Radio Lento podcast

There is always quiet. Somewhere. All the time great swathes of it do exist. But these, are the farthest from reach.   Here though, is some, within reach. Quiet, that from its highest point, is within sight of a major city. Within sight of busy roads. Buried behind nature's natural barriers, this quiet, lies beside a single-track lane.    Water flowing along the valley bottom. Fills the air with p...

With Benfleet behind, see ahead the footpath to Leigh-on-Sea. It's a beckoning line to the horizon. But for now, we can just let it go. Let it go because something else beckons. Something sky sized. Breezing in from the flat reflecting water. A presence, that's been there all along.  So turn off the path and stride down, down through the thick grass. Head straight to the land water boundary. The g...

Six strikes St Mary's bell, and it's a new day. A new woodland day, with time returned to normal. The wood pigeons coo it. The cow lows it. The buzzard whistles it and the rooks crow it, from the high tree tops. The cockerel crows it too. A new day, for this wood, just to be. Footsteps? Someone! Steady strides. Wading boot deep into the forest pool, down, and into it through a flood bank of leaves...

We always try to make a recording in the landscape after it's just snowed. It's so quiet. And the quiet is palpable. The effect is unique and wonderful, and is down to the way freshly fallen snow absorbs sound. By absorbing it so well though, there is virtually nothing for the microphones to pick up, and so none of these recordings have ever properly worked. Over Christmas 2014, whilst staying wit...

A passing ship, in the night, is like a thought in slow motion. A thought sailing in, from out on the ocean. A thought made of bulk timber upon steel. Made of engine, rudder and wheel. tangible. Omnipotent. But a thought unseen. In perfect dark. In perfect, peninsula darkness.   From this place upon the seawall, the nocturnal transit begins, as a warm, pulsating hum. As a low down sound rising slo...

Still air. Quiet parkland. It's 8am, before the people come. Empty paths. Untrodden grass. Mist lifting. On the face of it, nothing is happening. But nothing needs to happen. This is a bright autumnal Sunday morning in late September.  To the listener, the scene is panoramic, and one enveloped in another kind of mist. Consistent. Never lifting, never changing. From night to day, from month to mont...

When we set up to record, there were no signs of the weather front. It was late evening. Low tide. We'd followed the path East along the river out of Burnham-on-Crouch and come across a Second World War armament, a pillbox, overgrown and derelict, beside the footpath. A lookout, that now, and for the last seventy years, has looked and been looking out on nothing more than the to and fro of the tid...

Day has arrived, and there's no mystery about it. Gone the voids. Gone the echoes. Gone the skewed sense of time, magnified, with distance overlapping. 5am, and it's here and there and all about. The present. The world, re-appeared.  Light has come, yet the wood remains still. It's filled with the anodyne reverberations of the distant A12, reflecting off all the hard surfaces of the trees, reveali...

Out of the 240 chalk streams globally, 160 are (or were) in England.  For a moment, I thought I heard a splosh and the whip of a fishing rod. But how? Ankle deep in dusty soft leaf litter, several yards down in the waterless bed of a dried up chalk stream, I craned my ears. There it was again. More of a splish, this time, or was it a wish just uttered, by the trees. They swayed in a gust of late s...

Rain. Rain falling in the night. Falling in the night when there's nobody about to hear it. Falling onto a little ramshackle garden made up of upturned pots, a patch of leaf scattered concrete, and a square of grass surrounded by sleeping shrubs and plants.  A little walled garden, basking under the falling water, still, under grey black suburban sky. Sometimes gusted, by a nosy, billowing  wind....

Up in the April hills of Wales, beside an empty road. Behind the brambles, down a dell, a stream, over bare stone rolls. What sing you mistle thrush? The inbetween of holly trees, is lit by morning sun. In the field beyond the birches, a thirsty sheep dog runs. Green beach, open sky, scattered lines of sheep shells. Run run, you thirsty dog, the world's your oyster. What sing you mistle thrush? Fi...

Three years ago we made another overnight recording at the edge of a rural wood. It turned out to be one of those night's when almost nothing stirred, just the faintest susurrations of wind in trees and the occasional crick of a dark bush cricket, hidden amongst the thick brambles that grew around the taught wire fence where we tied the microphones. Nothing happening, for hour upon hour. It seemed...

