Radio Lento podcast

For this last August intermission episode we've made you a montage of *sleep safe* sound-scenes selected from four overnight recordings.

From the sea wall at Burnham-on-Crouch, looking out over panoramic tidal estuary waters by Wallasea Island. An oak tree deep within the Forest of Dean where woodcock make their roding flights. A remote fishing village harbour under empty skies in South East Scotland. To a rural wood in Suffolk where we made our first ever overnight recording.

Here are some short descriptions plus links to the episodes so you can hear them in full.

126 The seawall and the night patrolling curlews

129 Pristine quiet to early dawn 

140 Fishing village harbour at night 

74 Night shallowing in a Suffolk Wood

For this penultimate intermission episode, we've made you a montage of sound-scenes selected from four enchanting woodland episodes. A forest ravine high in the Derbyshire hills. Under a tree above the town of Wooler, in Northumberland. A waterfall gorge on Dartmoor. And finally, the mysterious murmurings from deep within the Forest of Dean. 

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

160 Forest ravine

141 Soft land murmuring - Wooler, Northumberland

162 Waterfall gorge on Dartmoor 

122 Forest bathing in the cathedral of trees

We're taking an intermission during August. Rather than disappearing, we're made you a montage of sound-feels selected from previous episodes. This week's theme is coastal.

Listen to four lovely clips of coastal scapes we've captured. Take a tour from Tenby in South Wales, Coldingham Sands in South East Scotland, and Nothe Fort on the Jurassic coast of England.

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

174 Where cool woodland meets the summer sea 

178 Waves of the intertidal zone 

150 Looking down on Coldingham Sands 

176 Early morning below Nothe Fort

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

128 Persistent rain

167 An hour under moorland trees 

156 Sheltered under night rain 

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.

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.