Radio Lento podcast

Down at the marina on a weekday in August

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 swells, and though smooth on the surface, slaps impatiently against the pontoons. And when the wind eases, crickets in the long grass discretely sing.

 

Out on the open water, small craft on small journeys manoeuvre. Mid-stream, a heavy-engined vessel labours against the out-going tide. Docked, distantly opposite the marina, machines relieve a bulk carrier of its consignment of timber. All the sounds of an August working day. At eleven minutes, six, soft edged, evenly spaced booms. Detonations from the firing range seven miles southeast on Foulness.

 

The aural ambience in the air around the marina pushes to, and fro, like the ever-changing water. Filling, then emptying, filling, then emptying, in slow, peaceful transitions. It's the sort of place where one can go to just listen, and take in the atmosphere. A waterside place with sun-warmed railings for leaning into, where everything is there, and everything is happening, but in a more reflective, tide coming in and out, kind of way. Summer beside the marina time.

 

Suffolk Wood (part 9) - the hour before dawn with owls and nocturnal animals

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 that stretches out in all directions over the forest floor. Around, nocturnal animals pad lightly in the darkness. Above, traces of a breeze. Of dry twigs and branches dropping. Of the last drifting echoes of night haulage from the distant A12. Across the resonant wood, owls call. Time passes.  

 

Then, signalled by one single rasp from a rook, something in the air changes. It's well before sunrise. In the mid-distance, a wood pigeon begins to caw. Are these the internal circadian rhythms of life or have they both seen some kind of light? Perhaps a stratospheric cloud, illuminated by a first shaft of sunlight? Whatever it is, a cockerel crows. The bell strikes 5. The night is over. The day has come.

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This is the 9th episode in our series made from one continuous recording through the night in this special location. You can listen to all previous episodes via this blog post. 

82 Hill top oak in strong wind - a natural source of white noise (sleep safe)

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.

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Artificial white noise generators designed to promote sleep and relaxation are widely available online and via apps. For anyone trying to steer their mind away from the distractions of the world they provide a stream of wind-like sound, that masks, washes, and soothes. 

Of course natural noise generators exist everywhere. Unlike their artificial versions, they produce their noise in infinitely varying ways. So much so, that rather than thinking of them as making just noise, they can be thought of more as instruments that enable you to hear the shape of an ever-changing current.

Perhaps the most abundant and interesting of natural noise generators, are trees. Evolved as giant plants able to thrive with almost any strength of wind, their leaves, boughs and branches convert even the softest of breezes into perfectly audible sound. 

Having evolved in and amongst trees, over several millions of years, our listening minds must have been fundamentally influenced by these kinds of sounds. So it must be, that all of us must have and share an intrinsic ability to understand the language of wind in trees. It might also help to explain why listening to white noise of any kind, works as a type of sound therapy.

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Thanks for listening to Radio Lento. We make it without any grants, sponsorship or funding. You can help Lento keep going by buying us a coffee on our Ko-fi site or by telling other people about Radio Lento or leaving us a positive review wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. 

Rising tide in the rock garden - the sea wall near Bradwell-on-Sea

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 two giant blockhouses of the now decommissioned and quiescent Bradwell nuclear power station built in 1957. Between the cuffing gusts of the onshore breeze, the air here feels unusually still of human noise. Unusually crisp, unusually vibrant with textural sounds. Deep inside clouds and far out over the channel, are some passing rumbles. Not thunder, more like low flying military jets patrolling and underlining some invisible boundary out there, over the sea.
Their distant rumblings not only illuminate, through sound, the infinite void of the sky, but bring contrast to the very tiniest, very closest of sounds. Countless fine edged movements, of a sand made of featherlight shells. Shifting and sifting, picked up and dropped, by gentle, inquisitive waves. 

 

Somehow, a quarter of an hour has passed. The rock pools between the sunken concrete barges that make up the sea wall, are now filling, and swirling, with the rising tide. Moving back up the rocks, above the high water mark, you find a new place to sit, and watch, as the pools overflow, merge into one another, to become new areas of wide open sea. The planes are gone. The footpath beckons. But you stay for a little while longer, just to listen to the changing sounds of the fast disappearing rock garden. 

A doze in the grass on Wallasea Island (High-def sound and sleep safe)

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 Roach flows into the Crouch, a swath of warm grassland basks under the hot August sun. Sheltered below the ridge, it's quiet, perfect for a doze. A few yards away from the microphones, behind the waist-deep sedge, a tepid inlet reflects glints of the summer sun.