Deep and spaciously detailed night quiet, at the edge of the tidal river Crouch in rural Essex. Wind on water. Rain on water. Night birds over water. Water upon water. A real piece of time, captured from one rainy inclement night in August by a pair of weatherproofed microphones tied to a seawall railing in Burnham-on-Crouch. Over time, and as the weather front rolls in, the delicate shifting move...

We're going back to early June this year, to the rich and intermingled singing of birds that happens at dawn throughout the spring and early summer. In Britain it's called the dawn chorus, a behaviour associated with song birds during the breeding season.  Captured by a lone pair of microphones tied to a tree, above the watery and precipitous ravine that runs into the infamous Todbrook Reservoir a...

Above the mud silt beach, it's all bright clouds, moving. Then the sun breaks through. The river is stretching wide here, left to right, silently carrying the land's outflow through marshes, and out to sea. Warm wind blows in between long spells of calm. Close by, on the tree holding the microphones, and almost within touching distance, small waxy leaves rustle in the summer breeze. The tide's fal...

They look as if they are swimming in it. The banks of trees. Tense into the current, swaying, twisting in sympathy with the changing wind. Like they're wading out into on-coming waves, wading out to be washed in this force of sky, landing.  And in-between, in the tranquil lulls, resting. Tall. Collegiate. Upright. With leaves still trembling. Equinoctial gales, glanced the highland cattle. Or the...

High tide on the River Crouch. Night. Not a soul about. Small bobbly waves gamboling along the brimming tideline. Playful, in swilling swirls, reaching for one more inch of land, before the ebb. From the east, a lazy wind muffles.    Tide turned. The surface has begun to calm. Palmful waves bob over each other in glassy melodious slurps. Their thirst for land is over. Retreat not yet in mind, and...

Last day of August. Pleasant sunshine, blue sky. Wind 1 to 2 knots, barely noticeable. Standing tall with motionless leaves, the trees are leaning into the warmth, letting their limbs soak up every available ounce of the sun's golden heat. Along the old bridleway, away from the grey noise of a cross-country road, quiet fields are revealed. Knee deep with grass. Waiting to be mown.    A hedgerow, b...

Sunlit pontoons. Taut ropes. Empty footways. Still, like a photograph. So many boats moored up, waiting for someone to come down to sail them. This is the marina at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, where to the eye, on this hot summer day in August, everything looks still. To the ear though, it's a different story.    Guy ropes whistle and moan in the wind. Halyards ring against hollow masts. Tidal water...

From over the fields beyond the edge of the forest, the bell of St Mary's strikes 4. Within this empty space between the trees, the golden sound rings pure and clear, though there's no one around to hear it. Soon, the dawn will come.   For now, down amongst the leaf litter, the dark bush crickets are still counting the seconds. Still twinkling, like tiny jewels on the velvety dark carpet of peace...

High up on an exposed moor, between the Derbyshire towns of Glossop and Buxton, an old oak tree leans into the wind. Its sound is heard only by passing walkers, who from time to time, clink through the gate on their way over the exposed moor. As we passed, we tied the microphones to one of the low boughs, leeside of the strong prevailing wind, and left them alone to record. -----------------------...

Stop walking! There's a place to sit. Roll up your jacket to make a cushion and perch on the rocks, just for a moment, to take in the view. Look! Over the expanse of cloud-dappled water, beyond, where the outgoing surge of the river Blackwater swirls into the North Sea, that's Mersea Island. From here, just a sliver of low lying land.   A few miles up the coast, though not yet in sight, are the tw...

This, is summer island time. Sizzled by crickets, gusted to and fro by hot marshy breezes, a distant marine vessel softly thrums the air with a low soporific hum. Occasional planes pass lazily over. This is Allfleet Marsh on Wallasea island in Essex. East is Foulness and then the North Sea.    Down a steep bank from the trail that leads from the car park to School House viewpoint where the River R...

Plunge off the train and smile at the fresh air of nowhere! This is Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex. All ground and sky. The bell in the driver's cab rings twice, then twice again, and it's off. Next stop, somewhere else. The ensuing feeling of loneliness is only temporary.   With the decaying buildings of the old maltings nearby, proceed on foot towards the main road. The brick bridge should be firmly o...

Early June days, up in the green of the Peak District hills, do not give way easily to night. The birds won't let them. Brimming over with life and song, they sing at the dying light to stay, with all the gusto of dawn. Here above the deep leafy ravine, their mercurial voices can be heard, pouring out into the sheer air, and down, onto the shallow stony river flowing below. The light, for a while,...