Radio Lento podcast

For the very last episode of 2022, and because it's so cold and dank, we want to use the magic of spatial sound landscape recording to teleport back into the summer! It's August 2017, and our microphones are out on their first ever overnight recording, lent up against the trunk of a tree in a rural wood in Suffolk.  This passage of raw unedited time continues on from episode 112, and begins as the...

A barn, that's stood alone on the steeply sloping fields below the summit of Black Hill in Derbyshire, for longer than anyone can remember. This is the sound atmosphere from inside, recorded around 1am this morning. Nobody and nothing is about. Not even the owls, that we've been told nest somewhere within the rafters. A storm is whipping up outside, across the moor. Strong sweeping wind, rumbling...

Changing weather. Shifting scenes. The east coast of Scotland above St Abbs. A landscape whose geography leaves it exposed to everything that the sky can bring. Wind. Rain. Mist. Brilliant, revelatory sunshine.  Here, listening to this landscape from within the leaves and branches of this tree. A lone tree along the Creel Path. The ancient Creel Path that's been trodden by fisherman on their way t...

Hear. This solitude. This real captured quiet. This authentic air. From horizon to horizon. Near empty of human-made noise. Aural solitude. Rare? Becoming rarer? It is there though. It does exist. Out there. And can be found. You can find it here, like we did, at this deserted beach. An uplifting stretch of land half way between Winchelsea and Rye Harbour. It's a place where you can sit down upon...

High in the Derbyshire hills, a century-old garden is being blown dry by brisk morning air. It's quiet. Sheltered. Surrounded by strong gritstone walls and tall trees. Over the lower wall is a perfect view. A steep hummocky meadow, and beyond, the vast deep space created by a wide vibrantly green Derbyshire valley.  Birds, to whom the garden is home, fleetingly sing, and call. Some flutter right p...

Peering out from atop the high seawall of Nothe Fort. Two o'clock in the morning. High tide, and the sea below feels so near. Overhead the sky is faintly luminous. But is dense black, out over the sea. Even blacker out over the invisible presence of Portland, somewhere over to the right. Hearing the night's velvet silence, rippled by slow moving, crisp edged waves. Crisp edged, watery waves, that...

It's gone dark. It's 21:15. And you're standing on platform 1 of the railway station in Penzance. Bright lamps light the long platforms, and seaside smells waft in the air. Wheely bag at your side, you're waiting to board the legendary Night Riviera . A long, impressive line of carriages hiding stylish cabins and bunks within. Departing Penzance 21:45. Arriving London Paddington 05:04. Far away at...

An exposed tree, looking down upon the town of Wooler, high in the Northumberland hills. It stands amidst wide open fields, by an empty bench and an overgrown footpath. It stands. And it feels the time passing, through the slow undulations of the wind. Bright cloudful skies. Rain expected. Then out across the valley the bell strikes. Reverberantly. Five shining tones to tell the sleeping town of W...

This is real quiet from the middle of the night, captured from a point above the harbour of St Abbs on the East Coast of Scotland. Car-free. Plane-free. Just the sparse and spacious cries of circling gulls, and the faintest hum of a fishing vessel anchored somewhere out at sea. This remote, thousand-year-old fishing village is to us a place defined by its quiet horizons. Its single country road an...

At the top of the old Victorian house are several flights of dim, dark stairs. Steep. Narrow. Cold. They lead up to a pair of rarely used attic rooms. As you climb, you feel the dust on the banisters. The threadbare carpets. The loose, unsteady floorboards. A small landing greets you at the top, with a single empty chair that's facing the wall. And two doors. The first opens into a small box room....

Dusk gathering, we found a stony path, and followed it. Microphones still in the rucksack. It'd been a long day, and we still hadn't found the right place to record. Time. Night approaching.  Two pairs of feet dislodging loose stones. Passing through thick stubby trees, and winding steeply. Then suddenly we're there! There, exposed, and looking out over a panoramic, coastal landscape. Breathing. S...

Up a soily slope, almost too steep to climb, nestled in against the smooth trunk of a tree, the microphones are recording. Recording the sound of solitude.  Dry inside their weatherproof box. Listening, carefully. Witnessing, faithfully, the moments of passing time. The tip taps of raindrops. The gently surging currents of moving air. And as the movement calms, the undulating views of the nocturna...

Wide silent sky. Still warm air. Having followed a country footpath across miles of open farmland you reach a stony bank and, like a natural magic trick, it leads you down onto a deserted, shingle beach, animated with its own soft crashing waves. Nobody's about. Really, nobody. It's a stretch of beach between Rye Harbour and Winchelsea that's somehow, perhaps for you, kept itself perfectly deserte...