 

It's hot here. Dazzling bright. Invigorated, the bees and hoverflies and countless other insects are hurrying skilfully by. The gusting winds don't affect them. Being early in the afternoon, nothing much is about, except for the sparse calls of a marshland bird. A tumbling chirruping song, fleeting, with a bright yellow timbre. Hidden, but only a little way off, somewhere amongst the tall grass. 

Essence of estuary

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 on your right. Don't go under it. Turn left instead and walk along the road for a few minutes, until on the opposite side of the road, you see the entrance to an overgrown footpath. This is the beginning of a country walk, that will eventually lead to the creek. 

 

In late summer, it'll be a corridor of deliciously verdant green, busy with butterflies. The aural presence of the B1414 will remain on the left. Follow the natural path all the way to the fast bisecting road, cross and continue along a lane surrounded by open fields until you reach another fast bisecting road. Join and follow, until a private road appears on the right. This is, though not signposted, the official footpath down into the creek.

 

It's a lane that ends in a handful of cottages, and a land that slides away between old timbered groynes, down shallow slipways of vegetated green, into nothing but wild, wide open water. Wind ruffled, low lying and unbelievably silent of human noise, those few miles we covered on shanks pony now feel worth every stride. We set the mics to record on a tripod at the water's edge, sunk part way in the wet spongy mud, tiny bubbles popping, and facing an island some way out into the creek. It was encircled by gulls, ringing redshank and curlews. 

 

Tide rising, a wind was beginning to whip up. A weather front was approaching from the south. From some trees farther along, we sat in the grass and watched the rain approach while the mics recorded. Listening, helped by some tea from a flask, It was the sound landscape we'd hoped we'd find. Essence of estuary.

78 The birds that sing on the cusp of night - a leafy ravine in the Peak District (sleep safe after 16 mins)

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, stays. The day, balanced upon the very edge of the horizon, has, with its luminous glow, turned back to catch the last arias of the ravine.

As night falls, the last to sing is a robin, the last to fly is a goose. A lone rear-guard bird, filling the dark shrouded void with sparse echoing calls , as it flies back down the valley to join the others, amongst the woodland beside the reservoir beyond.

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This is part of a 24 hour recording we made last month to capture the sound landscape above the infamous Todbrook reservoir of Whaley Bridge. This spot was just on Cheshire side of the border with Derbyshire, the river a natural border between. We tied our spatial microphones to a tree growing out of the steep banks, about 60 feet above the river that feeds the reservoir with an almost unchanging flow of fresh moorland water. The aural space of the ravine on the transition into night is rarely if ever heard, and makes for a uniquely peaceful soundscape.

77 The cuckoo of Swanscombe Marsh

Swanscombe is one of the last surviving brownfield sites in the Thames Estuary where threatened wildlife can live. On the Kent side of the Thames, to the east of the QEII bridge, opposite Grays on the Essex side, it is an oasis of natural quiet. We took a train and a bus to get there, then walked a sloping path, paved then muddy with the sound of the road dying away. The marsh was full of fascinating life, though empty of people, except for a couple of weekday birders who gave us a wave.

Onwards we walked, heading to the UK's tallest pylon, scraping the sky from the very edge of the river. Impossibly high at 600 feet. We hoped it'd hum, or be drizzling so we'd hear it fizz, or windy so we'd hear a whistle, But instead it stood silently in accepting partnership with its sibling on the other side of the river. 

Though strictly-speaking too quiet to record, we tied the mics onto one of the giant pylon's legs anyway, and left them alone. Listening back, days later, we discovered the mics had captured not only splashes of the lapping Thames and the wide spatial feeling of the place, but also some astonishing and unexpected sounds. Listen and hear the gifts from the marsh. Truly, a magical precious location to be protected.

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How many different birds can you hear singing on the marsh? Surprising answers revealed by the winner of the first Radio Lento Golden Lobes quiz see our blog!

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Find out more about the campaign to Save Swanscombe Marshes.

Last pasture before the sea - Winchelsea to Rye

Our first really clear sound-view of the landscape came along a footpath a mile or so from Winchelsea station, with the A259 behind us and, according to the map at least, the open sea ahead. It was in all its peaceful wideness, its pastoral mildness, there to be heard, from inside a little outcrop of blackthorn trees. Every branch covered in the healthiest grey lichen we'd ever seen. Blossom just starting to appear. We named it lichen thicket. 

 

The land from Winchelsea to Rye is not only pleasantly low lying and bucolic, but the last before the shingle. We walked it before the summer came through all the new bright green, under a changeable April sky, under the thin calls of distant seagulls and passing geese. Hot sun shone between banks of fast moving cloud. Fresh breezes blew, they smelled at first of luscious hedgerows, then as we got closer, of the salty tidal zone.

