Radio Lento podcast

This is a blend of intimate and wide spatial quiet, captured as it happened from beside an old oak tree, in a remote spot in the Forest of Dean. The time is 3:30am and the microphones are recording alone. It's 90 minutes to dawn. What we hear in the foreground are the intimate textures of a trickling stream, that's completely hidden from view under thickly tangled vines. A hedgehog is foraging thr...

Have the back streets faded to silent? Have the dogs begun to bark? Quick, get in, there's a storm coming. The front room chair with the cushion that isn't supposed to be outside in the yard but is, because it's been so hot of late, is that in? And the pile of winter boots left out to air next to it? And those newly potted plants that can't cope with heavy rain yet?  Get them all in, the air's gon...

Sunrise over Tenby. Blue sky. Scudding clouds. 5am, and nobody about, except for the birds in the murmuring air of a seaside town. This sound photograph, captured from behind the descending houses on St Johns Hill in Tenby, is spatial, and composed by chance with balanced foreground and background layers. A blackbird right of centre. Another blackbird, mid-distance and left of centre. Far distance...

Tenby. A seaside town on the South coast of Wales. End of May into early June. Late sunsets, followed by warm, springtime nights. It's 1am and the mics are recording alone. Capturing the atmosphere of Tenby, in the dead of night.    Behind where we're staying are dim shapes of buildings. A tall tree with whisping leaves. Empty sun loungers and nextdoor's gate, loosely fastened, being moved atmosph...

The Hoo Peninsula is a vast open landscape on the Thames Estuary. Huge uninhabited swathes of ground. The mics (recording alone) were lodged in a hawthorn tree on Higham Marshes nature reserve and pointed out over a watery marsh. Close to the mics lapwings, redshank and cetti's warblers call, as well as geese and ducks that are familiar sounds to us urban dwellers. Skylarks circle above the farmla...

On Portland Bill. Dorset. We climb down jagged rocks. Naturally formed steps, waist deep, towards the water. Evenly uneven. Like narrow walkways. Some puddles along. Sea spray or resting rain? Now crouched down, she's peering silently into one of the puddles. Look, she says, tiny creatures. They're just speckles, swimming.  Rumbling waves roll in from open sea. Break against the sheer rock. Fiftee...

Just an hour. Under moorland trees. An hour to listen, to the weather, the flurries of rain. How they come and go. And the steady currents of wind. Force rising. Easing. Settling. Rising, rising again. Holding. Then easing. Blowing and sprinkling the falling raindrops over wide, waxy, sheltering leaves.  In time. Slowly becoming aware, in the quietness, of how many different layers of sound are no...

Here, in this quiet and empty spot, only the waves can be heard, as they break sedately, upon the rocks. The waves and the velvety silence that seems to press in between them as their gentle energy is dispersed. The tree, to which the microphones are attached, and all the boulders from up which it grows, and the 18th century fort behind and to the left of the scene, remain entirely invisible to th...

This episode includes lively birdsong, a trickling stream, foraging bees, a creaky pheasant flapping, a few softly passing vehicles along a country road and a gently droning propeller plane. Sat on a fallen branch, beside a flowing stream. Hidden from sight. An empty hillside road, where only the odd thing goes. This remote, yet sheltered spot, lies quietly and unobtrusively in the hills, a few mi...

After last episode's tumultuous waves upon a dramatic shingle shoreline, this week we retire behind the secluded walls of a little garden, at the back of a small suburban terraced house, for an altogether different sound feel. The sound feel of gentle rain, falling on an empty garden, in the quiet hours, when almost everyone is asleep.  We love it this time of year as winter turns to spring. And w...

Last week, we walked on Chesil Beach. We felt its steepness. Its shingle. Its sound. We heard its heavy waves. The way the stones are heaved back, in long, ground rumbling sweeps. A wild, brazen place. A bird, wheeling high above, must see Chesil Beach as an endless grey white line spanning from one end of the visible horizon, to the other. From the coast road it looks like a white raging line. Th...

When a rushing torrent cascades, down a precipitous rocky gorge.  When the intensity of the white noise is so brilliant on your ears, that it feels like acoustic sunshine. You know you're here. When the waterfall's rumble is almost completely absorbed by ground knee deep in the softest, deepest foliage.  When all around it echoes throughout a vast cathedral of untouched woodland, that grows up the...

