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Surround yourself with somewhere else. Captured quiet from natural places. Put the ”outside on” with headphones. Find us on Bluesky @RadioLento. Support the podcast on Ko-fi.
Episodes
Saturday Nov 05, 2022
Saturday Nov 05, 2022
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 and empty panoramic plane-less skies. Where the lack of human-made noise means you hear the sound-feel of the place itself.
This 'sound landscape' is produced in keeping with the natural experience, so through headphones you can feel the real place through your ears. Hear the sea-washed piers and jetties of St Abbs, captured in 'one take' by our high spec wide angle microphones, recording on-location and alone.
* We often travel long distances to capture the quiet we share in our weekly sound landscapes. Each episode is unique, fully authentic, highly spatial and sonically detailed. Genuine peace and quiet is endlessly fascinating to us, as well as refreshing and rejuvenating. Hearing the sound world around us without talking over it, or adding music, loops or effects, is the reason Radio Lento exists! If you can please **support us on Ko-fi** or by give us positive reviews wherever you get the podcast. Thank you.
Saturday Oct 29, 2022
Saturday Oct 29, 2022
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. It's full with shadows, and stacks of long forgotten things.
Between the boxes, pushed against the far wall, beneath a tiny blurry window, is a slanted wooden form. A child sized school desk, with a lifting lid and a round hole for an ink pot.
This little desk, behind the boxes and the shadows of the attic box room, feels like a place far away. a place that's good for sitting, and listening. To the wind rumbling in the chimneys. To the gusts that moan through the tiles and rafters. The resonations inside the roof voids. All the strange and eerie sounds of a brewing storm, from an attic room at the very top of an old Victorian house.
Saturday Oct 22, 2022
Saturday Oct 22, 2022
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. Soft, warm, silky August air.
Still, and standing, to listen, by a hedgerow. By a hedgerow with a hawthorn tree with a strong sturdy trunk. Thorny but perfect to hold the mics. Then tying up the mics with hands catching on thorns, before leaving, to let them record alone. Alone. And through the night.
Rising thermals, from far below carry up the ocean's murmurings. Its undulating white noises. Its timeless surging waves. Its sandy shoreline flows. And long after we're gone a dark bush cricket comes. Comes to be beside the hawthorn tree. Comes to mark the time, passing.
Saturday Oct 15, 2022
Saturday Oct 15, 2022
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 nocturnal landscape beyond is heard.
This is a place where the trees live. A remote place, where nobody goes. Steep soily ground that looks down over a hidden valley. From afar it looks like just another shadow, along the moor.
Saturday Oct 08, 2022
Saturday Oct 08, 2022
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 deserted. It's the sort of place you've been longing for. Now all you need is time.
You find yourself scanning the horizon. Surely somebody must be about on this warm October Sunday. Layered shingle berms stretch out to the left. Pristine water out ahead. A heavily laden timbered groyne to the right, bearing all the weight of the longshore drift. There is really no one here. Except for a distant calling seabird.
Scrunching forward, and a few yards from the wetted shoreline, you find a patch of shingle, fold your coat, and sit down to listen to the waves. They're so close, and yet so soft. So full and detailed, as they curl, and fold, and crash onto the beach. Soft crashing. And soft sifting textures, of shifting shingle. You wonder about time. If it's been five minutes, or ten. But your hands are resting now, feeling the cool stones. There really is no need to check. No need to move.
Saturday Oct 01, 2022
Saturday Oct 01, 2022
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. It's remote. Proper countryside. Far away from major roads and industrialised, built-up areas. So, a place where unnatural noise should be almost non-existent.
To get here we travelled several hundred miles by train with our audio equipment, staying in the Gloucestershire town of Lydney. We covered the last five miles on foot. We found the same tree we recorded from back in 2019 and set our mics beside it to record on their longest mission so far.
Hooked up to a huge battery, we left them alone to record non-stop over a four-day period. We imagined how we'd capture the sounds of woodcock on their twilight roding flights. Owls hooting in the dead of night. Brilliantly songful dawn choruses. Hours of pure birdsong in the warm daylight. All pure and free of human-made noise.
We have managed to capture these amazing sounds, but what's also revealed is just how much human-made noise there is too. We've not been able to find natural daytime quiet lasting for more than about 15 minutes. From aircraft to the exhaust sounds of motorbikes and other motor transport, the sound-feel of the forest is strongly shaped by unnatural things.
The natural environment is recognised as vitally important to our health and wellbeing, but it's highly permeable to unnatural noise which can carry over many miles.
Its effect on the experience of being within nature can be heard in this episode, particularly over the first five minutes. It shows how just one passing motorbike becomes the main sound feature of the forest for a significant portion of time. How the number of journeys that people make, in that area and the design of the machines they use, combine over time to interrupt and break up the forest's own natural sound presence.
