experience over interpretation. The absence of wall texts and fixed narratives is not an abdication of responsibility, but an invitation. Meaning is not delivered. It is encountered, assembled, and sometimes missed. In this sense, Intangible Labour and the New Folklore can be read as a modest act of cultural reconstruction. It does not propose new myths fully formed. Instead, it listens for those already emerging through practice, voice, and gesture. The podcast extends this listening into the auditory domain, preserving not conclusions but conversations. What remains is a record of people thinking aloud together, attentive to the labour involved in making culture when its foundations are no longer stable, but its necessity remains.

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  8. ١١ يناير

    Computala Launch – Robots for a Safer World

    The launch of Computala unfolded less like an opening night and more like a listening exercise. Voices moved between artworks, machines hummed in the background, and conversations drifted from speculation to reflection. What emerged was not a single argument about artificial intelligence or digital culture, but a shared attempt to stay human while standing inside technological change. This podcast captures a series of conversations recorded among artists, curators, and participants as they encountered works shaped by code, systems, robotics, and generative processes. The tone is neither celebratory nor alarmist. Instead, it lingers in uncertainty, asking what it means to make art, music, and images at a moment when machines can imitate creative labour with unsettling fluency. Several artists speak about agency. Not agency as control, but as presence. The ability to choose how one works, what one resists, and where attention is placed. Salvaged electronics, evolving systems, live coding environments, and interactive installations become ways of testing this agency rather than surrendering it. Technology appears not as an external force, but as something already folded into cultural memory, labour, and imagination. There is a recurring concern with time. Nostalgia presses from behind, while visions of automated futures exert their own pressure. Between these forces, the present becomes the only workable ground. The conversations return again and again to this point: that culture is not something that happens later, nor something safely preserved in the past, but something reconstructed through action now. Listening closely, the exhibition reveals itself as a kind of collective thinking aloud. Questions surface about authorship, systems, ecology, and whether complexity can remain meaningful without becoming inert. AI is treated neither as oracle nor enemy, but as a condition that demands discernment, limits, and responsibility. This episode of the Radio Lear podcast offers space to sit with those questions. It does not resolve them. Instead, it invites a slower form of attention, one attuned to uncertainty, dialogue, and the unfinished nature of cultural work. In that sense, the broadcast mirrors the exhibition itself: an open structure, receptive to interpretation, and shaped by listening as much as by speaking. Visit the exhibition at LCB Depot.

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  9. ٤ يناير

    Distraction Therapy – Visualising the Emergent

    What does it mean to see emergent metamodern arts, rather than simply to document them. This project has gradually disclosed a visual language that sits between fidelity and invention. Images are neither promotional gloss nor documentary evidence. They operate as propositions. They ask whether sound art, electronic performance, and hybrid practices can be represented without collapsing into cliché, nostalgia, or spectacle. What happens when the artist is framed as a custodian rather than a protagonist. When attention replaces performance as the central gesture. When analogue cabling, retro machines, and digital projections are treated not as retro fetish or future signal, but as coexisting temporal layers. How do we represent sincerity without naïveté, and simulation without irony? What does it mean to place a sound artist in daylight, among plants and ceramics, and still allow the work to feel unresolved and alert? Can a café, a bar, or a gallery basement become a threshold rather than a backdrop? What kinds of bodies and fashions belong in these spaces. What does chromatic diversity in clothing signal about participation, plurality, and presence? How do we avoid uniform subcultural codes while still acknowledging style, lineage, and locality? What does it mean to let camera focus drift? To privilege peripheral vision, compression, blur, or distance. To allow the audience, the room, or the media residue on the walls to take precedence over the artist, even momentarily. And finally, what responsibility does an image carry when it circulates internationally. Can it remain rooted without becoming parochial, and portable without becoming abstracted? These are not design problems to be solved, but tensions to be held. The images emerging from this project are not answers. They are questions, posed visually, and left deliberately open.

