Radio Lento podcast

104 While away in winter woodland (a clear mind special)

December is a very quiet month for natural sound out here in the walkable wilderness. Wind moaning in the telegraph wires, and rain spattering into flooded puddles. And when you reach them, the woods, down long lanes and a muddy footpath, the song birds haven't yet begun to sing. But stop, qwell the noise of your boots, and listen. Wait.... Let all sense of motion go. A few moments are all that's needed.

It comes, more as a feeling than a sound, though it comes from sound. An awareness, of the surrounding wood. The wood as one, huge, still presence. One, huge, reverberant reservoir, of hushing quiet, that has you immersed within it. The wind rises, and falls. The calls of distant birds echo through the voids. Occasionally, the creaking sound, as solid tree trunks bend with the pressure of moving air.

The hushing is made as the banks of cold winter wind brush over the high tree tops, and through into the countless boughs and bare branches. Each one, each bough and branch, each one in their thousands, in their millions, generates small trails of invisible, turbulent air. White noise streamers, that shower down, to land on our ears. We hear it, as waves of infinitely spatial hushing. The sound of the whole forest, as it brushes against the wind.

This was recorded in Comb's Wood, Hertfordshire in December. 

103 Tidal breakers winter beach - in HD sound

How it is, that a winter weekend city walk, can end up like this - by the seaside! How an inner city landscape, with its roads and concrete valleys between misty mid-distance skyscrapers, can be faded from consciousness by simply hopping over one, very long, brick wall. 

So up and over the flood wall you go, with its curved brick top, and down you drop, not onto but into, something else. Something else entirely. Beach! 

Yes a beach. A real beach! A wild watery foreshore, with blustery winds, and rushing white horses, and liberating rejuvenating scrunchy shingle under foot. You walk, over the unsteady ground, with a rolling swagger. You walk, right up to the water's edge, right into its bright white noise, its refreshing spray. 

And everything, from only moments ago, is suddenly forgotten. Forgotten because now you remember. Remember what it is you are living for. This! Children playing amongst bright ringing stones. The thrum of deep channel cruisers. An accidentally discovered beach, beside the Thames, at Rotherhithe. Tidal breakers. Winter beach.

102 Mild valley in June at the Cheshire / Derbyshire border (source of natural white noise)

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 pleasant noise. Birds, singing out across the steep soft pastures. Mellifluous. Mid-morning voices.

 

To the right a distant farm. To the left, dense woodland at the mouth of a leafy ravine. Ahead, a sleepy farm building, hidden beneath tall dark trees.

 

Over this mild, favourable hour, a lone car passes. It labours up the steeply winding lane, past the tree that holds the microphones, then coasts back down a short while later. A country car. The only one. On country business. 

 

This section of audio is from a twelve hour recording we made of time passing in a quiet valley in June last year. We spent some days in the area and made a second overnight recording further down the valley in a different spot. Episode 89 and 78 are taken from the second location. The brook, about 100 yards in front of the microphones, runs left to right across the sound-view, and defines the Cheshire / Derbyshire border.

101 At Benfleet Creek

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 ground will soften, and soften again, but keep going. In careful steps, press on through the ankle deep squelch, around the slippery half submerged stones, until the vegetation beneath your feet feels like a semi floating bed of sponge. This, is the last walkable point. The point where you just have to stop, and listen, because the presence of this place has got so strong. 

In front, is the exposed mud, patterned with trickling remnants of the high tide. Further on, a bright reflected sky. A sky reverberant, with the bending tones of a passing propeller plane.

It's the sense of wide, wide open that makes this place so overwhelmingly present. And one might respond to it with an equally strong feeling, an awareness somehow, that what's here and happening outside, is happening inside too. Pure openness. But not emptiness. This place is vast, but not empty. It is filled with fresh blustery winds, and patrolled by tiny, flapping sparks. These are the wild birds. And this, is their world.