 

A see-sawing great tit watched as we set up the microphones. Then as we scuffed away down the stony path, we heard the tumbling song of a chaffinch. Time begins to pass, pushed along by a gentle wind. Some falling drops of honey: a willow warbler. Distant activity on a farm. Yard dogs barking, rooks surveying the ground. Amidst the long quiet, two propeller planes pass, one behind the other. 

75 Yacht masts on the estuary at Wrabness (part 1)

We stopped to step over a large brown caterpillar mid-way across the rough brambled footpath. All around us light breezes were sweeping through the high grasses, nettles and reeds. Miles and miles, of wide open estuary land. Then in the distance, amongst the just audible drones of lone cars on winding country roads, we heard the plaintive drooping call of a curlew. The water was close. The map showed we'd converge, ahead about a quarter of a mile.

Soft sand blending to mud then water. Gently swirling waves. High tide but on the turn. Pleasantly susurrating woodland and little wooden houses on stilts, some storing beached boats beneath. At the high water mark a gnarled weather-worn tree stands with a panoramic view of the estuary. It leans out precariously, towards the lapping waves, but is sturdy as rock. A good place for the microphones. We leave to brew tea and cook beans for the kids.

Yacht masts ring like lonely bells in the light wind. Two walkers stop to pick something up from the muddy sand. Perhaps an oyster shell, there are lots here. Boats squeak and bump reassuringly against their moorings. Two men bob about, fasten ropes, secure decks. Timelessly absorbed in the act of preparing to sail. Everything's settled, between gently lifting banks of estuary wind. From nowhere a blackbird begins to sing. The tide's very gradually going out. The clouds part and a wood pigeon welcomes the arrival of some hot uninterrupted afternoon sun.

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74 Night shallowing in a Suffolk Wood - listen with headphones (sleep safe)

This is part eight, 3am to 4am of the twelve hour Suffolk Wood recording. We made it almost four years ago on a balmy summer night in August by leaving a pair of sensitive microphones spaced out like ears, to record non-stop in the heart of an uninhabited rural wood in Dedham Vale. It was the first overnight recording we ever made, and we had no idea what the microphones would hear. 

The wood is situated about three miles from the A12. In the evening, when we set things up, the noise of the road was barely audible, but in the dead of night, air cooled and still, the wood becomes transparent to the A12's pale grey drift that illuminates the landscape beyond, like aural moonlight. 

Close by, between the tree trunks and hidden amongst the ankle-deep leaf litter, are the dark bush crickets. They chirrup pleasantly through the whole night, stridulating their resonant bodies marking out the passage of time in slow, natural seconds. Owls haunt the empty voids, as do other strange and almost unearthly noises. The things we are unused to hearing, the things we may call dream-like.

Miniature deer called muntjac inhabit this ground, as do badgers, rabbits and other smaller mammals. Unworried by the microphones they move about with light footsteps on the dry leaves, so close you could almost touch them. A precious sound-view onto their world that our very presence would normally preclude.

There are so many surrounding sounds, from bits of dead wood dropping from the tree tops, to distant geese and ducks flying their nocturnal routes. There are also the planes. Passenger planes, possibly also military, emerging as soft rumbles from over the horizon, then passing in lazy arcs overhead, before dissolving away into the world beyond. For them this land below doesn't exist. 

And just over a mile away, from over the fields, the golden toned bell of St Mary's parish church strikes the hour. Bookends, to the slow passing of time in this peaceful rural wood. 

** We've marked this episode *sleep safe* as it is quiet with no louder noises. However, you may find the snuffling of animals and snapping of twigs keeps you awake. So only listen during the day if this the case!

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To listen to the other episodes in this series and how the sound of the wood changes over time, visit the Radio Lento blog which lists them all in one handy place.

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Slow rhythms of the Hoo Peninsula

Several miles up the sun-baked track, along overgrown footpaths and through fields high with meadow grass, lie the watery ditches of the Higham Marshes nature reserve. Nestled within the wide expanse of partly farmed, partly inhabited, but mostly untended land that runs along the lower reaches of the Thames Estuary in Kent. On a barmy summer's day, blown about by a friendly wind, it's a place of retreat and of well tempered quiet. 

 

Beside one of the wild ditches, from inside a hawthorn bush at the water's edge, we find a secret space to record. Well defended by thorns, it gently creaks in sympathy with the breeze, but has a birds-ear view of the nearby wildlife and the landscape beyond. 

 

The air is cooler beside the water. It rings with the pewit calls of the lapwings. Croaks stretchily with the marsh frogs. Echoes with the gliding yelps of distant geese. At ground level this world is all green and overgrown, but from the air, it must be laced with glints and pools.

