Radio Lento podcast

We're taking an intermission during August. Rather than disappearing, we're sharing a different type of episode, each with a theme, using some of the best bits from previous episodes. This week's theme is rain. 

Here are four glorious rain scapes. Travel with the rain as it falls, on a wide open coastal landscape, a walled garden in London, and on high moorland woods in Derbyshire.

Here are the descriptions and episode links  so you can listen to them in full. 

146 Fresh air along the Creel Path
The Creel Path has been trodden by fisherman on their way to work from Coldingham to the harbour at St Abbs in Scotland, for a thousand years. It's a landscape whose geography leaves it exposed to everything that the sky can bring. By locating our mics within the natural shelter of a tree, and letting them record alone for twelve hours, we were able to capture the full width, depth and range of this place and its unique soundscape. 

128 Persistent rain
Heavily, this winter rain falls. Persistent. Cold. Wet. Refreshing. In waves. In sprinkling flurries. Over time. Onto the huge tarpaulin stretched across the yard. Each drop's long downward journey is both completed, and revealed, in one tiny moment. Is this just plain old rain? Listen in, especially through a pair of headphones, and layer upon layer of spatially detailed rich textured sound will to you become revealed. 

167 An hour under moorland trees 
There is nothing and no one about.  You. Here. Hidden. Up in the Derbyshire hills. Sat, on dry leaf litter, lent against a gently slanted tree trunk. Listening. Just an hour. Under moorland trees. An hour to listen, to the weather, the flurries of rain And the steady ever-changing wind. 

156 Sheltered under night rain 
The city sleeps, under a dark impenetrable sky. In one garden, sheltered under a wide tarpaulin, microphones are recording. Alone. On top of a tripod, and standing, as high as a person. Listening. The tarpaulin, is to them a canvas. It lets them see the rain. In all its spatial detail. A transcriber. A taught thin surface, that catches each raindrop, and changes its collided imprint into crisp edged, spatial  sound.

A shadow grey rock, the size of a stranded ship. Radiating heat, remembered from the midday sun. Around it, rock pools, and smooth curving shapes. Like sleeping seals. You're out. Alone. For a late evening walk. Overhead, and behind, the sky is a deep, deepening blue. An end-of-day blue. But to your right, on the low west horizon, it's still blazing bright. 

This place, this wide open beach, is white noise solitude. All around, empty space. Empty space and sea air breezes. Sea air breezes, and some people. Happy cries, and beach ball thumps. 

You walk. Scrunch sand between your toes. You swing your legs towards the sea. Head towards the intertidal zone. Stepping on hard ruttled sand. Over furrows of stranded water. For as far as the eye can see. Corrugated land. Low tide land. Shaped into longitudinal lines by the withdrawing waves. 

Right ahead, bright white noise. And gulls. Just landed on the wetted sand. Rapidly stamping their little webbed feet, to bring up the morsels. A rush. Of cold fizzing sparkling rippling water. Breaks suddenly over your feet. Breaks, and splashes up your ankles. Stops you in your tracks. Swirls and foams and flattens and shallows, all around you. Fills the air with watery sound. Like shimmering blue, shoreline silk. 

Now you're in, and immersed. Ankle deep and paddling. White noise is everywhere. Waves, are everywhere. Racing. Washing over each other. Left to right. Right to left. Face on. And under. Rushing away, behind you. Tiny bubbles. Sparkling. Shallowing. And dissolving, into fizz. Each one, each wave, adding one more corrugation, on the wide intertidal sand. 

* This sound photograph of Tenby beach is first try of something new for Lento. We recorded it dynamically, as we walked, in one unbroken 30 minute take. Angling and panning the Lento kit, holding still on wide panoramic views, then panning down almost to touch the water for close-up views of the sparkling bubbles, then gently sliding sideways to chase waves as they race to the shore, as with a film camera. We wanted it to be a kind of sound film.

If you can't make it to the beach this month we hope you can enjoy this intertidal sound walk, until you can. 

You find yourself, suddenly out. On the other side of the wood.
The edge, of a wide open empty field. A meadow.
Tall elegant trees, given way to a high, bright sky. 

