Radio Lento podcast

When a rushing torrent cascades, down a precipitous rocky gorge. 

When the waterfall's rumble is almost completely absorbed by ground knee deep in the softest, deepest foliage. 

Whether it's the journey, and sometimes hazardous climb.

* We made this recording in April 2022 and released most of it in episode 117. The timeline in this episode partly overlaps with that episode, but we haven't been able to travel back and we feel so drawn to the place that we decided to re-issue part of that section of time with the remaining unreleased material, this time in high definition spatial sound.

St Abbs. A small fishing village and harbour in bygone times, perched on the coastal edge of South East Scotland.  A wonderful place to experience what the world must have sounded like, before machines were invented. It is, for this reason, quite a rare place, where people can go to bathe their ears, uninterrupted, with naturally spatial oceanic noise. 

To the eye, St Abbs rests along a dramatic coastal landscape, with high jagged cliffs and plummeting rock faces festooned in the daylight hours with noisy kittiwakes. To the ear though, the landscape tells a different story. A story that's about wide openness. About how sound and water waves must travel over long distances. About lofty seagulls, who seem to live in never-ending circles in the astronomically dark sky.

Here, looking out over the harbour from an elevated position, the microphones are alone and recording. Capturing the rarified vibrations that waft about like acoustic mists in the salt tinged air. Layers upon layers of soft white, reverberating  noise. Sound waves made by water waves. Countless waves, breaking against and revealing to the ear through the total darkness, the harbour walls and the rocky promentaries, that form the seaward edge of St Abbs at night.

Want more? Listen to episode 140 - Fishing village harbour at night (part one).

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It was Radio Lento's third birthday this week. Thank you for all the lovely messages. 

This precipitous place, high in the Derbyshire hills, flows with birdsong and fresh moorland water. It's aural presence is made almost entirely of natural things. Non-human, natural phenomena.

The sound-feel when immersed in it, has a depth, a width, and such rich spatial detail, that with headphones on and eyes closed, the sensation of actually being there, in the ravine, can be so strong as to trigger your visual brain to daydream you into it. Daydream you into a place of green, restorative quiet. The ravine is a wilderness. 

Having picked your way through and up into it's central point, and with your back against the trunk of a sturdy tree, feet wedged against the 45 degree slope on a jutting rock, you feel safe, and hidden. Safe enough to listen, to time passing.

Far below, the barely wide enough to walk on path, criss-crossed with exposed tree roots and used mainly by sheep. Below that, the fresh flowing water of Todd Brook, babbling its way shallowly, filling the air with delicate soft white noise.  Extreme right of scene, the reservoir itself, and beyond that a hillside road. 

Having this piece of time uninterrupted , and from this elevation, you can watch the geese through the trees as they fly up and through the airspace of the ravine, right to left.

Hear the valley's luscious reverberations. The water timelessly rilling, over the uneven bedrock. The sheep calling, as they graze the steep farmland above.  The blackcaps, the wrens , the robins, and all the singing birds, pouring out their perfect mellifluous songs, into this wilderness forest ravine.

A wide open landscape, resting, between gusts of rain-speckled Northumbrian air. This place, on the edge of the Northumberland National Park, is endlessly rural. Mostly farmland. Dotted with far apart sheep, grazing under a silent plane-free sky.

Green fields sloping steeply down towards the town, framed on either side by tall, well established trees. Trees that transcribe the invisibly moving air into varying blends of white noise. Trees that are home to cooing wood pigeons. Trees seen from afar, as just patches of dark shadow on a green, far away horizon.

* This is NOT a *sleep safe* episode as there is a loud bell chime halfway through!

** This is another section from the mics we left out and alone for 14 hours last summer in the hills above Wooler in Northumberland. Listen to the 5am sounds from this special place in episode 141 - Soft land murmuring.

*** Every Lento episode is unique and represents an authentic passage of recorded time. We think of them as sound photographs inspired by the French impressionists. Each is an exposure from our own hand-built sound-camera, set up to collect spatial audio depicting the auditory impression of the moment, especially the spatial shiftings of audible textures. 

