Repetitive deconstruction…

There’s something about sitting in silence together…

It’s a day of listening at the Sonic Arts Forum…

We live in mythological times, with wanderers continuing to make pilgrimages to our ancient sacred places!

An inspiring evening of heartfelt art in Loughborough at Studio No17. Check out the exhibition if you can 👏🏻

Up in an hout!

6-7pm: Sound Across Distance

decaying vibrations traverse time and space - sound art by jimmy Peggie

@avantologist.bsky.social | www.jimmypeggie.com
#Drone #DarkAmbient #DroneAmbient #Ambient #Industrial #Soundscape

*⏰CET

Intangible Labour and the New Folklore Exhibition 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.

How much creative work goes unseen? Intangible Labour and the New Folklore explores how artists, musicians and performers carry emotion, risk and care through everyday acts of making. What kinds of culture are being formed beneath the surface?

This evening we are immersed in intangible labour, at Leicester Adult Education basement gallery

Just been chatting about the Hydra for a Safer World project here at Computala

We are chatting with exhibiting artists at Computala this evening with New Media Arts club @lcbdepot.bsky.social

Leicester Emergent Arts Radio – A Platform for Metamodern Sound and Experimentation 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…

Radio Lear is now live on the Leicester and Loughborough multiplexes, sharing AI-generated and artist-made soundscapes. How might artists reimagine radio as a space for creative transformation? Follow and support through Decentered Media’s Patreon to get involved.

Heritage Fair next Saturday (11th). We will be there, if local, why not pop along !

Final measure up in Hansom Hall .... our 9th FREE heritage event since 2015 hosted at the Leicester Adult Education Centre takes place this weekend on 11th October 10am-3pm .... join us at the Saturday Heritage Fair doc-media-centre.org/2025/09/07/s...

In Leicester on DAB, and online...

Distraction Therapy – Carving Out Space in the Global Noise 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.

In a mediascape that overwhelms with fragments, how do we carve space for reflection? This week’s Distraction Therapy mix suggests music as a guide to transcendence, echoing Schopenhauer’s idea that art lets us step outside striving into a clearer, more timeless knowing.

Distraction Therapy – The Quiet Gift of Isolation 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.

Can time alone become a gift? This week’s Distraction Therapy mix asks if social isolation opens not emptiness but new ground for imagination. When the outer world quiets, can music guide us inward to that space of reflection and intuition Schopenhauer called transcendence?

Radio Against the Grain 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.

Can radio still be art? When signals flood across cities, indifferent to playlists and algorithms, can they open fleeting moments of transcendence—rupturing uniformity with sound that unsettles and surprises?

Radio as Atmosphere – Transforming Broadcast into an Art of Perception 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.

Can radio be more than background noise? What happens when we treat broadcast as an art form—an atmosphere that reshapes how we perceive sound, music, and each other?

Between Signs and Symbols – Metamodern Identity After Deconstruction 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.

Exploring existential versus spiritual identity through Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jung, this episode of Distraction Therapy embraces metamodern reconstruction.

Distraction Therapy – The Pleroma and the Differentiated Soul 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.

What can Jung’s vision of the Pleroma and Abraxas teach us about finding meaning today? Can music and sound guide us to hold together opposites without dissolving into fragmentation?

Distraction Therapy – From Pleroma to Differentiation 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.

What if music could help us hear the Pleroma itself—the undifferentiated fullness Jung described—taking form as sound? Can listening to a mix become a way of letting symbols and images emerge, more than the sum of their parts?

Distraction Therapy – Listening to the Soul 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.

What happens when music becomes a mirror for the soul? Jung saw imagination as a dialogue with inner images—could a DJ mix hold that same space for contemplation? How do we listen without a plan, letting sound shape visions from within?

Distraction Therapy – Dancing the Two-Step of Meaning 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.

How do we learn to move between opposites without clinging to one side or collapsing into the other? Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us to dance on the rope above the abyss. Can music teach us this same two-step of meaning?

Against the System – Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the Sound of Dissent 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.

What does it mean to reject the system yet still feel deeply? Schopenhauer scorned Hegel’s abstractions—but is that tension still alive in our music and art scenes today? Where does your creativity draw the line between resistance and reconciliation?

Listen again: Auricular Shelter / 13th July 2025

Playing tracks by Ghost and Tape, Yyate, Nahal Kayand, Fletina, Pa and more.

@matkinssound.bsky.social | www.mixcloud.com/camp_fr/auri...

Reimagining Care, Creativity, and Communication — A Conversation with Kajal Nisha Patel 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.

What happens when media stops performing and starts caring? In this episode, Kajal Nisha Patel shares how photography, yoga & co-creation offer a different path—rooted in presence, empathy and shared meaning. What does care-centred media look like to you?

The Artist as Witness – the Will and the Fate of Art in a Transactional World 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.

Can an artist still act as a witness to the eternal in a world obsessed with outcomes and optics? What happens to art when intuition gives way to transaction?

Escaping the Transaction – Music, and the Lost Art of Contemplation 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?

What if music wasn’t just background noise, but a way to step outside the noise of life itself? Can we still find moments of pure contemplation in a world that turns art into a service?

Walking the Rope – Meaning, Risk, and the Tightrope Walker in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 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.

What does it mean to walk the rope between past and future, meaning and uncertainty? In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the tightrope walker falls. But maybe the act of crossing is the point—not reaching the other side. Are we each walking that rope now?

Tiny Gear Concert 18th June 2025 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.

Tiny gear, big ideas. On 18 June at the Real Ale Classroom, sound artists turned small devices into rich, immersive performances. What makes a space feel alive with sound—scale, or attention?