Saturday Sep 24, 2022
Saturday Sep 24, 2022
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 human things. Quiet, enough to hear the rumbling undersides of the breaking waves. Time. Gradually shifting contours, as the tideline recedes.
We captured this natural aural landscape and all its uninterrupted spatialness last month near St Abbs in Scotland. As we walked the cliff path to set up the equipment late the previous evening, the silence in the sky was the thing that struck us most. It created a palpable, almost velvety sensation in us. This sense of silence is not, as we've discovered, a purely aural experience. It's something that seems to be felt rather than heard, although it does come from what is heard. Microphones can't record silence, they can only capture actual vibrations, and silence is the absence of vibrations. What's come out from this particular sound recording expedition though, is a very precise sound-picture of the shapes, over time, that waves make as they first roll onto the rocky margins of land. Silence is for sound recording like good light is for photography, the more there is, the greater the detail that is captured in the picture.
Saturday Sep 17, 2022
Saturday Sep 17, 2022
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 outside, and still, the rain had begun to fall. There was electricity, in the air. And subsonic rumbles, from afar, that sent the thin metal oven tray drying on the hob into faint, buzzing vibrations.
Over only a few minutes, the rain became heavier. And heavier again. That warm drenching kind of rain, that tumbles rather than falls out of late summer skies, and suddenly abates. It cascaded onto hurriedly covered garden things. Poured in rivulets and sung as it sank down through the hollowness of the drains. Holding high the microphone box, we silently glided around, angling it straight up into the sky, and hoping, to catch the thunder. Powerful flashes came. Cavernous rumbles followed. Sounds that rolled, like unimaginably huge boulders across the immensity of the sky. Sheet lightening, superheating the air, causing it to explode in acoustic shockwaves. A natural phenomenon, that like few other experiences, lets us see through our ears the true dimensions of the heavens above.
* Listen out for the umbrella that we quietly guide over the equipment towards the end. The amount of water falling directly onto the box meant we had to do it!
* We are able to keep capturing sound landscapes like this and bring them to a public audience with no upfront cost thanks to everyone who donates to Radio Lento. Every pound is put towards the costs of maintaining the recording and production equipment, travelling out to locations, and digital distribution. We don't get any payment each time the podcast is downloaded, even though some distributors stream our material to listeners who are paying them, as well as us paying to get the podcast available on their platform. Thank you for each donation, and thanks to everyone for listening. The more downloads we get the greater the chance we might be able to attract ad-free and sustainable sponsors.
Saturday Sep 10, 2022
Saturday Sep 10, 2022
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 windows, within the shadow, there's a figure, of an old man. Not creaking its timber floorboards, he moves towards the threshold, but then stops. "Can you hear it?" He asks, in a soft brown tone. A curl of smoke from his pipe wafts on the breeze.
Softly washing tidal water. Breezes rustling in tall reeds. A cricket, there but barely perceptible, hiding somewhere. Basking in the sun. This place, beside the bird hide, though near habitation, feels beyond civilisation. On the edge of something else. Like an outpost. But what can the old man mean? A single drifting seagull. Faint noises of the bankside industry. Or is it that nearby clink, of loose metal on stone?
"It's all around," he says, slowly raising his arms as if to fly away. "In the all around". Subtle. There, and not there. A low, undulating hum. A slow, quavering tone. What is it? The old man smiles. "They say it's the wind in the telegraph wires". Then backs, and disappears into the shadows inside the bird hide. As if in reply the sound rises, and falls. Rises, and falls again. Marking the quiet. Marking the time. "It's just the voice, of the wind".
* We recorded this piece of captured quiet on the almost completely deserted nature reserve at Mucking on one of the last days in August. The wind in the telegraph wires is subtle, and worth finding a pair of headphones and a quiet place to listen. At about 29 minutes the curlews do come. We still can't work out what is making the occasional chinking noise. There was nobody at all about. Someone (not any of us) does walk along the path next to the bird hide near the end.
Saturday Sep 03, 2022
Saturday Sep 03, 2022
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 lie along the narrow track, wettening, and darkening, and waiting, for the first feet of the day. In the hedgerow, the tall grasses wave on the edge of golden fields with sculptured hay bales resting. Sheep graze. Jackdaws fly, against a slender band of ocean grey. Time passes. From within the tree, raindrops are landing amongst broad green leaves.
This is how the world sounds from the Creel Path, a track that runs from Coldingham to St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland. The route has a history going back a thousand years. In bygone times, fishermen used it to trudge to their gruelling work. We left the microphones alone to record in the only useful tree we could find on this stretch of the path. It looked out towards the sea, about a quarter of a mile away. The same view for 1000 years.
