Radio Lento podcast

225 Night suburban garden - quiet sound brutalism (sleep safe)

Night rain, as it falls onto a quiet suburban garden, has a cool and spacious sound-feel. It seems to help focus the mind's eye onto the presence of objects and surfaces that without the rain would simply not exist, to the ear. Even to the eye, in such murky darkness, these objects and surfaces are not things that make sense in and of themselves.

This nocturnal suburban soundscape, stippled with falling droplets, reverberates with the ever-present ever wide city rumble. City rumble is not a warm nor a cold sound, and has no shape other than always to be the same shape. It's always there. Always present. Permeates every inch of outdoor space with a steady unchanging and strangely indeterminate aural glow. It has something to do with all the buildings. Something to do with all the distant machines that whirr and whine as we travel about, keep warm, keep cool, keep moving. Something to do with urban life.

A little back garden in North East London is such an ordinary place from a soundscape perspective. There is nothing here to peek the interest in conventional terms. You'd probably never hear a place like this through any normal broadcast audio channel. And so the idea of a quiet soundscape, a quiet brutalist soundscape, made of layers of indeterminate aural glows, echoes of indeterminate activity, reverberances of empty spaces under a wide an empty sky, must make its indeterminate way to the edgeland of the audio world. And that is here. On Lento. A quiet brutalist soundscape from one rainy night in March.  

224 Shallow river under an open sky (sleep safe)

Back we go again to Miller's Dale in the Derbyshire hills. To this quiet spot, beside a shallow river wrilling. There's a country lane, and a steep grassy bank down to the river where an old tree grows. The tree, so gnarled, and with an unusually stout trunk, must have grown here for decades. Maybe even a century, or more. 

At about five feet from the ground it split into two almost equally thick boughs from which winding branches reached out over the river. Covered in moss. Dense with summer leaves. Something had drawn us to this place. We climbed down because we wanted to hear how the river sounded from underneath the tree. It wasn't easy. We had to hold on to the trunk to stop us rolling down into the water. From underneath we found the leaves worked like a walled garden, cradling and reflecting the aural qualities of the swiftly moving water. It felt like a perfect place to sit and listen, so We felt around the moss and hung the Lento mics beneath one of the thick boughs and left it to record through the night.

This section is from the dead of night. The river is flowing steadily. Steadily over the time worn rocks. Above the tree the open sky must have been thick with cloud. Almost all the wildlife is asleep, or making noise that is hidden by the sound of the water. Aeroplanes over fly from time to time, ploughing their nocturnal ways above the clouds from one civilisation to another. The English landscape, however rural looking, is very often aurally speaking not wilderness but edgeland. This is a real sound landscape that represents the world as it is. Whilst listening back to prepare this episode we heard tawny owls calling to each other, from far across the fields.  

223 Birdsong in deep forest ambience

Whilst walking up towards the observatory in the Kielder forest, we passed large areas of cleared woodland. "Fallen in the great storm of 2021" a passing forester explained in the afternoon sunshine. In some sections, the trees had been cut and stacked. Rows of tree trunks that smelled deliciously rich with the resin-y smell of Christmas trees. We found the smell instantly relaxing, as if it reduced blood pressure just by inhaling it. 

We stopped on a steep rough path by a rushing burn, to take in the pristine quiet ambience. Banks of wind were brushing across the high tree tops. Grand firs, whose countless fine needles instantly convert wind energy into rich brown sound. The rushing water permeated the surrounding space with what we feel is the cleanest white noise mist we've come across this year. Capturing this sound scene was something we just had to do. 

Finding a suitable tree for the Lento box by the path wasn't too difficult. Bathed in the white noise mist and the brown sound of the tall fir trees, we left the microphones alone to capture this passage of time.

Slightly to the left of scene is the rushing burn. Fresh water speeding shallowly over steep flinty stones. High above and undulating from right to left of scene, wind brushes the upper tree tops, filling the air with waves of softly hushing sound. Various songbirds are singing, wrens and blackbirds but willow warblers seem to be very common in the Kielder Forest. Their song while quite fleeting is a lovely droopy descent down a simple scale of notes. It's very similar to the chaffinch song, only purer, and without the musical somersault that the chaffinsh seems to finish on.