The tripod sinks deep into the sponge-like vegetation, but finds its place, so we attach the mics and leave them, wrapped in a wind absorbent hat, to record alone. As we climb away, back up the slippery bank, we hear them, the wild birds, coming back to see what it is we left behind.

100 Suffolk Wood (part 11) - a new day

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. It's the woodsman, come to tend the forest. Come to clear its tangles and fallen branches. But we think the woodsman's come not just for work, but for a swim. A swim and a bathe in the forest's atmosphere. Its still sense of emptiness, the rippling bands of peace between the trees. Its high vertical walls, of quiet.

To mark Radio Lento's 100th episode, we wanted to share this, a special recording. It is the eleventh segment from the twelve hour overnight recording we made of an empty wood in Dedham Vale. Lento began at episode 1 with a 30 minute clip from this same segment, done back then as a test, to see if the whole idea might work. Thanks to everyone who's listened and especially to those who've got in touch to tell us what Lento recordings mean to them. You've inspired us to make these 100 episodes, to keep searching for new places to record, and to develop better methods for capturing the essence of these natural places in detailed, spatial sound. 

Huge thanks to everyone who has made a donation too. Every pound goes towards the costs of Radio Lento, which is funded by us.

99 High in the hills amongst snow laden trees - Christmas special

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 with family up in the hills of Derbyshire, it snowed, and snowed, for days and days. And so we recorded, and recorded, for days and days too. Each time, on playback through headphones, the spatial sense of landscape quiet, the effect we strive to capture in all our recordings, was entirely missing. 

A few days later, just before ten o'clock at night, the snow began to fall again. The landscape was frozen, after days of freeze thaw. And this time, instead of absorbing sound, the icy snow was reflecting it. As the snow fell, every tiny fragment and particle of it made a sound, in varying degrees from the finest of fine dust, to sounds almost like leaves dropping, to distinctly heavier scattering ice falls. There was a lazy wind in the trees too, moving through as soft murmuring white noise. Occasionally, it was strong enough to push off the lighter accumulations of snow and ice, causing it to fall between the branches, and down onto the frozen ground below. For the first time, the snowy landscape sounded spatial, and the microphones were able to capture the feeling of being out amongst snow laden trees, within a wide open, and frozen landscape. The old clocks can be heard chiming ten inside the house, and towards the end of this unusually short episode for us, far away geese, and foxes too.

Merry Christmas everyone! From Radio Lento we wish you and your family a happy and sound new year. 

98 A ship that passes in the night - sleep safe

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 slowly, in the east. A vast, timber laden hulk, that to the inflowing tide, feels like nothing more than a drifting feather. To it, a feather adrift. To us, a ship.

 

This soundscape is another excerpt from the twelve hour overnight recording we made last summer in Essex, about seven miles inland from the North Sea along the tidal River Crouch. The mics, which we tied to a seawall railing while we slept in a nearby inn, captured this chance event in total darkness, an event that we feel makes for one of the most compelling listens, of all the river sounds. A passing ship! a ship that comes, and never seems to go. A hum, among the washing waves.

97 Through the trees, distant weir (source of natural white noise - 3D with ear/headphones)

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 month, from year to year, a mist made of sound. A flow of pure and natural white noise, infinitely spatial, present throughout every shadowed space beneath the trees. The weir. Its soft surrounding balm.

Lulle Brook is a tributary of the Thames at Cookham, just off the Thames Path National Trail. We heard it from afar, when we first came, long before we knew what it was. A noise on the horizon. A noise with a soft, gravitational pull. In the solitude of the empty parkland, with nobody about, the flowing water instils peace into the air. Widens the sense of space. Throws a canvas on which the birds can paint on their sparse, autumnal calls. Wrens, robins, screeching green parrots, tchacking jackdaws, finches, some distant high passing geese. 

96 A blustery day begins on inland tidal water (headphones)

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 tides. Further along we saw a railing sloping steeply down the seawall, and into the water.