St Abbs. A small fishing village and harbour in bygone times, perched on the coastal edge of South East Scotland.  A wonderful place to experience what the world must have sounded like, before machines were invented. It is, for this reason, quite a rare place, where people can go to bathe their ears, uninterrupted, with naturally spatial oceanic noise.  To the eye, St Abbs rests along a dramatic c...

This precipitous place, high in the Derbyshire hills, flows with birdsong and fresh moorland water. It's aural presence is made almost entirely of natural things. Non-human, natural phenomena. The sound-feel when immersed in it, has a depth, a width, and such rich spatial detail, that with headphones on and eyes closed, the sensation of actually being there, in the ravine, can be so strong as to t...

A wide open landscape, resting, between gusts of rain-speckled Northumbrian air. This place, on the edge of the Northumberland National Park, is endlessly rural. Mostly farmland. Dotted with far apart sheep, grazing under a silent plane-free sky.   It's nearly midday. Hearing the spatial sound of time passing and looking down, from a hill above, on the town clock of Wooler. How might its chimes ca...

Bright hazy sunshine. Behind, and up the bank, a winding footpath, littered with discarded sunbleached things. Here, sat still and amongst it all, dense bankside vegetation. Everything dried up, and whisping in a warm late summer breeze. Ripe blackberries growing on renegade edgeland canes. Hints of sunbathing crickets. Slishing shoreside water. Wafts of cludgy strandline clay. The Thames flows fr...

Sometimes we feel it's right to share an ear-witness account from a place where natural quiet and human-made noise co-exist. Our last was from the Forest of Dean ( episode 135  which documented the aural reality common to so many 'natural' places today. Human-made noise has quite varied effects and meanings, not always bad. This latest ear-witness account contains sounds familiar to urban dwellers...

The city sleeps, under a dark impenetrable sky. Streets, almost empty. Beneath invisible rainclouds, countless back gardens hold up their hands. Up, as high as they can reach, to catch the falling water.  In one garden, sheltered under a wide tarpaulin, microphones are recording. Alone. On top of a tripod, and standing, as high as a person. Listening. The tarpaulin, is to them a canvas. It lets th...

A mid-February night and you're out on an empty beach, for the cold sea air, and that feeling of wild emptiness. There's nobody about. Past the silent hulk of a huge parked digger on caterpillar tracks, you reach a shoulder high timber groyne (a long, narrow structure built out into the water from a beach in order to prevent erosion.) You pull yourself up and peer over, down into the gloom. The dr...

We captured this passage of time on a visit to some friends in Exeter last year in April during a spell of fine weather. It turned out to be a silky soft recording of a spring garden at dawn. It's about 5am and the garden birds are just starting to sing against a backdrop of high circling seagulls. From here, the still sleeping city of Exeter exudes a panoramic aural presence. A wide, steadily mur...

At over 600 feet high, and visible for miles, this giant mass of steel pylon on Swanscombe Marsh on the Thames Estuary has a sister. They stand together, like monoliths either side of the sprawling Thames, holding up cables, and silently serving society's insatiable thirst for power. After a shortish walk over the marsh from Swanscombe station, we arrived at the pylon on the Kent side bank. The gr...

Time aside. And at rest. A quiet, leafy space. Folkestone, on the Kent coast. An area called the Warren, where forested steeps slope and tumble into the sandy wash of the sea. It's early August 2022. A month of heat, like the south of Spain. The sun is up. The air's got that scent of another sweltering day to come. The hedgerow and the hawthorn tree holding the microphones are already hot. Turning...

Dusk has come, and the Forest of Dean is, very gradually, darkening. Silence, like dew, is beginning to settle in the voids and hollows between the trees. Shadows, and echoes, are everywhere. In the gathering dim, melodic song thrush, blackbirds, and some roosting wood pigeons are singing the last notes of the day. Sounding, from across this huge space, like they are already in a dream.  Time pass...

There's a bench. Perfectly perched, by the sandy steps that lead steeply down onto Coldingham Sands. Perfectly perched, because the sound-view from this bench is so wide, and the angle just right to hear the incoming waves, as they break over outcrops of craggy, elephant-sized rocks. It's a bright August day, and the sun is mistily lighting up the sea, the rocky cliffs, and the plunging, richly ve...

Dawn. Bright morning sky. High pressure, barometer rising. A vast quiet sky, etched with a few scudding clouds picked out by the light of the rising sun. Gone is the tranquil hush of night. These remote moorland woods are alive again! Alive and lit up, not just by the morning sun, but by countless singing birds.  From a sturdy beech growing beside the ancient track, the woodland sparkles. Sparkles...