222 The trees of Kielder Forest before dawn

In our quest to capture the pure sound of trees in true spatial quiet, we have without realising it, been following a long and winding path that has ultimately led us here. The Kielder Forest. It's a remote place for England. A place where the sound of trees can properly be felt and heard. A place where millions upon millions of trees grow together, across an area of 250 square miles (400 square kilometres). 

Planning this recording trip involved OS Explorer map OL42. We also checked flight paths and road maps to try to guess what extent human made noise might filter into the forest. From the sparse few roads and giant area of uninhabited nothingness, the location looked on-paper like a very quiet place indeed. Ideal we hoped for capturing the real sound of trees, in high definition audio.

When we say the 'real sound of trees', we mean the spatial sound of trees in an ever undulating wind. Wind that shifts in strength between soft to medium. Ideally with most variations around the 10 to 20 knot range and that peaks every now and then with slowly rising and slowly falling currents in the 25 to 30 knot range. For the spatial aspect, the trees need to be over a very wide area, and very tall. To be spruce and fir, because these make the sound-feel that we are most interested in. Evocative deep brown hushing.  

Somewhat optimistic for these very particular conditions, we travelled up country and ventured deep into the forest. We found a location near the dam of Kielder Water, and in driving rain left the Lento box tied to a tree. Then returned to the village some way outside the forest to stay the night. It always feels strange to leave the box behind, alone in such a vast place. Now we are home and listening back, what it captured is magical to us. Here is the period of time from 3am to just before 4am when the majority of spring birds begin to sing in first light. The wind strengths aren't strong, but there is an undulating wind that can be clearly heard in the tall spruce and fir trees as the banks of wind move across this region of the forest. Echoes of owls can be heard too, distant geese and a strange barking which we can't quite identify. Delicate layers of bird song gradually begin to build as the time approaches 4am. 

* As always with Lento listen with headphones or Airpods to properly hear the full range of aural qualities we strive to capture and share. 

221 An hour on the headland

Time to take in a view. A panorama that changes with the wind and the tide. It's about six o'clock in the morning, and the Lento box has been recording through the night, tied to a windswept tree facing directly out towards Looe Island and the English channel.  

The scene has an aural horizon formed of disapated ocean breakers, crashing against rocks far below. Blended layers of panoramic undulating natural white, grey and brown noise. Close by, newly sprouted leaves flutter around the microphone box in fast currents of blustery air. As the gusts subside, a softer, calmer view of the headland is revealed. 

There's a fresh bracing feel to this place. Spring birds sing and call. Land birds such as chaffinches, wrens, robins, chiffchaffs and wood pigeons. Some sea birds too, herring gulls and possibly some oyster catchers. It's an exposed location. Unsheltered from the elements blowing in from the vast and empty sea. Unsheltered, and so thoroughly enlivening.

220 Empty night Cornish air (sleep safe and best with headphones / Airpods)

West Looe at night. A Cornish town on the edge of the English Channel. An edge where human things end and emptiness begins. We've shared a few captured sound scenes from here over the last month. This is the one if you're searching for the sound-feel of long, true night quiet.

What is true night quiet? Capturing rich and detailed audible quiet, in contrast to dead meaningless silence, is what we're always trying to do with Lento. By rich and detailed we mean those aural essences, those often very delicate sound signatures, that give a place its own sound feel, and that aren't actually created by anyone. The sound feel of a place is formed and shaped by what's in it, its geography and its weather.  

On this part of the Cornish coast we found very little human made noise during the night. No aircraft overflying. Next to nothing on the roads. Just long stretches of time where the softness of the place's sound-feel can be experienced with clarity. This episode is a section of time from around 3am in early April. A blustery weather front was blowing in from the sea, billowing along the narrow lanes of West Looe, cuffing in the roof gaps, whistling somewhere in a distant chimney pot. Fresh. Very spatial. A true and uncluttered piece of time. 