Standing silently. You can feel the heart of the forest behind you. Hear its echoes. Its leaves near and far, rustling. How one tree creaks. How banks of soft summer air move spatially across the treetops. How trains, passing distantly through the forest, make sound like silver wind. 

In front, is open grassland. Fragrant. Home to large populations of butterflies. And that sings, with the sound of stridulating crickets. Hundreds. Thousands. All cricketing, under this warm noon day sun. 

This meadow. These slowly swaying trees. This breeze, in the leaves and grasses. This feeling, of being so near to the cool green heart of this forest. And up, at the sky. And up, at the sun. And the shifting clouds. And the planes, flying from time to time. Flying, from cloud to cloud.

* We travelled into Hertfordshire (by train and on foot of course) to take this sound photograph from as near as possible to the Clinton Baker Pinetum one lunchtime last week. It's a fascinating place, rich for forest bathing, first planted in 1767. We want to take some more sound photographs that capture the range of tree species inside the pinetum if and when we can get permission.

The sound-scene is of a smooth, sunrise sea, heard from a tree, growing up out of a bundle of boulders, close to the water's edge. It's early April, and just after daybreak. The Lento kit is in the tree, capturing the wide spatial quiet of this place with nobody about, right beside Nothe Fort in Weymouth on the south coast of England. Ahead, looking south, the sea. West is Portland. East is Weymouth, then Durdle Door, near to Lulworth Cove. 

Here, in this little settled spot, and from far left of scene, the sea seems to be breathing, softly, as it sweeps the shingle at the foot of the fort's huge parapet wall. Perhaps it's still asleep. Has it not heard the blackbird? Has it not heard the wren? Or the garden warbler? Maybe. In a dream.  

From right of scene, where the swell's near and breaking over the boulders, the sea's very much awake. Awake, and moving. Rising, falling. Gently washing the sunlit sharp rocks, in slow, circling motions.

High above, in wide circles, are the seagulls. Calling brightly to each other in the first light air. And some stray crows. And ducks. And something else. Something deep. Something that hums. It is, almost musical. Not animal. Or geomorphological. Too powerful, too omnipotent, for that. It's the kind of sound that isn't in the air. But is the air.

A ship. And its low humming engine. Moving. Very gradually. Across the horizon. Like a far drifting cloud.

 

The cabin, is compact, in every way. Every inch, accounted for. Every component, slotted in, perfectly. And, with full rucksack and boots and spare boots and string bag, a bit of a squash to get in too. Once you're in though, once you've sorted, and stowed, and made things neat, any claustrophobic feelings will just, well, have magically evaporated. In some curious way, these cabins can somehow, surreptitiously, expand. 

As the train pulls out of Penzance station, you begin to hear the rumble. A sturdy, rounded edges sort of rumble, a cacophony, of gently juddering low frequency vibrations, that'll sway about beneath you and your bunk as the miles pass, and gradually become your friend. The sound is, dark, and velvety, and when combined with the physical sensation of being horizontal on a cotton soft pillow, deliciously soporific. 

And there are the other swaying sounds. The tiny creaky movements of all the cabin's fittings. The muffled clunks and clicks, as someone sleepily feels for the night light switch. And The carriage's squeaky suspension,  that in your dreams can be a swinging sign, outside some windswept Out West saloon. Howdy friend, welcome to the Old Railroad. Care to come in?

But best of all, to us, perhaps to all who slumber their nocturnal way cross country aboard the Night Riviera, is the ever-present, ever fluctuating, omnipotent hum of the locomotive. The giant sized engine, the dynamo, the journey's conductor, that valiantly leads the way into the night, and makes the whole thing happen. And keeps it happening, warmly, and reassuringly, over hundreds and hundreds of dark, dark miles.

* This spatial sound photograph, an unbroken sixty minute segment of the journey from Penzance to London Paddington, was taken from within the cabin beside the bunk. It will to those trigger deep and we hope blissful memories of travelling through the night on a sleeper train. If you haven't done this yet, we hope this recording conveys at least some of the unique and soporific sound experience of a night train sleeper.

At the far end of the long sandy beach at Tenby there's an area of cool, shady woodland. From the distance and under hot summer sunshine, it looks idyllic. Inviting. A shady promontory on the horizon that curves and blurs down into the sea. 

