Music is a medium that helps foster and enhance desired states of feeling and embodied experience. From one moment to the next, music can make you feel good, uplifted—it can promote the temporary abatement of pain and deflects from debilitating energies and feelings. Intimate Connections engages with music’s capacity to help us cope and develop in manifold ways. Sometimes we might not be able to reflect our feelings into words. This is perhaps where music enters, and helps process our emotions in an immediate and embodied way.
Here, the radio as a medium and technology of communication has a vital role to fill. Radio enables a conversation between listeners and radio-makers, mind and music get transmitted — bridging distance and forging intimate connections in its place. Each broadcast in this series will see different musicians and radio practitioners explore specific emotional states, political complexes and knotted experiences: from belonging to happiness, reproductive rights, the “intervening mind”, longing, rest and recovery, the life-giving energy of natural phenomena, stress and plant healing, and the sonic properties of the real and the authentic.
The radio show was developed as part of Mindscapes and Resonance Room. Mindscapes is an international cultural programme initiated and funded by the Wellcome and aims to support rethinking how we understand, address and talk about mental health.