Radio Lear

There is a tendency in contemporary life to assume that creativity is something exceptional. We associate it with professional artists, performers, designers, musicians, and makers. Creativity becomes a special category of activity rather than a natural human capacity. Yet the conversations we have on Radio Lear often suggest something different. Creativity may be less about talent and more about...

Radio Lear is beginning a new Weird Walks-inspired strand with a music-led episode that sets the ground for future walks, field recordings, local stories and sound-led explorations of place. This first episode is not a walk in the usual sense. It is a threshold. It is a way of tuning the ear before the foot goes forward. The programme is built as a reflective music mix, shaped around the feeling o...

Radio Lear is built around the idea that creative audio can do more than carry information. It can hold atmosphere, memory, presence and the small shifts of attention that happen when people gather, listen and speak. In this feature, recorded at a Word open-mic event at Attenborough Arts on Thursday 28th May 2026, we hear poetry not as a finished cultural product, but as a living social act. This...

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 contempla...

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 o...

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 ac...

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 fiel...

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 worshi...

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...

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 cura...

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...

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...