 

Bees buzz quickly by and a farmer traverses a field on a quadbike. It's alive with sheep and lambs. Above, skylarks wheel beneath high thrumming planes. From over the horizon, fleeting whines of overtaking motors along a distant country road. These are the slow rhythms of an early summer's day on the Hoo Peninsula.

The tunnel, the towpath and the window - under the M6 at Spaghetti Junction

Set free from its cradled bowl, the smoke from the bargeman's pipe rose straight, into the sky. Lighter than air, the burning vapours knew all-too-well where they wanted to go. Up! And so up they went. Unravelling coils of wisdom, racing towards one small window of blue in the vast ashen sky.

 

Not in your lifetime, nor mine, the bargeman confided between tokes from his short black pipe, but sure as night follows day all of this'll be buried. His prophecy seemed to startle a bird out of a hedgerow, some fifty yards yonder along the towpath. It flapped low over the water before dropping into the scrub opposite. The barge horse, head deep in the thick grass beside the canal, only twitched an ear. 

 

Buried? I said, looking up and down the towpath, then up into the vastness of the sky. All of this? More mouthing the words than saying them. The bargeman made an arch with his work-worn hands. Black water, under a metalled sky.

 

The horse tore hungrily at the grass. The bird remained in its refuge. I watched as a curl of smoke lifted towards the patch of piercing blue. The bargeman saw me looking, then slowly let out a gentle smile. If you ask me I reckon they'll have to keep that little window up there.

 

His words made me fix my eye on it. Why will they do that? I whispered. To let the future in, when it comes knocking, he said, pulling up the horse's rope. That's the blue of the world beyond. The one that's tired of all our soot and smoke. Teach the children about the blue, for when it comes knocking. And Never Lock Your Door.

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Built in the 1840s, the Tame Valley Canal was covered by the M6 motorway in the 1950s, and then overshadowed by further development of Spaghetti Junction in 1972. When we visited on a bright May day, there were no boats or birds on the water. The cars, motorbikes and lorries, oblivious to the space underneath. Just a few walkers and cyclists joined us in the empty space below the concrete.

 

There, in a dark tunnel under the road, a window onto the sky, placed to let the light and sound from above in. Impossibly placed graffiti on the other side of the canal said in huge letters 'Never Lock Your Door'.

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See photos from this place via our Twitter. Explore other brutal soundscapes. 

Wading cows and a passing cuckoo - the lakes and woodland of Chatsworth

Mid-afternoon. June hot. An overgrown track on the Chatsworth Estate, close to the peaceful lakes above the house, between meadows and dense woodland. An abundance of fresh hoof marks. A route used not by people, but by livestock changing fields. Hedgerows scent the quiet air with pollen. Cow parsley, moist nettles, something like aniseed. Nobody is around, so we leave the microphones behind to record, on the trunk of a tree facing straight into the sound vista. 

 

Through the tall trees, beneath the loudly singing birds, come the echoes of cows. Knee deep and wading. Splashing and wallowing in the cool shallows. 

 

With us gone the true sound of the woodland is revealed. An infinite humming, of bees and countless tinier insects. It can, if we let it, grate with modern taste, but it is a key barometer of life. Humming is a sound-measure of biodiversity, and the louder it is, the healthier the ecosystem. This is a well place. 

 

The birds and the insects and the wallowing cows are, with the woodland and the lake, basking in the summer heat. And then, at nine minutes, the thing we never thought could happen... 

 

A magic spell. A sonorous rocking call. 
A simple pair of musical notes, that flow through the air with a special kind of wistful purity.
A cuckoo. All-too fleeting. But a cuckoo. Flying.

70 - Blue sky. Empty beach. Low tide.

It's past midday on a late May day in Suffolk and the sun is pouring down onto a calm sea. It's shining, for the first time this year, with that summer strength that makes you stop, to really take in the moment. It's perfect, here at the shoreline, not far from where the River Deben joins the sea, the beaches a mix of shingle and soft sand. 

Listen. 
There's no wind. 
No on-shore breeze. 
Nothing to cuff the ears or muffle the sound that washes to and fro here at the boundary of low tide.

Hear the mesmerisingly detailed and spatial sound which shallow waves make as they break and dissipate. Break, and dissipate.

A propeller plane. The grey outline of a container ship on the horizon. Sailing away. Under full steam, out into the North Sea.  With each new wave, its grey box-like outline shrinks, and recedes. A giant hulk, no bigger than a fingertip. A few waves more, until it dips out of sight.