In this week’s episode of Distraction Therapy, we journey through soundscapes that ripple with the soft tension between clarity and mystery. Whether it’s the intimate hush of ambient strings, the cinematic swell of a soundtrack, or the minimal pulse of a modernist motif, each track has been chosen not simply for aesthetic appeal, but for its potential to hold meaning—to curate, to orient, to reflect.

This curation is not an indulgence. In an age where the digital overwhelms and the algorithm distracts, meaning itself becomes the most elusive signal. What once might have been assumed—story, purpose, orientation—is now sought with fresh urgency. Popular culture has responded. Not with answers, necessarily, but with a quiet turn back to the mythic. From the gods that reappear in capes, to the pilgrim-heroes who stumble through neon wastelands, we see signs everywhere that storytelling has reached once more into the deep chest of collective symbolism.

Music, too, echoes this shift. The ambient and neoclassical pieces that drift through our headphones often do more than soothe—they seem to ache with a kind of metaphysical longing. They do not declare what to believe, but they ask us, with silence and sound, what it means to believe at all. And they make space for that question to linger.

If Carl Jung were here to observe, he might gently caution us. For him, the mythological was not mere ornamentation or trope. It was sacred, not because of any dogmatic authority, but because it gave structure to the psyche. It spoke in the language of the soul. Symbols, in Jung’s world, were not for the taking—they were for the tending. When popular culture borrows from the sacred, it risks losing the weight of what those images once meant. It’s a risk worth naming. For meaning, Jung would argue, cannot be manufactured. It must be earned through encounter.

Still, perhaps this moment is not one of exploitation, but of rediscovery. The sacred symbols—fractured, refracted, remixed—return not because we are trying to play with them, but because we are trying to remember them. And the music we make and share on Distraction Therapy is part of that remembering. It holds a mood, a texture, a resonance that hints at something beneath the noise—a sacred thread woven through modern life.

And in that thread, if we’re quiet enough, we might just hear a myth being reborn.

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In a world increasingly shaped by scientific insight, it’s tempting to think that reality can be fully grasped through equations, models, and measurements. After all, science has given us unprecedented tools to predict, control, and explain much of what surrounds us—from the movement of stars to the behaviour of subatomic particles. But does that mean science tells us everything about what’s real?

A growing conversation—emerging especially within the realm of “metamodern” thought—suggests that the empirical sciences, while powerful, may not be enough. Alongside our capacity to measure the world is our capacity to feel it, to experience it, and to wonder about its meaning. This is the space where mysticism begins—not as superstition, but as the lived, often ineffable side of being that science cannot quite reach.

The Two Languages of Knowing

Science, at its best, is rooted in repeatable observation. It builds models of the world, which help us make predictions. But as philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead argued, science often falls into what he called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”—the habit of confusing abstract models for the world itself.

Mysticism, on the other hand, starts with the primacy of lived experience. Rather than reducing the world to mechanisms, it attempts to encounter it directly—as mystery, as relation, as presence. This doesn’t mean mysticism rejects science. Rather, it questions whether science’s language of mechanism and abstraction can account for phenomena like consciousness, time, and meaning—things we know first-hand but struggle to model.

Correspondences and Contrasts

Both empirical science and mysticism begin from curiosity. They ask: What is this world we’re in? Where they differ is in their assumptions and methods.

Science relies on objectivity, detachment, and replication. It often strips away subjective experience to get at what is universally measurable.

Mysticism starts from the opposite direction: it honours the particular, the relational, the immediate. It sees consciousness not as an accidental byproduct of matter, but as a fundamental mode of participation in reality.

Yet, interestingly, both may meet at the edges of current understanding. Quantum physics, for example, has revealed a universe more relational, indeterminate, and subtle than classical models allowed. Meanwhile, mysticism—especially in traditions like Sufism, Kabbalah, or Eastern philosophies—has long spoken in terms of interconnectedness, emergence, and nonduality.

This is not to say that mysticism is “ahead” of science, or vice versa. It is to suggest that each speaks to different dimensions of a shared world.

The Limits of Psychological Universals

We often take for granted that the psychological tools we use to understand the world—attention, categorisation, abstraction—are neutral or universal. But these, too, are shaped by our cultural contexts, our bodily experiences, and even the language we speak.

For example, seeing the world visually, through clear distinctions and defined forms, has long been the favoured metaphor in science. But is that the only, or most “real” way of knowing? What about our visceral feelings—our embodied sense of time, mood, or being? These are not easily generalised. They are situated—experienced by us as specific beings in particular moments. Any account of reality that ignores this subjectivity risks missing something vital.