Here are our top tips about how to re-experience this captured quiet. Find a relatively peaceful spot and listen through headphones or airpods. If you have Apple Airpod Pros set the volume just over half way at about 60%. This closely matches the sound levels that would have been landing on your eardrums by actually being at the location. Volume levels do vary between headphones so we can't give reference levels for other types of ear phones. Having now tested decent noise cancellation we can say when it works it can be like turning the lights off to watch a film. Clean listening, largely free of extraneous noise. Nothing beats a quiet room with a comfortable couch though, if you have one, and a pair of velvet headphones. 

219 Country meadow summer breeze

The time has come for hot sun. Hot sun and basking. Hot sun and basking, and listening to crickets. And just sitting, amongst the crickets taking it all in. 

This sound scene is of the landscape around Arley station in Shropshire. Under high trees in full leaf. Golden fields as far as the eye can see, glowing in the afternoon sun. Farmland gold. And farmland birds. Bobbing crows. Wood pigeons. And a buzzard. Distant farm machinery working the land.  Distant children playing beyond the station. Distant echoes, that roll across the horizon from a departed steam train that can be heard in episode 187.

Down the field there's a man working. Hammer and nails. Knock knock knock. From post to post he goes. Slowly repairing the fence that runs between the hedgerow and the railway line. Knock knock knock. And a rest. And a glance up, at the circling buzzard. No rush. It's hot. There's all the time in the world for this. 

218 Sing dawn - the songbirds of Abney Park nature reserve

It is hard to believe this is North East London at dawn. And yet it is. 5am, last Wednesday. Day break, on the 1st of May. Misted air, barely a breeze. Verdantly breathable air, filtered and cleaned by the dense surrounding woodland. When at 8am the park gates are unlocked, the people will come to walk the winding paths. Bathe in the atmosphere created by the trees. And breathe the restorative, country clean air. 

This is what a nature reserve within a city does. It purifies the air, not just for the lungs but for the ears. Layers upon layers of veteran trees soften the city rumble whilst providing a myriad of roosting spots for the songbirds to sing. And as they sing, their mellifluous sounds echo and reflect off all the boughs, branches, and countless leaves, to form an aural brilliance that is wonderful to behold. 

But behold the brilliance we rarely do. Rarely can do. 5am is not when most of us are around or want to be around. And perhaps, for the sake of the birds and their own sense of freedom in the trees that are their home, that's not such a bad thing. 5am is, shall we all agree, their time of day. Their chance to be on their own amongst their own kind. Be themselves, and be in the world, in their own particular way. Capturing an hour of this world, as it happened, and on a day when the sky was relatively free of planes and the nearby roads relatively free of traffic and sirens, is what the Lento box was there to do. Here is that hour of time, heard from behind the gates of the newly restored chapel at the heart of Abney Park nature reserve.
 
Our special thanks to Abney Park for allowing us to capture the dawn chorus from the chapel. We recorded this episode exactly three years after our last recording just before the major restoration project started in the chapel. Listen to the dawn chorus from inside the chapel in 2021, in episode 68. And more episodes from around Abney Park here.  

217 Upland woods in winter gales (part 2 - sleep safe)

In winter gales amongst moorland trees at night. Dark sky. Empty of everything, except for the invisible moving wind.   

A moor slopes steep up to the right. And half a mile of grassland slopes gently away down the valley, to the left. At the bottom, is a reservoir, hidden behind more trees. This grassy spot along a high gritstone wall, near an old iron gate, looks from the lane like any overgrown corner of a Peak District field. But it isn't. It isn't just any spot. It is a seat in an amphitheatre of specially arranged wind catching trees. 

Of course nobody actually set out to specially arrange these outcrops of trees like this so they'd create such a perfectly balanced and spatially panoramic scene in winter gales. They only catch the wind and turn its energy into deep and richly undulating sound because that's what trees do. But having left the Lento box in this spot to capture this long passage of time, it feels wonderful to have discovered that this exists.

Here it is. And the performance? An hour of fresh moorland air. 

216 Sat on the sand of East Looe beach

You're not alone here, in this seaside town. A place of hot pasties, hot cups of tea, and families on a day out. A place of rolling Atlantic waves. This is East Looe on the coast of Cornwall. Thick grey sky. April cold. A sprinkling of rain, But shut your eyes, and it could be summer. 

