Radio Lento podcast

Have the back streets faded to silent?

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?

Thick thunder rolls, across a strange coloured sky.

Heatwave storms plough a deep furrow through the sky as they pass, that take a while for the atmosphere to settle.

A powerful storm is like a piece of theatre.

* 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. 

After last episode's tumultuous waves upon a dramatic shingle shoreline, this week we retire behind the secluded walls of a little garden, at the back of a small suburban terraced house, for an altogether different sound feel. The sound feel of gentle rain, falling on an empty garden, in the quiet hours, when almost everyone is asleep. 

We love it this time of year as winter turns to spring. And when the weather forecast is for rain. Loads of rain, in bands, throughout the night. If we can, we may leave the back door open just before midnight for a while, to let the sound in, but the thing about rain is it does not fall to order. You have to wait for it to come, and that can mean hours. Witnessing the falling of the rain is something that can be done by setting up spatial mics to record, all night, and then listen back, to experience the passages of time when the rain did finally come.

At the edge of our yard,  beside a patch of old raspberry canes, there's a perfect spot where the aural presence of the garden can be heard evenly balanced. The acoustic 'presence' that arises from its physical shape and reflective surfaces, clear. All the upturned half propped up things, evenly spread. Some overhead shelter, centrally positioned. Its where we post the mics, on a tripod, so they can hear everything, evenly. Hear, for us and everyone who couldn't be there to witness it, the delicate sound and changing ambiences, of rain, falling. And when we did listen back, we heard not only the rain, but a nocturnal robin, somewhere far off in another garden, singing, as they do this time of year, in glorious solitude, in the dead of night.

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Last week, we walked on Chesil Beach. We felt its steepness. Its shingle. Its sound. We heard its heavy waves. The way the stones are heaved back, in long, ground rumbling sweeps. A wild, brazen place.

A bird, wheeling high above, must see Chesil Beach as an endless grey white line spanning from one end of the visible horizon, to the other. From the coast road it looks like a white raging line. The Jurassic south coast of England. Unmoveable land meets unstoppable sea.

But as a person sat, hunkered down on a bed of golfball-sized smoothly rounded stones. Coat pulled up against the cuffing onshore breeze just a few yards from the fizzing shoreline. You feel that between the to and fro of the crashing waves, there is a kind of softness to Chesil Beach. 

A kind of hidden tenderness. A feeling made from time, and the way the frothing water delicately stills, and settles. Stills, and settles. Forms, and dissolves. Endlessly. Breaking waves, upon meek wetted stones.