 

Gripping onto the railing not to slip, we climbed down. In places the seawall was covered in a fine moss, and felt velvety under foot. Where the rough shrubs and grasses gave way to bare concrete, marked the high tide line. The sky had filled with dusk, and we stopped, to listen. It's the sound-check, the audition, before we can commit the kit. A silent minute, that lets us hear the world far beyond ourselves. Slowly, the main flow of the river's outer edge was revealed through countless thousands of swirling eddies. In the mile wide body of air above, the ding ding dings of redshank, the rasping calls of hardy gulls. It was a good, panoramic place to record, and a scene somehow also shaped by not a sound, but an absorbent mass, the low lying effect of Wallasea Island, far off over the opposite bank, with not a light in sight. 

To make the 12 hour recording, we spent the night in an Inn, half a mile up-river from the microphones. In the dead of night we could hear the yacht masts ringing in the wind, and the rain battering against the window panes, and wondered. What will it be like down at the seawall? Had we gauged the high tide mark right? Will the fluffy hat that we stretched over the kit box stand up to the pelting rain?

This is the section of the recording from between 7am and 8am. rain clouds are still passing overhead, their precipitations sifting down like tiny fragments of grit on the rising water, and as it gets heavy, hammering on the lid of the mic box. Seabirds are all around, mainly in the distance, between the gusts of wind, but sometimes they swoop by very close. Someone passes, up early and on foot, with their scampering dog.  A few planes traverse, softly reverberating through the full width of the sky above Wallasea Island. The hat that we used to help baffle against the constant esturary wind is by now wringing wet, and the wooden box protecting the kit is too, though luckily not inside. What the mics manage to capture though, despite the drenched state of the equipment, is the essence of this wild landscape around the River Crouch, as another blustery day begins.

95 Suffolk Wood (part 10) - a voyage from dawn to day - spacious and subtle - best with headphones

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, revealing in sound the huge interior space that is the wood. Don't be beguiled though! These are the grey blue watery minutes, the slack, before the journey really begins. Stand behind the prow, and lean into this, a quiet voyage, from dawn, to day. 

Slowly, the creatures come. In the leaf litter, they nibble shoots, chase over fallen branches and twisted vines. Gambol around the microphones, as morning children do. They race through the night's re-arrangement of leaves, then stop to bathe in the newness of the wood, re-appeared. Some tiny mammal squeaks, from somewhere near. High in the branches above, the rooks caw, and observe. Maybe they see the cow that lows, in the field beyond. 

And what about the day? Dressed in the cotton soft coos of wood pigeons, embroidered by the sparkling songs of wrens, buttoned with the bright pips of the littler birds, the day is getting ready. Ready to rise up, and in the blue light, blink. Blink, and lift its shoulders wide, and stretch out its neck, for a touch of the morning sun. 

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We made this recording back in August 2017, leaving our microphones to record overnight and alone, in a rural wood, off-the-beaten track. This section is from 5am to 6am. Listen to the other episodes from through the night. 

94 The trees that wait for the chalk stream to flow (natural source of white noise)

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 summer wind, and I swayed with them. 

There was someone there. An old man. He was  sitting bolt upright on the bank just beside me, with crystal clear water lapping at his leather boots. He was smoking a pipe, and holding a fishing rod. And he was swinging it in, right past my nose, the most beautiful fish I'd ever seen. A dark silvery torpedo shaped body with proud fin, hoisted and shimmering, in the setting sun. 

A fish! I exclaimed. Aye the old man muttered, from behind his puff of Parson's Pleasure. Just a grayling. It was so beautiful. Where did it come from I said? The wind gusted again in the overhanging trees, and they swayed. Swayed with what this time I knew was a kindly form of long-suffering impatience. Grayling used to live right there, where you are standing now. And many others like them. Mind you, there was a lot more life about when I was around, in those clear flowing waters. 

