Music rarely travels in a straight line. Ideas move between people, places and generations. A rhythm developed in one studio appears years later in another form. A synthesizer technique becomes part of a pop song. A production aesthetic crosses national borders, changes shape and eventually becomes so familiar that its origins are difficult to hear. This edition of the Distraction Therapy Podcast Mixtape follows some of those transmissions through Japanese music.

There is a particular moment in popular music when the machine stops sounding like an imitation of musicians and begins to suggest an entirely different way of experiencing time. This edition of the Distraction Therapy Podcast Mixtape moves through that moment. Its starting point is the electronic disco of the late nineteen-seventies, but its destination is less easily defined. These records lead towards synth-pop, Hi-NRG, post-disco, house, techno and electronic pop, but they also describe something more elusive: a change in the relationship between the body, technology and imagination.

The second part of Building Bridges moves eastwards, but not in search of a simple contrast. This edition of the Distraction Therapy Podcast Mixtape turns towards Japan as a place of encounter: not as an idea to be explained, but as a collection of voices, textures, attitudes and musical possibilities that resist being reduced to a single image. The programme asks what happens when we allow another voice to change the expectations we bring with us.

There is something deceptively simple about a bridge. It joins one place to another. It allows movement across a space that would otherwise interrupt the journey. But a bridge does not abolish the distance beneath it. The river remains a river. The railway remains a railway. The valley stays open. Perhaps that is why the bridge is a useful image for thinking about how we live alongside other people.

An archway holds a space open. People can pass through it, pause beneath it, or gather within its shelter. On Wednesday 16th September 2026, the Braunstone Gate

The first River, Ritual & Ghosts programme follows an imagined city to the point where its river reaches the sea. This separate Japan episode begins at that horizon and asks what happens when listening crosses it. I didn’t want to use the music to construct one fixed image of Japan. No country, city, or musical culture can be reduced to a single atmosphere.

I’ve been reflecting on the way a city can exist in more than one form at the same time. There is the visible city of streets, stations, warehouses, shops, homes, and workplaces. Then there is another city beneath it: a place assembled from memory, music, repetition, loss, and imagination. River, Ritual & Ghosts follows that second city. It isn’t a portrait of one named place.