This is a segment of time from a clearing deep in the Forest of Dean. Echoing birds in full voice. Soft hushing breezes in high treetops. Then, over time, a band of fresh summer rain, falling in rich spatial detail over countless broad-leaved trees. It's a natural environment. The sort of place people travel to, to get away from it all. To get a dose of green health, because it ticks all the boxes...

Up steep steps from the sandy beach, and a birds-ear view of ocean breakers from a thicket, perched half-way up the cliff. Several hours to go before low tide. Directly ahead slow rolling waves, breaking over outcrops of large craggy rocks.  It's the dead of night, here on Coldingham Sands. An empty, uninhabited land, under a sky of almost astronomical darkness. An area of land mostly free of huma...

A rare night amongst nights. A dark landscape, subdued, beneath immense and invisible storm clouds. It's just past eleven thirty on Monday the fifth of September 2022. The kitchen was in darkness. The light was off. But the little door leading into the small garden beyond was open. We'd left it open, because there was this palpable sense that an event was about to happen. Though strangely peaceful...

Warm sunlit afternoon. Late August. On the nature reserve at Mucking, beside the Thames in Essex. A bird hide. Perched on a steep bank amongst reeds, looking out on a strip of newly exposed mud. Tide falling. Water receding. Soon, when enough mud is exposed, maybe the curlew will come. "Listen" a voice says. From inside the bird hide. Though empty, someone is there. Between the bright of the slot...

A straight and stony path heads through open country, towards the sea. Beside the track, amongst land in-between, a tree. Lone and leafy. Like a sentry. Exposed and standing. It watches the sea birds. Hears their wide and freeing calls. Feels summer gusts of salty air. And listens, to a distant thrum. A vessel. At sea. Slowly passing.   It's daytime. Rain clouds are moving overhead. Loose stones l...

Children play on a soft sandy beach by the Essex Wildlife Trust nature reserve at Stanford-le-Hope. When the tide goes out, this amazing hidden beach is revealed. Water laps. Families bask in the sun. Distant engines of passing marine vessels thrum the air. It's hard to believe that this is reclaimed, re-wilded industrial land. As east as you can go, deep amongst the sedge grass on Wallasea Island...

It's the dead of night. Along an exposed stretch of seawall East of Burnham-on-Crouch, a deluge has started. Rain lashes down from a pitch black sky onto the swirling water of an out-going tide. This is the River Crouch, and the microphones are capturing the essence of this nocturnal estuary landscape, opposite Wallasea Island in Essex. Bright daytime, on Landermere Creek. Wild water surrounded by...

Wondering along the path from Althorn to North Fambridge in Essex. Skylarks! Their contented never-ending songs, wheeling about slowly in the warm thermals somewhere, high above. Almost as far as the eye can see, a vast waist-deep plantation made of millions of waving stems and leaves is catching the breezes, shushing and sissing in sympathy with the moving air. This, is open country, crossed by t...

Begin, by a country church on the hills above Harlow in Essex, and at the foot of a jovial fir tree, hushed by warm wind. It's a sunny afternoon and a blackbird is singing in the secluded churchyard of St Mary's, Gilston. Wood pigeons are sunning their wings on the old slates of the church roof. Great tits call from the long hedgerow that forms a natural boundary to the open fields beyond.  The op...

After an hour's steep upward toil, through a thickly wooded gorge and along some very precipitous granite rock formations, you reach a wooden footbridge. Here the landscape's totally changed. Just dense bracken, a rough winding path, all slanted steeply up to a wide open sky. Somewhere, up there you think, is an ancient stone circle known as the Nine Maidens. But no Dartmoor walk should be done, o...

For this week's episode we're back in the Forest of Dean for a different kind of captured quiet. Quiet that transforms from one thing to another. A kind of sonic metamorphosis.  The segment from this overnight recording begins at around 4am when the space around the oak tree holding the microphones is still pitch dark, and pristine quiet. Intimate. A clearing, deep within an expansive forest, wher...

Heavily, this winter rain falls. Persistent. Cold. Wet. Refreshing. In waves. In sprinkling flurries. Over time. Onto the huge tarpaulin stretched across the yard, each drop's long downward journey is both completed, and revealed, in one tiny moment.  It's actually quite loud! And so dense and complex and layered with detail that we tend to hear it as, well, just rain. Just plain old, simple, rain...