Before he and the fish vanished, I saw its iridescent soul rise up, into one of the trees. And I realised there, it will have to stay, leaf like, waiting with its kin, until the chalk stream returns.

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We recorded the natural white noise created by these trees a few months ago in the countryside near Newport in Essex. It was a peaceful place, with a tractor tilling a field in the far distance. The trees grew along the banks of what we later found in bygone days used to be a chalk stream. We think of it as a barometer of human impact, and turn to listen to the wisdom of trees.

Chalk streams are rare and fascinating. Find out more.

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93 Rain garden after dark (sleep safe)

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. Does the rain know where it's going to fall? 

An old tarpaulin hangs beside the raspberry canes. Beneath, a small piece of shelter. A small piece of peace, tapped by the tiny, scattering drops. Does this rain make a sound, when there's nobody around to hear it?

We hardly know anything of our garden at night. A few weeks ago we left the Lento microphones there, to find out. Under a waxed hat they recorded the passing hours of the night. City slumber, silk softness, and a band of tranquil, spacious rain. In the morning, it was the raindrops caught on the nasturtium leaves, that told the story of the night.

92 Up in the April hills of mid Wales

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?

First car of the day, chases emptiness away.
Then another in its wake, lest it dare to stay.
Their bow waves press the brambles in. Their tyres peel gently by.
Their wind sends the dry straw up. It spins. Floats. Then settles down, upon the asphalt, in jumble writing.
Sing, sing, you mistle thrush. Sing your mottled, scuttled, song.

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This is part of an overnight recording we made in early spring 2019, up  in the hills above Kerry, mid Wales. We first thought it featured a spring blackbird, but now know it is a mistle thrush. Chif chaf, wrens, a juddering pheasant, great tits, rooks and wood pigeons can also be heard.

91 When woods go weird

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 it wouldn't make even one episode. 

 

But then, just before the gothic bell clanked the half hour before 5am, something in the air changed. The wood, came alive. The change began with a tawny owl, far off to the left, that began to call. It was soon joined by another, replying in an unusually tremulous way. Their strange mid-distance hoots over time were joined by others. Some close, some farther away. Each owl, materialising in its own silent void of the forest, filled the space with what, at times, can almost be said to be an owl chorus. 

 

It is often said that everything connects, and so it seems. Whether roused from slumber or in some way spoken to, a cow lows back to the owls from the field beyond the wood. There is a timing to it. It isn't rational, of course, but the interaction is there, all the same, to be heard. Passing geese join too, calling down from their lofty processions, and the ducks laugh back at them, from their murky millpond. It is, in all respects, a weird time, a weird scene, from this wood several miles from the A12 in rural Suffolk.

 

Distant bells clank the hour. The parish clock strikes 5. The dark robe of night is slipping away. The dawn is nigh. Awake you wood pigeons. Fly by you large bird. Buzz you giant insect, sounding like two airborne elastic bands. Hoot, and hoot again, you strange owls. Welcome! The August dawn.

90 Wind on water, night curlews, rain later (sleep safe)

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 movements of the water fill, and become richer and more pronounced. Unperturbed, curlew, redshank and distant geese patrol the black, empty night air. Their calls carry far, in long natural intervals, across the wide open space. It's the waiting, between the calls, that refreshes the mind.

Three step listener guide: 
1. Ear/headphones enable you to hear the detail and panorama of the captured sound. 
2. On a phone or tablet try setting volume in the middle but if you hear nothing nudge volume up, bit by bit, until you feel immersed in the light rippling washes of waves. Not loud, they should feel delicate to start with, because the soundscape is real. 
3. Unlike music or speech audio, playing back the detail and space of a naturally recorded soundscape is greatly enhanced, in addition to headphones, when your surroundings are conducive too. It's the listening equivalent of dimming the lights, closing the curtains and settling down to watch an atmospheric film. These are not sound effects, they are all 100% original and natural recordings from real places.