Thinking Forward

To meet the complexity of our moment—climate crisis, AI, existential drift—we may need a new kind of understanding: one that honours both the precision of science and the depth of mystical experience. This is not a retreat into irrationalism, but a recognition that depth requires both explanation and interpretation, both measurement and meaning.

Science and mysticism are not rivals. They are the two eyes through which we might begin to see the world whole.

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The search for meaning and value often seems disconnected from the scientific worldview that dominates modern life. Yet, a fascinating conversation is emerging among philosophers and thinkers who believe that our understanding of meaning and value must evolve alongside our knowledge of the physical universe.

Bridging the Gap Between Physics and Metaphysics

That’s where metaphysics enters the picture. Metaphysics isn’t about mystical thinking – it’s the attempt to understand the fundamental nature of reality, including aspects like consciousness, purpose, and experience. The new proposal being put forward by scholars like Matt Segall is that meaning and value are not afterthoughts or by-products of physical processes. Instead, they emerge from complex relationships and can’t be understood by reductionist thinking alone.

Why Complexity Matters

Experience Is the Key

A New Story for the 21st Century

By embracing complexity, we can begin to tell a new story about who we are and why we matter – one that integrates physics and metaphysics, logic and love, fact and feeling. It’s a story that begins not with certainty, but with curiosity.

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What happens to the imagination when the world it seeks to conjure is already saturated with images?

In this episode of Distraction Therapy, we wander into the shadow of Coleridge’s *Kubla Khan*—a dream of vision, voice, and vanished meaning. Written in the half-light between sleep and waking, Coleridge’s poem offers a powerful metaphor for our contemporary condition: a fragmentary pleasure-dome rising out of the mists, glimpsed only briefly before it slips away. The dreamspace is not stable, but it continues to exert a pull. What might that pull reveal about how we seek meaning now?

In a metamodern media landscape, we are surrounded by signs, yet often unsure what they signify. Identity is increasingly shaped through networks of connection and disconnection—curated moments, shifting affinities, interrupted gestures. If Coleridge wrote of a sacred river running through caverns measureless to man, are we now caught in a digital stream equally vast, but harder to feel?

And what becomes of the figure of the poet—or seer—when everyone is, in some sense, their own narrator? Can the Romantic ideal of visionary imagination survive the self-conscious performance of identity across fragmented media spaces? Or does it change, become diffused, shared, unfinished?

This episode doesn’t look for resolution. Instead, it lingers in the ruins and projections of what once felt sublime. The psychoid dimension—the place where inner psyche and outer form collapse into each other—feels newly relevant. Screens become mirrors. Memories become templates. Do we project our desire for meaning onto the images we consume, or are they shaping that desire in advance?

Coleridge’s imagined dome, with its sunny pleasure and its caves of ice, was never completed—just a fragment of a larger whole. Is that what meaning looks like now? Fragmentary, provisional, but still resonant? Not an answer, but an echo that invites us to listen differently?

The search continues—not towards a fixed truth, but within the space where imagination still flickers, quietly, even as the platforms shift.

Distraction Therapy is produced by Radio Lear and broadcast on Soar Sound. Each episode offers a pause in the churn, a space to reflect, wonder, and drift through layered landscapes of sound and thought.

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How do we find meaning when the ground beneath us keeps shifting?

In this episode of Distraction Therapy, we step into a dreamspace—part media, part myth—where old archetypes return in unfamiliar forms, and the search for coherence becomes a journey through ever more intricate patterns of disruption. Set against the backdrop of Goethe’s Faust, and haunted by echoes of Germanic myth, we explore what it means to navigate a world where truth, identity, and belonging no longer come with fixed boundaries.

This is not about nostalgia, nor is it a critique of the new. The digital world—with its ever-branching tributaries of media, selves, and truths—demands that we let go of any expectation of a single, stable path. Instead, we walk a broken causeway suspended in mist. Each step is uncertain, and each encounter reflects something of our inner state. Are we looking outward or projecting inward? Do we recognise ourselves in what we reject, or in what we long to become?

The episode invites reflection on how the ‘psychoid’—that hybrid territory where psyche and matter seem indistinguishable—might still be at work in our interactions with media. If the world is increasingly composed of fragments, mirrors, and recursive signals, what does that mean for the self? Are we adapting, or simply dispersing? When every platform invites us to express who we are, how do we even begin to know what that is?

There’s a yearning now, noticeable in the rhythms of culture, for something both earnest and ambiguous. Not a return to certainty, but an embrace of contradiction. Metamodernism—a term that floats around this space like a signal beacon—might offer one way of naming this sensibility. Neither ironic nor naïve, it dwells in the oscillation. But is it enough to name the mood? What do we do with it? How do we live inside it?