The best way to get there we think, is by shanks pony. Walk, as slow as you like. Go the full length of the beach. Pass the kids playing and the running dogs who couldn't be happier. The picnicing families, and the lone beach ball, waiting patiently to be collected.  Steer yourself between the scattered seaweeds of the strandline, and the breaking waves of the shore. Just keep going, but don't forget to stop too. There'll be plenty of bits of flotsam and jetsam that need to be checked along the way. And the odd motorboat, to watch, far out on the water, steadily bouncing over the swell. 

As you approach the headland, the trees loom. They are towering things. High, with broad boughs that stretch like green sails overhead. Some will be swaying in the onshore breeze. The beach ends here, so step off the soft sand and up and over the ridge of craggy rocks, to the wooden steps leading to the woodland path. A sandy adventure, that leads steep up, under the trees.

Climb. Feel how the air cools. Becomes laden with sweet musty smells and sappy perfumes. Hear how the sound changes. How the birds are singing. How their sound reflects between the trees, and combines with the washing waves. The sea enters the lowest footings of the forest along natural inlets that are lined with gnarled and exposed roots. 

This place is like a temperate greenhouse. A naturally reverberant space, shaped, regulated, and defined, by the sea and the trees. Such a perfect place, to set down, forget about doing anything, and just listen for a while. 

* Tree canopies can divert over 60% of the sun's heat and so make you cool through a process called evapotranspiration. Source: bbc.co.uk 

This is a blend of intimate and wide spatial quiet, captured as it happened from beside an old oak tree, in a remote spot in the Forest of Dean. The time is 3:30am and the microphones are recording alone. It's 90 minutes to dawn.

What we hear in the foreground are the intimate textures of a trickling stream, that's completely hidden from view under thickly tangled vines. A hedgehog is foraging through the dense leaf litter, making delicate scratchy sounds like a moving pin cushion. The space immediately around the oak tree holding the microphones is sloping, and partly cleared of trees but only for about ten yards or so. The forest stretches all around for miles.  

As time passes, high planes overfly the woodland, in soft rumbly arcs. A car, speeding along the country road that bisects this area of woodland, makes white noise like a breeze in the trees. At 36 minutes, sliding from far left to far right of scene, a male woodcock flies through the clearing, making a strange qwacking type call that ends in a bright squeak. This call is known as a roding flight and it returns quite a few times. 

As dawn approaches, the echoing hoots of tawny owls reverberates sonorously across the huge expanse of the forest. Dogs distantly bark, and farm animals can sometimes be heard. Towards the end, a song thrush begins to sing, short melodious notes in repeated phrases. Dawn is near. 

Have the back streets faded to silent?
Have the dogs begun to bark?
Quick, get in, there's a storm coming.

The front room chair with the cushion that isn't supposed to be outside in the yard but is, because it's been so hot of late, is that in?
And the pile of winter boots left out to air next to it?
And those newly potted plants that can't cope with heavy rain yet? 
Get them all in, the air's gone electric.

Thick thunder rolls, across a strange coloured sky.
Brings rain that's in such a hurry to get down it all comes down at once.
Rivulets of sparkling water, flowing off the tarpaulin. Pouring onto the parched concrete yard.
Wafting smells of petrichor.

Heatwave storms plough a deep furrow through the sky as they pass, that take a while for the atmosphere to settle.
It's the dramatically changing sound scenes such storms create that make them so rewarding to listen to.
The sheer intensity of an unbridled deluge.
The panoramic spatial thunder created as the lightning bolts explode vast volumes of air.
And the relief, after the storm has passed, expressed through the countless dripping drops of fallen water, from all the surfaces on which it fell.
Three movements. Three acts. Of a heatwave storm.

A powerful storm is like a piece of theatre.
It bends and redefines the meaning of time.
It suspends your belief in what is normal and your perspective on reality.
And when it's over, it leaves you feeling physically different to how you were before.
Different, and better.

* The Lento mics captured this storm as it passed over Hackney in North East London in early afternoon last week, after a long period of exceptionally hot and dry weather. The location is the back garden of a small terrace house. Temperature prior to the storm was 30 degrees. Humidity was 39%. A few months ago the humidity was typically between 80% and 90%.