Saturday Aug 27, 2022
Saturday Aug 27, 2022
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 the temperature climbs above 30 degrees. Insects busy and buzz on hot rising thermals. Warm wind whirls and whisps. Here, below the footpath, near an inlet brimming with water, a pocket of perfect summer quiet simmers in the heat haze.
Low tide on an empty shingle beach near Felixstowe Ferry, with the waves rolling in. The sun is high in the sky, shining almost directly down onto a calm North Sea. Blue sky. Nobody about. Far away on the horizon you see a container ship is about to disappear over the horizon. Time just to stand, and imagine where it might be going, and enjoy the spatial sound of waves advancing and retreating around your feet.
In-land now. Rain. Heavy rain. Persistent rain. When a gloriously refreshing soundscape comes to you, and begins to land all about. All about your home, the space around your home, and the streets and gardens nearby. Millions and millions of tiny percussive drops, falling, and landing, from invisible high up clouds. Each drop ends its long downward journey, on top of an upturned plant pot. An old paint tin. A concrete paving stone. A tarpaulin stretched over a little back yard. And there it is. Bliss!
Free moorland wind gusts through the branches of an old, lone oak tree. It stands tall, in the corner of a windswept field, beside a gritstone wall and a metal gate, that chinks, and an ancient footpath. A Peak District tree, with wide reaching bows laden with wind catching leaves. How many storms has this tree survived? How many droughts? How many days of grey? And of bright afternoon sun, like this one, where country walkers pass from time to time. This is the unique sound that this tree makes, high on a hill above the railway line between Chinley and Edale, Derbyshire.
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Don't forget that from next Saturday we're back to our normal service posting up a new and unique piece of captured quiet every week.
For now here's where to listen to the full episodes from this final daydream:
Saturday Aug 20, 2022
Saturday Aug 20, 2022
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 green fields and farmland. Gulls, redshank and curlews speed up and down the creek on fast, blustery breezes. In this place there's a strong sense of escape, and of a world where land, sea and weather interlace.
On a rock, closely suspended above a small patch of exposed shell beach at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary, near Bradwell-on-Sea, the microphones capture the pristine detail of the incoming tide. The way these particular waves move. the way they lap, and hurry along the contoured rocky edges, as the tide slowly rises. It's a sound that no matter where you are, or what you're doing, happens twice a day, everyday.
We stumbled upon a fallen tree whilst walking over Galley Hill near Epping Forest. the M25 sounded further away than usual, so we tied the mics under its steeply angled trunk for some shelter, and left them to record the ambience of the place alone. Some rain falls in large heavy drops, from ominous grey clouds seen from miles away approaching. But this rain didn't. It fell from an open sky, light as it was light grey. Flocks of jackdaws flew overhead, surveying the wide open fields between the outcrops of trees.
We always set out to capture the closest 3D aural experience we can, so with a pair of headphones, you can close your eyes and feel yourself present somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more natural, and peaceful, but without our human presence disturbing the nature that lives there. As dawn breaks over a wood in Suffolk, the mics capture, almost close enough to touch, a rare experience of small furry animals, scampering about with each other, on the crisp summer-dry forest floor.
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Thanks for listening and for spreading the word about Radio Lento, a self-funded podcast helped by listener recommendations and donations. Last May we went to the Podcast Show in London and walked about feeling like ducks out of water! Ad spend, business plans, audience growth and sales. We're typing this in a Youth Hostel far far away, with the mics still out on their overnight record, and being pelted by rain, we feel much better.
Here's where to listen to the full episodes featured in this daydream:
Saturday Aug 13, 2022
Saturday Aug 13, 2022
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 the rippling River Crouch on its way to the North Sea.
A blackbird sings, out over the swirling water at Wrabness. It's perched high up in a gnarled tree, leaves catching the softly flowing breezes. It's the closest of a whole bank of trees to the estuary water, and the last before the mud of the exposed shoreline begins. The tide's just turned. A warm, quiet summer afternoon, and nobody's about.
Midday in August. Sun beating down. Strong, radiant heat. It's making the crickets cricket in the grass beside the marina. Cool, deep water, glinting, with lines of sailing boats, all moored up. Their masts knock in the wind, and sometimes sound like bells. Seagulls. Out over the basking River Crouch,
Inland, across the other side of the vast county of Essex, the churchyard of St Mary's Gilston is at rest. It's unusually peaceful because it's under a very quiet sky. Rare. A phenomenon of 2020 and 2021. A secluded spot, where walkers can stop, ease their feet on the wooden bench, and listen to wood pigeons cooing on the warm slates of the church roof.