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  10. ٣١‏/١٢‏/٢٠٢٥

    Distraction Therapy Mix – New Year Shift of Orientation

    The turning of the year is not simply a change of date. It is a shift in orientation. A moment when we are asked, quietly but firmly, to decide where we stand in relation to what is coming, and what we choose to carry forward. Hermetic traditions speak less of prediction than of position. To see clearly, one must have a vantage point. To endure turbulence, one must have roots. The work of renewal does not begin in movement, but in stance. A culture cannot be reborn through acceleration alone. It requires a grounded centre from which motion can occur without disintegration. The New Year arrives in a climate of noise, volatility and competing narratives. In such conditions, stability is often mistaken for inertia, and rootedness for nostalgia. Yet secure roots do not bind us to the past. They anchor us so that we are not thrown about when the surface becomes chaotic. From depth comes resilience. From continuity comes the capacity to imagine what is not yet formed. Radio Lear exists within this tension. It is not a retreat from the present, nor an escape into abstraction. It is an attempt to hold a listening position that is steady enough to remain open. To keep a cultural hearth lit, not by clinging to old forms, but by tending the conditions in which new forms can emerge with meaning. As we enter the New Year, we welcome those listening across Leicester, Loughborough and Rugby, and those joining us online. You are part of this work of orientation. Each act of attention, each moment of listening, contributes to a shared sense of where we are standing together. Rebirth is not a spectacle. It is a process of alignment. Of knowing what we are rooted in, so that we can look forward without fear, and remain undisturbed when the ground above us begins to shift.

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    Distraction Therapy – Solstice and Urban Renewal

    The Winter Solstice arrives quietly in the city. There is no open horizon, no wide moorland sky, yet the turning is no less real. It moves through streetlights and shuttered shops, through late buses and lit windows, through the hum that never fully subsides. Even here, the year reaches its inward point. In urban spaces, darkness is layered. It gathers between buildings, pools in underpasses, settles into routines worn smooth by repetition. The night is rarely silent, but it can still be listened to. Sirens fade. Footsteps pass. Somewhere, a radio murmurs behind a wall. These fragments form a different kind of landscape, one shaped by proximity rather than distance. Spiritual renewal in the modern environment does not arrive as escape. It emerges through attention. It asks what it means to pause within systems designed for constant motion. At the solstice, the city invites a subtler practice: to notice thresholds, to recognise the inward turn even amid brightness and speed. Distraction Therapy inhabits this urban interior. It treats sound as a means of reorientation, a way of tuning into quieter registers beneath the noise. Radio becomes a companion to reflection, offering moments where imagination can breathe within the built world rather than flee from it. As the light begins its slow return, the solstice reminds us that renewal does not require wilderness. It begins wherever listening is possible, even in the heart of the city.

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    Distraction Therapy – Solstice Reflections

    As the Winter Solstice passes, the land itself seems to pause and listen. Across the country, the air carries different voices now. The dark does not arrive as emptiness, but as presence, a thickening of attention. Sound travels further in this season, and silence feels less like absence than invitation. Radio belongs to this hour. It is not an announcement but a threshold. In the long nights, it offers a place where imagination can loosen its grip on certainty, where dreaming is not indulgence but orientation. Sound becomes a companion rather than a demand, opening space for the creative, the uncanny, and the half-heard to surface without explanation. We find ourselves thinking of King Lear on the heath, stripped of title and protection, exposed to weather and voice alike. What remains for him is listening. Not to command or chorus, but to the quieter inner register that only speaks when authority collapses and the world grows bare. Distraction Therapy moves within this terrain. It treats radio as a listening practice, not a platform, and sound as a way of sensing rather than informing. At the solstice, when darkness turns slowly toward light, this kind of attentiveness feels necessary. It reminds us that imagination is not an escape, but a way of staying with what is unfolding.

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Welcome to Radio Lear, a captivating exploration of sound and thought that transcends conventional boundaries. In our unique way we invite you to embark on a unique journey curated by Max Sturm, a visionary artist and Creative Director. Discover the transformative power of sound as it intertwines with the principles of metamodernism, bridging the realms of art, technology, and human expression.

المعلومات

  • صناع العمل
    Radio Lear
  • سنوات النشاط
    ٢٠٢٣ - ٢٠٢٦
  • الحلقات
    ١٢
  • التقييم
    ملائم
  • حقوق النشر
    © Radio Lear
  • موقع البرنامج على الويب
    Radio Lear