Sunrise over Tenby. Blue sky. Scudding clouds. 5am, and nobody about, except for the birds in the murmuring air of a seaside town.

This sound photograph, captured from behind the descending houses on St Johns Hill in Tenby, is spatial, and composed by chance with balanced foreground and background layers. A blackbird right of centre. Another blackbird, mid-distance and left of centre. Far distance, ranging 90 degree left to 90 degree right, wrens and other birds. The white noise of the beach can be heard reflecting slightly to right of centre, off the high wall of a large sided building beyond. Circling seagulls often pass over too, and light up through sound the empty airspace above. 

This episode follows on from last week's 'Night murmuring in Tenby'. The daylight has come, but still rocking slightly in the breeze, is next door's rusted garden gate. 

* Tenby is another location we've found that has quiet horizons. There was almost no aircraft noise in the four days we spent there. Quiet horizons we think promote a deeper sense of wellbeing and allow the natural world to be perceived properly. There is some wind noise in this episode due to coastal conditions, but because of the minimal human-made noise, the murmuration of the sea reflected off the nearby buildings is clearly audible even though it is on the other side of the hill.

Tenby. A seaside town on the South coast of Wales. End of May into early June. Late sunsets, followed by warm, springtime nights. It's 1am and the mics are recording alone. Capturing the atmosphere of Tenby, in the dead of night.   

Behind where we're staying are dim shapes of buildings. A tall tree with whisping leaves. Empty sun loungers and nextdoor's gate, loosely fastened, being moved atmospherically by the gusts. Echoes of distant windchimes. And there above, the deep, dark, quiet sky. And all around, the breezes. How this place sounds. How it rests, in this smallest hour. And murmurates, under its so peaceful sky. 

So much silky air blowing in from the Atlantic that it's barely any effort to breathe. Soft flowing currents, that billow, cuff, and clean. Listen. Listen. To the trees. Can you hear them? They're breathing for you. 

The Hoo Peninsula is a vast open landscape on the Thames Estuary. Huge uninhabited swathes of ground. The mics (recording alone) were lodged in a hawthorn tree on Higham Marshes nature reserve and pointed out over a watery marsh. Close to the mics lapwings, redshank and cetti's warblers call, as well as geese and ducks that are familiar sounds to us urban dwellers. Skylarks circle above the farmland straight ahead on the other side of the marsh. Several pastures, with sheep and lambs in one, grazing cattle in the other. During the quieter periods when planes aren't going over, cattle can clearly be heard tearing up the long grass. 

We took this 47 minute 'sound photograph' as an ear witness report of everything hearable on Higham Marshes on 14th May 2023 (map reference - 51.450474, 0.464734). Wildlife. Human life. The weather conditions were good - warm, around 20 degrees with a light breeze gusting 3-5 knots. The air was rich with scent of hawthorn blossom, cow parsley, meadow grasses and pollen. 

The sound photograph is taken from the same tree as episode 73 Slow rhythms of the Hoo Peninsula, that we captured in June 2021. Due to the frequency of aircraft, subsonic throbbing of passing ships, and a strange long lasting clank from the distant Tilbury Container Port, we normally wouldn't have released this as an episode, but we've decided the recording is important as an ear-witness report for two main reasons. First, it clearly  shows the step change in human made noise now, compared to June 2021, when the pandemic was heavily impacting aviation and industry. Second, it documents the insect life, wildlife and farmed animals present on and surrounding the nature reserve at roughly the same time of year. Hearing how the birds communicate when planes are passing over, compared to how they are during the periods of quiet, has peeked our curiosity. 

On Portland Bill. Dorset. We climb down jagged rocks. Naturally formed steps, waist deep, towards the water. Evenly uneven. Like narrow walkways. Some puddles along. Sea spray or resting rain? Now crouched down, she's peering silently into one of the puddles. Look, she says, tiny creatures. They're just speckles, swimming. 

Rumbling waves roll in from open sea. Break against the sheer rock. Fifteen feet beneath us, deep gurgles. An underwater space, I say, can you hear it? Exposed, then sunk, then exposed again. Can you hear, the way the water seems to bend the air? We listen. Like plucking the opening of a wine bottle, with a wet thumb. Sort of, she says. Is this a good place? She already knows it is. It's where she wanted us to come. Perfect, I say, swinging round the rucksack to unpack the kit. 

