ArTEEtude: Art, culture and the creative mind. Never so close again. - with Detlef Schlich

SHOW / EPISODE

#Arteetude 345 – Schlich and his AI co-host Sophia explore the relationship between hearing, touch, vibration, bodily rhythm and memory. The episode concludes with the new song by Los Inorgánicos: When Silence Moves

Season 1 | Episode 345

23m | Aug 2, 2026

Can sound be felt before it is heard?

Arteetude 345 – The Skin That Listens grew directly from responses to our previous episode.

Listener Wendy Chivers questioned whether feeling had been treated merely as an unusual side effect of hearing rather than as an essential form of perception. Pastora Braghini then shared a childhood memory of her deaf grandfather, who could detect the children approaching his armchair through vibrations travelling across the old wooden floor.

Together with my AI co-host Sophia, I explore the territory between hearing and touch. The ear translates vibration into sound, while skin, bones, muscles and balance translate the same physical event into pressure, movement and spatial awareness.

Perhaps listening has never belonged to the ear alone.

Perhaps music enters a body already filled with rhythms—heartbeat, breath, memory and movement—and becomes part of us before language can explain what happened.

The episode concludes with the new song by Los Inorgánicos:

When Silence Moves

Research & Artistic Method

Detlef Schlich’s artistic research is rooted in his essay Shamanism, Art and Digital Culture: Cause and Effect, which investigates the relationship between ritual, artistic transformation, media, and digital culture.

Download here for free:

Shamanism, Art and Digital Culture: Cause and Effect

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303749640_Shamanism_Art_and_Digital_Culture_Cause_and_Effect

Building on this foundation, Schlich developed Multilayerism: A New Paradigm in Contemporary Art – A Manifesto, an artistic method and conceptual framework for understanding contemporary art through layers of media, memory, technology, ritual, emotion, misunderstanding, and lived experience.

Read here:

Multilayerism: A New Paradigm in Contemporary Art – A Manifesto by Detlef Schlich

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375665507_Multilayerism_A_New_Paradigm_in_Contemporary_Art_-_A_Manifesto_by_Detlef_Schlich

Together, these texts form the theoretical backbone of Schlich’s ongoing work as a visual artist, media archaeologist, ritual designer, musician, and host of the Arteetude podcast.

WEBSITE LINKS

Music Projects

WAW / Wild Atlantic Way

WAW is the music project by Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.

Official YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@WAWBand

From the forthcoming WAW album The Stories of Nil Young

Two songs from WAW’s developing album project The Stories of Nil Young form part of a mythopoetic journey along the Nile, where river, memory, loss, cooperation, and hope flow into music.

AfricaSmile

AfricaSmile follows the Nile as an imagined journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea — a river of memory, movement, rhythm, and myth. The song turns the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a fragile image of cooperation. It is not a naïve peace anthem, but a wounded musical hope: two different currents meeting, listening, and still moving forward together.

Watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnQbsh01YWU

The Nile’s Bittersweet Song

The Nile’s Bittersweet Song is the first official single by WAW / Wild Atlantic Way — Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer.

The song follows the Nile as a river of memory, beauty, loss, and contradiction: a life-giver, but also a force that can take away what it once nourished. Through the story of Kamau, it becomes a poetic reflection on childhood, fragile hope, and the emotional landscape carried by a river that is both kind and cruel.

Inspired by East African storytelling traditions and shaped along the Wild Atlantic Way in West Cork, The Nile’s Bittersweet Song is a mythopoetic musical journey about water, grief, resilience, and the deep human longing to keep moving with the current.

Watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33AWko4IkKI

WAW on Bandcamp

Silent Night

In a world shadowed by conflict and unrest, Dirk Schlömer and Detlef Schlich felt compelled to reinterpret Silent Night to reflect the complexities and contradictions of modern life.

https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/silent-night

Wild Atlantic Way

This song emerged from a trip to West Cork, Ireland, where the beautiful coastal Wild Atlantic Way stretches along the west coast.

https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/wild-atlantic-way