Find a good spot on the sand. You may need to move once or twice. Be guided by your ears. Then chuck your rucksack down, lean against it with your umbrella angled so its just behind, and you'll have the perfect spot for an uninterrupted cinematic sound-view of the crashing waves. In all their crisp textural detail. And spatial glory.

Can you hear which way the longshore drift goes? Maybe not yet. It can take a few minutes. While you wait notice how there's an interesting mix of garden birds and sea birds here. A mistle thrush far left, or is it a blackbird? A wren too, far right. Beyond where the little children are playing. The waves feel powerful in this spot on the sand. Powerful, Sometimes thunderous. Coming, and going, in long swaying rhythms. Coming, and going, with wide spacious calm inbetween. 

215 Calm within Kilminorth Woods

A fresh Cornish spring day last week, along the West Looe River valley. Hear an area of ancient woodland. Described as the lungs of Looe. It's Cornish rainforest. Trees, that go back in time, farther than we can imagine. Walk inland, with the river to your right. Soon it'll be endless oaks, trunks covered with moss, all around you. As far as the eye can see. Ahead, where the muddy footpath goes. And behind, from where you've come. From left high up the steep sided valley. All the way down to touch the clean span of tidal water, that glints peacefully between the line of smaller trees. 

From high in the treetops above your head, the calls of rooks echo for half a mile or more. Birds sing crisp, and less harshly in these parts. They have no human noise to compete with. You can hear woodland birds, estuary birds, and sea birds all together here. Against a backdrop of beautiful, deep brown, undulating noise. Oak forest noise. 

The subtle harmonious sound that steady sea air makes when it moves over oak does seem to us to have a deep and richly brown sound-feel. It's a sound that's so spatial. So invigorating to the senses. We believe it is one of the most valuable and important sensory ingredients, of what some call a forest bathing experience. We loved every moment of it, and of being within the true precious quiet of Kilminorth Woods. 

214 Storm over hotel peninsula

A birds ear view over Plymouth in the far south west of England. Plymouth in a fast gusting storm. Storm Kathleen. This is how it sounded from behind the huge plate glass window of a comfortable cushioned room on the fourth floor of a hotel the night before last. The hotel overlooks a district called The Hoe, where one of the original Eddystone Lighthouses now stands. We climbed Seaton's Tower just before making this recording. Inside the narrow corkscrew stairways, the rounded structure was rumbling loudly, like being inside a giant organ pipe.

A few hours later, the wind was still fierce. Taken with the microphones on a tripod facing out a few inches away from the rain stippled glass (not at all how a sound recording is conventionally made) the air pressure was pressing so hard that whispering gusts were whistling and almost singing through the window seals, left and right. Somehow, though captured entirely from within the hotel room, the soundscape is wide and open. A blended scape, formed both from the interior cushioned acoustic of the hotel room and the wide open windswept city beyond. 

Far right of scene, cars can be heard passing along a rain soaked road. Left of scene air whistles through the window seal. The calls of seagulls light up the spacious sky, flying despite the extreme conditions. The building rumbles subsonically. The sound of Plymouth, an exposed coastal city, in Storm Kathleen. It's a sound photograph that without the protection of the window, would not have been possible to make. 

213 Sound-scenes we love from four years of Lento

Today marks four years of Radio Lento! We launched on 29 March 2020. Since then, a hundred and forty hours of material shared. Hundreds of thousands of ad-free and cost-free downloads. Long-form audio recordings. Of natural and empty places. In high precision spacious sound. Real aural essences of what it is to be present and immersed in a real place. 

We've not missed a week since March 2020. Rural and country places. Coastal and tidal places. Edgelands. Brutal landscapes. Sonorous interior spaces. In wind and rain. Under the forces of nature. Broad daylight and the dead of night. We're interested not in any particular thing, but in the sound of every thing. In soundscapes that are most often not experienced. Because they seem empty. Places where nothing seems to be happening. Places filled with the delicate and the subtle. The soft, and the fragile. Aural environments that only through focusing over time, form in the mind's eye of the listener.