Throughout the episode, we keep circling back to these questions—not to resolve them, but to stay with them. The mythic figures who walk through our dreamscape are not there to teach or save. They are companions, projections, mirrors. Perhaps they remind us that every media experience, no matter how mundane, is an invitation to reckon with what we are becoming. Or with what we are losing.

Can meaning still emerge in a world so saturated with symbol and sign? If so, does it come through understanding—or through attunement?

Listen to the episode. Drift with us. Let the fragments speak.

Distraction Therapy is a podcast produced by Radio Lear and broadcast on Soar Sound. This blog is part of an ongoing series that extends the themes of each episode into a reflective space for further thought and imagination.

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Elitism in the arts refers to the notion that certain art forms are of higher value and should be appreciated by those with the cultural knowledge and education to fully grasp their meaning. This view creates a distinction between “high art”—such as classical music, fine art, opera, and certain forms of literature—and “popular” or “mass” culture, which is often considered more accessible but of lesser intellectual or aesthetic value. Elitist art, often supported by institutions like galleries, symphony orchestras, and universities tends to emphasise tradition, complexity, and intellectual depth, positioning itself as a more serious, enduring form of cultural expression.

This divide becomes particularly evident in the way elitist art challenges the rise of mass-produced and disposable popular culture. Popular culture, driven by market forces, is typically designed for broad appeal and easy consumption. It is typically characterised by entertainment forms like television, popular music, and commercial cinema, which are meant to be enjoyed quickly and without much intellectual effort. Critics of popular culture argue that it is formulaic, shallow, and created with commercial profit in mind rather than artistic integrity.

An example of how elitist art counters this can be seen in the world of classical music compared to mainstream pop. A symphony by Beethoven or a modernist opera by Benjamin Britten demands careful attention, patience, and knowledge of musical structure and history. These works are celebrated not only for their beauty but also for the way they engage with complex themes—social, emotional, and philosophical—that go beyond mere entertainment. In contrast, much of today’s pop music, though catchy and widely popular, is often considered transient, designed for immediate gratification and quick obsolescence, reflecting the commercial pressures of the entertainment industry.

Elitist art is also regarded as timeless, resisting the ephemeral nature of mass culture. Classic works of literature, such as those by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, are considered to require a greater level of engagement and intellectual work from the reader. They offer layers of meaning and deep exploration of the human condition, in contrast to many best-selling novels, which are written to be consumed rapidly, frequently offering straightforward plots and themes that do not require sustained reflection.

However, elitist art is not without its critics. Some argue that it can become disconnected from everyday life, appealing mainly to those who possess the cultural capital to appreciate its complexity. Yet, it is this very complexity and the demand it places on its audience that positions elitist art as a counter to the more disposable and commercialised aspects of popular culture. By requiring deeper reflection and understanding, it resists the superficiality and rapid turnover that characterise much of modern mass media.

At the heart of this tension is a debate about the value of art and its role in society. Elitist art, while critiqued for reinforcing social hierarchies, seeks to preserve a space for works that demand more from their audience—works that offer a lasting impact, in contrast to the fleeting nature of much popular culture. This dynamic between enduring, intellectually challenging art and more immediate, commercially driven cultural products continues to shape discussions about artistic value and inclusivity in the modern world.

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If you’ve ever wondered what it means to truly be immersed in both sound and vision, our latest podcast episode offers just that—a conversation woven with the performance of Clouds: Elevated, an awe-inspiring piece by electronic music producer Kulvader (L’Ku) and audiovisual artist Andy Harper.

Recorded live at LCB Depot as part of the Sound 2024 exhibition, the podcast seamlessly integrates segments from the live performance with in-depth discussions. You’ll experience the dynamic fusion of soundscapes and real-time visuals that left the audience in a state of wonder and reflection.

Throughout the event, audience members described the experience as “transcendental,” where the boundary between intuitive and imaginative thinking dissolved into an interconnected flow. The performance became more than an artistic display—it was a sensory bridge, linking participants to a heightened awareness of their own place in the world, through both abstract and tangible experiences. The subtle layering of ambient and downtempo sound, paired with Harper’s ethereal visuals, gave life to a space where stillness met motion, and thought met sensation.

As one listener described, it was “a revelation of how sound can shape our engagement with the world—both inner and outer.” This podcast captures the depth of those sentiments. In our discussion, Andy Harper and L’Ku unpack the intricate process of merging sound, technology, and art to craft an experience that speaks beyond words.

Whether you missed the live event or want to relive its magic, this podcast episode is your opportunity to dive into a piece that doesn’t just entertain—it evokes, challenges, and transports. I invite you to listen with open ears and an open mind, and allow yourself to become part of this auditory journey.