Towards London, where the last piece of Essex country blends into the series of lakes that make the Lee Valley Park, the night is coming. The paths, usually busy with people enjoying their freedom, are empty. No more bikes and scooters. No more barking dogs. No more chasing kids with trikes and ice creams. Just dark bush crickets under the hedgerows, and swans, slowly swimming over still, twilight water. And the echoing hoots of owls.
Listen to the full episodes where these short daydreamy clips are from:
Saturday Aug 06, 2022
Saturday Aug 06, 2022
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 open fields beyond. You slip into a daydream, and imagine yourself not beside vast open land, but beside a vast, and open sea. You can almost hear the waves lapping. No, not quite lapping, it's more that they're washing in. Washing in on an incoming tide, from the cool expanse of the North Sea. You're on the Blackwater estuary, listening to the waves coming in. Playfully flowing over tiny, feather light shells, that form a carpet under your warm, bare feet.
Hot noon sunshine. Eyes blurring. Rising thermals from the dense sedge grass, and a heat haze to make you think you're in a dream. Now you're on Wallasea Island, a little further down along the Essex coast. A nature reserve, and a home to wild birds and countless buzzing insects. It feels like high definition. Pristine and taught with high frequency sound. The aural evidence of an ecosystem that's being nourished with more of what it really needs to exist. Bask for a minute, in its existence. Its intense August heat, and all its life-affirming sound.
And then, to a different kind of place. A creek, along which gulls and redshank and curlews swoop and fly as they hunt for food. A place where sea water ingresses inland, to blend with rolling farmland fields and little collections of homely houses and a beach with gnarled wooden groins. This is Landermere Creek near Thorpe-le-Soken. A cool summer's day with a big sky, a day of changeable weather. Rain clouds are approaching the creek, Dark grey. Heavy. But the birds are flying headlong, all the same.
You follow the rain clouds, inland. Float over miles and miles of land, criss-crossed with rivers, and roads, and strips of woodland, and buildings and settlements. Towards, but not quite, to London. By now the clouds are out of rain, and are now, just clouds. Below is a lake, No, a collection of lakes, Darkening, but that still just about reflect the clouds. The dusk is rapidly gathering. Far below, on the ground, on the thick overgrown ground that forms one bank of a large lake-like pond known as Norman's Pond, the dark bush crickets have come out. Cricketing their sharp, precise stridulating sounds to each other. Then along comes a creature. A small mammal, of some kind. Squeaking, like a children's toy. Can it be real? Where has it come from? It comes, and goes, through the leaf litter, on its jerky, squeaky way. Perhaps the swans, out dabbling on the smooth still water, will know...
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These minute segments are taken from the following full episodes:
- 65 Songs from the churchyard (50 minutes)
- 81 Rising tide in the rock garden (37 minutes)
- 80 A doze in the grass on Wallasea Island (39 minutes)
- 79 Essence of estuary (32 minutes)
- 54 Lee Valley Park at night (45 minutes)
We're sharing these mini daydream adventures while we gather new material over the summer. Full-length episodes will return in September.
Thanks for listening to and supporting Radio Lento, a podcast for anyone who loves authentic captured quiet. Each episode is recorded by us, on locations that we find by exploring the landscape on foot, and by listening. We're independent sound recordists, helped by your >>kind donations<<.
Saturday Jul 30, 2022
Saturday Jul 30, 2022
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, or needs to be done, without stopping to take in the atmosphere. This footbridge is a natural stopping point. You rest on its weather beaten beam, look down into the tumbling stream, and think at how it nourishes the woodland below. The air is rich with the smell of verdant undergrowth, moist rock and deep green mosses. Then you see an interesting tree, a little further on, growing beside the water.
At the tree, you sit down for a rest. Looking up, you see it's several types of tree, growing together as one. In front of you begins the wood that runs down into the valley. Behind you the bare path up to the Nine Maidens. But here, in this spot beside the tree, and for this little piece of time, you've found some pure, watery bliss. Feeling the tree's soft bark against your back and the luscious cushioning moorland grass beneath your outstretched legs, you let the richly spatial flowing water lull you into a delicious, dreamlike doze.
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* We captured the sound feel of this place only a few days ago on Dartmoor, above Okehampton. This 35 minute segment of time shows how a stream is made up of constantly yet subtly shifting formations of richly textured sound, that can be really helpful as a focus for an overly busy or overly tired mind.
** Over August we're pausing the release of new material so we can travel and find more quiet places. Instead we'll be posting collections of clips we made for Essex Wildlife Trust, along with links to the full episodes so you can listen without having to search the back catalogue. Thanks so much for listening and for your on-going support, including donations which we combine with our own money to keep the podcast going. This week we reached a significant milestone of 200k downloads. Have a lovely August and we'll see you in September!