Four years of producing Lento and we do still struggle to explain to people what Lento is. Is it mindfulness? Well, it could be, but we aren't really thinking of that when we make the recordings. Is it nature? Not specifically. Is it an experimental podcast? We are definitely not experimenting. Perhaps the ordinary, the everyday, the subtle, the long-form, is just too off the beaten track. We add that Lento is slow growing, but that we do get quite a lot of good feedback. They often say why don't you do a marketing plan? We say we can't really make one because the value of the material is in the the listeners heads not ours. They say you could combine it with someone doing guided meditation. We explain that any talking at all would ruin Lento. And they ask how do people know how to listen to it? And we say they just have to work it out for themselves. And they don't say anything. And we stare at each other. 

And after a few moments of thought they say your pod sounds amazing. And we ask if they have listened to it? And they say they will. And we explain it's harder than it seems to capture real authentic quiet, properly, because the places we can get to are almost always scattered with human made noise but when we do practice patience, quiet does eventually come, and that really makes each recording. And they seem to be thinking about it, but not know what to say next. And then we talk about something else. And we hope they might try listening, in a quiet place of course, with a pair of headphones or ear pods, so they can hear the captured quiet properly. 

In this special edition to mark four years we retrace our steps through six 10 minute segments from these episodes: 

17 Dusk in the Forest of Dean 
26 Delicate sifting waves at Felixstowe Ferry 
139 A passing storm from the attic of an old house
128 Persistent rain at night in an urban garden 
192 Spring wildlife on the Hoo Peninsula, Kent 
136 Ocean breakers near St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland 

Listen to each episode in full via our blog.

Our grateful thanks to everyone who listens and supports Lento.  

212 Ear witness: innercity woodland peace

In late December 2020 we were given permission to make a long form landscape recording of Abney Park nature reserve in north east London. Abney Park is an area of long established woodland, surrounded by busy streets and major roads carrying traffic in and out of central London. It's an oasis of tranquility used by locals to escape from urban living, that very convincingly does look like deep rural woodland. Muddy paths between tall trees, with the advantage if you take the right routes, to never see the city beyond.

To the ear though, the city is usually very much there and present. All around. And from above. Planes heading to London's airports pass almost directly overhead, often separated by only a minute or so. Sirens circling. Helicopters hovering too. Wondering along the muddy paths and admiring the specimen trees can require some considerable zoning out of the aural experience, depending on the action of the day and weather conditions. 

What we've found though, by going back through our archive, is this recording. It is one we made on Christmas Day, in between lockdowns and when air travel was substantially reduced. The sounds of the city are of course still present, but greatly softened. The wind can be heard murmurating through the trees. The birds form the primary sound sources. Their crisp songs echo, and reverberate through the empty woodland. It's a unique soundscape, that is unlikely to happen again. 

You can of course still witness periods of tranquility within Abney Park. We do every time we go. And there are times in this recording when the presence of human activity approaches that which is normal now. What is we think different, and demonstrated in this piece of captured quiet, is just how long the peace lasts. And just how delicate the wide panoramic sound of the city rumble is, compared to today. 

We'd like to think this recording might serve as a benchmark for future city designers. and for everyone to listen to, as an example of what north east London can, and did sound like, with human made noise re-balanced with the natural world. 

211 Nothe Fort at night - quiet swirling waves

Nothe Fort in Weymouth, on the Dorset coast. An old sea fort that celebrated its 150th birthday in 2022. For most of these years, it has been able to stand, looking out to the sea around Portland, amidst pristine clear night silence.  

Against the velvety quiet, tidal water ebbs and flows, rises and falls, swells and recedes, softly, around semi-submerged rocks. It's water that has a slow motion, sleepy  sound. It's a soundscape that will have been heard by many a night watchman. And perhaps also the odd  soul, curious enough to be awake at this time. 

But did the sea sound the same here 150 years ago as it does now? It isn't possible to say. We can't ask the people who knew. The sea, the rocks, the currents do change over long spans of time. So perhaps they did hear something slightly different, back then. Or maybe not. What we can hear in this recording, that we made by leaving the Lento box overnight in a tree beside Nothe Fort, capturing and witnessing the night hours, is from April 2023. We hope to get back to Nothe Fort before too long, to explore the museum again, and make another overnight recording that future generations will be able to listen to, and compare, with how it sounds to them, in 150 years time.