Away up the rock like a mountain goat and she's gone, semi vertically, back up to the path. Now, sitting alone, with the mics, hardly breathing, still as a statue. Almost at the precipitous edge of the cave mouth. Me and the mics, listening. Cave below to the right. Wild sea to the left, it's main power a few hundred yards out. Such still listening, makes me daydream. Eyes shut. Imagining I'm inside the sea cave. The waves rolling towards me. Breaking. Fizzing. Slooshing into craggy pools. Making reflections. In light, and in sound.

Just an hour. Under moorland trees. An hour to listen, to the weather, the flurries of rain. How they come and go. And the steady currents of wind. Force rising. Easing. Settling. Rising, rising again. Holding. Then easing. Blowing and sprinkling the falling raindrops over wide, waxy, sheltering leaves. 

In time. Slowly becoming aware, in the quietness, of how many different layers of sound are not just audible, but readable, in a tucked away place like this. Readable to us, like words scratched into smooth bark. You. Are. Safe. Here.

Because you have inherited the understanding of what the trees are saying, passed down by a million years of human evolution amongst trees. And you are immersed. And you are safe. Everything you are hearing is telling your vigilant brain there is nothing and no one about.  You. Here. Hidden. Up in the Derbyshire hills. Sat, on dry leaf litter, lent against a gently slanted tree trunk. Listening. Indistinguishable. 

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A thank you to the Lento Supporters Club.

Here, in this quiet and empty spot, only the waves can be heard, as they break sedately, upon the rocks. The waves and the velvety silence that seems to press in between them as their gentle energy is dispersed. The tree, to which the microphones are attached, and all the boulders from up which it grows, and the 18th century fort behind and to the left of the scene, remain entirely invisible to the listening ear. Or do they? 

Witnessing this piece of time, where nobody came, and nobody was. Hearing it, because it is a real place, the spot beneath the tree. In full spatial detail. The way the waves move, the way the silence is always there, like the backdrop of the  night sky. Clouding over, with swirls of pale white noise, then clean black, and clear again. Everything, that when heard binaurally, forms a spatial image, shaped and contoured in our auditory brains by the reflective properties of the tree, the boulders and the huge stone parapet walls of the fort. Without these contouring influences, the waves would not make the sound they do

By finding a quiet spot to listen, and putting a pair of headphones on, we can, without our physical bodies having interfered in any way at all, put ourselves into the real sound feel of this place. This place, that place, as it was, and is still there, now.

* We went back to Nothe Fort in Weymouth at the start of April and made another overnight recording. The landscape around the tree emits a strong sense of quiet, and has become an enchanted spot for us. This section is from midnight. There was a clear sky and a full moon. The waves and the rocks sound different to when we recorded in 2022. Aural evidence of the world, subtly changing. 

This episode includes lively birdsong, a trickling stream, foraging bees, a creaky pheasant flapping, a few softly passing vehicles along a country road and a gently droning propeller plane.

Sat on a fallen branch, beside a flowing stream. Hidden from sight. An empty hillside road, where only the odd thing goes. This remote, yet sheltered spot, lies quietly and unobtrusively in the hills, a few miles above the village of Ceri. 

An ancient, wide open landscape. A handful of isolated farms. Sheep graze on the high fields, and the tiny speeding dot of a sheep dog, barks, in broad circles. It's morning, and the activity on the nearby farm can sometimes be distantly heard, between the rilling stream, and the spring birdsong. 

On the lane just above the secluded dell where the microphones are recording, a rattly lorry trundles by. And in a while, rolls back again, down the winding lane towards Ceri, in the valley. Natural life, and human life, as it really sounds, up in the hills of mid Wales.

* This is another section from the twelve hour non-stop recording we made at this location back in 2019. We completely love the sound feel of being up in the Welsh hills, and of being somewhere far, far away. When we returned to the dell to collect the microphones, we couldn't help noticing how perfect the spot was, and how fortunate we were to find it.  Listen to all previous episodes from this special location.