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The Shortwave Collective is an international feminist artist group that explores creative uses of radio. They view radio-making as a collaborative process involving experimentation, trial and error, and a continuous cycle of doing, undoing, and redoing. For the Collective, radio is a medium that transcends traditional boundaries, as it is both everywhere and nowhere—existing as signals that interact with the physical world, including our bodies.

The group is interested in creating radios that receive multiple signals, resist the clarity of conventional channels, and even devices that don’t receive or transmit yet aren’t broken. Radio, in their view, is deeply relational and can be influenced by factors such as weather, physical space, and mental state.

They also conduct workshops and projects that experiment with the intersection of sound, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum.

For more details, you can explore their projects like “Foxhole Radios and Fencetennas” and other creative experiments on their website.

Shortwave Collective has been commissioned as one of the lead artists for LCB Depot’s Sound 2024 exhibition. Their project, titled “Edge of Transmission“, invites participants to borrow a radio and discover unique transmissions around LCB Depot and the Cultural Quarter. The Collective will also be hosting workshops as part of the exhibition, which runs from September 2nd to September 20th, 2024. This exhibition showcases a diverse range of sound art, music, and audio from both established and emerging artists.

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Seth Guy is an experimental sound artist whose work explores the intersections of listening, memory, and imagination. His contribution to Sound 2024, held at LCB Depot, is a poignant installation titled “I Cried When…”, a sequence of thirty experimental sound sketches created during April 2024 as part of Artquest London’s 30Works30Days art challenge. These daily recordings are rooted in Seth’s deeply personal exploration of the human body and mortality, following his survival of sepsis in early 2023.

Seth’s work in this installation uses untreated concrete recordings, made by physically handling various objects, layered with minimal electronic sequences generated through a Korg MS-10 synthesiser on a Nintendo 3DS. Central to the pieces is Seth’s voice, narrating moments from his past when he cried. The visual aspect of the work complements the sound by featuring a consistent tone of blue for each sketch, adding a subtle yet meaningful dimension to the experience.

Known for his playful yet thought-provoking approach, Seth Guy creates performative works that challenge the listener’s perception of sound and its relationship with visual and emotional cues. His broader body of work spans both sonic and visual art, often incorporating humour and a sense of disquiet. Seth’s contribution to *Sound 2024* reflects his ongoing artistic research, blending personal narratives with experimental soundscapes that invite listeners to engage with the vulnerability and intimacy of human emotion.

Seth has a history of participatory and experiential projects, and his recent work has been featured in various exhibitions and publications, reinforcing his reputation as an innovative voice in contemporary sound art.

The Sound 2024 exhibition at LCB Depot is an event that highlights audio-focused creative practices. It takes place from 2nd to 20th September 2024, featuring a range of exhibitions and events related to sound art. The exhibition is part of LCB Depot’s monthly programme, which showcases different creative fields. Visitors can explore the exhibition on-site at LCB Depot from Monday to Friday, 11 am to 5 pm, as well as online via the @lcbdepot platform using the hashtag #sound.

This event brings together various artists, like Seth Guy, whose work reflects experimental and audio-driven themes and offers the public an opportunity to engage with cutting-edge sound art in both physical and digital spaces.

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As you listen to the sounds in this episode of the Distraction Therapy Podcast, consider how creative change occurs. Is the process of artistic expression driven by contradictions, where opposing forces collide and generate something new? Or is it a natural unfolding, where ideas evolve steadily over time?

Reflect on the Hegelian idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Do the layers of sound you’re hearing suggest oppositions that eventually resolve, forming a unified whole? Or do they reflect the **Marxist view**, where tensions—perhaps between traditional and experimental elements—drive the work forward, much like how social change is propelled by economic contradictions?

Are you picking up on moments of dialogue within the music? Does the interplay of instruments or electronic elements feel like a Socratic dialectic, where understanding emerges from an ongoing conversation between different voices?

What about the environment? Does the interaction between natural soundscapes and human-made sounds mirror an ecological dialectic, where human activity and nature are in constant tension, influencing each other?

Consider whether the music evokes a sense of critique, as in critical theory dialectics, challenging the structures that shape how we think about sound, music, and creativity. Can you sense any moments where the music deconstructs itself, a nod to the postmodern dialectic, asking you to question the very idea of structure?

At the same time, think about whether the piece you’re hearing grows naturally, developing through stages, much like developmental thinking suggests. Is this music about gradual transformation, like Goethe’s metamorphosis, where change is continuous but without conflict?

Finally, how might the music reflect a blend of these ideas? Are there moments where opposites come together, not just in conflict but in unity, offering a synthesis that both embraces contradiction and allows for growth?

As you immerse yourself in the music, let these provocations guide your experience and deepen your understanding of how sound can mirror both conflict and progression in the world of creative expression.

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