Bright hazy sunshine. Behind, and up the bank, a winding footpath, littered with discarded sunbleached things. Here, sat still and amongst it all, dense bankside vegetation. Everything dried up, and whisping in a warm late summer breeze. Ripe blackberries growing on renegade edgeland canes. Hints of sunbathing crickets. Slishing shoreside water. Wafts of cludgy strandline clay.

The Thames flows from left to right of this sound scene. Far to the right, almost inaudible, Tilbury Docks. Gantry cranes lifting containers light as lego bricks from giant ships. One after the other. Bleeps thinly carried by the cuffing wind. Straight ahead the overgrown slope of the riverbank opposite. Far to the left a ship, approaching. Mid-channel. Steaming east, just twenty miles more to go to pass Leigh-on-Sea, then out onto the open sea. Its huge engine kneads the air with deep, muscle massaging vibrations. Reminds this forgotten piece of wilderness, that it's an edgeland.

Taking in the vastness of the river. And listening into its detailed shoreline. And letting the time pass. Such a wide river at this point. Such choppy water. Washing and rewashing the lumpy clay bank, in brisk rocking rhythms. Shifting something small, and tinny. Perhaps it's a fragment of paper-thin slate. Or a slither of metal. The water's revealing an empty thing down there too. Hollow. Maybe a semi-submerged plastic container being slowly unburied from the mud. A little way to the right, along the bank is a rusting wreck. A stranded pontoon bridge, left to rot. Nature will find it something to do, one day, when it's ready. All we need to to, is wait.

Sometimes we feel it's right to share an ear-witness account from a place where natural quiet and human-made noise co-exist. Our last was from the Forest of Dean (episode 135  which documented the aural reality common to so many 'natural' places today. Human-made noise has quite varied effects and meanings, not always bad. This latest ear-witness account contains sounds familiar to urban dwellers, but that are also found here in a countryside setting in January.

This episode contains intense periods of forest peacefulness as well as huge flocks of jackdaws and a woodpecker. One quite distant gunshot is heard plus a heavy passing freight train, more planes than we're perhaps used to, and a tractor that caused the hundreds of jackdaws to take flight. The gunshot happens just before 11 minutes. We did (for listen-ability reasons) cut out over a hundred similar often much louder shots but kept this single one in for the ear-witness report of pheasant shooting season.

Surrounded by open farmland in the Hertfordshire countryside, Bayford Pinetum has become a fascinating place to us. Fascinating because each time we visit it seems to have fundamentally changed in some material way, but still somehow maintains its same, curiously mysterious, sound-feel. 

It's a very picturesque environment. Easy to take photos and feel visually immersed in nature surrounded by ancient trees and a rich carpet of lichen, moss and fungus. It's also not that difficult to imagine why people believe witches and fairies inhabit places like this. 

To the ear, and during periods of quiet, when no trains or planes are passing, there's a delicate white noise sheen in one part of the forest. It hangs like a fabric, very spatially in the airspace immediately above, as you move along the path. It has a strong enlivening and relaxing effect and is audible on headphones in this sound landscape recording. We think it's the sound of a small babbling stream, about fifty yards from the microphones and down a gully, being reflected off the extensive lattices of winter bare branches and boughs high overhead.

Listen to other episodes from this special place. 

The city sleeps, under a dark impenetrable sky. Streets, almost empty. Beneath invisible rainclouds, countless back gardens hold up their hands. Up, as high as they can reach, to catch the falling water. 

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. 

Drizzly white noise sheens. Sharp flurries of scattering pinpricks. Steady mesmerising rhythms. And the shadows, in time,  of the slow passing rain clouds.

A mid-February night and you're out on an empty beach, for the cold sea air, and that feeling of wild emptiness. There's nobody about.

Past the silent hulk of a huge parked digger on caterpillar tracks, you reach a shoulder high timber groyne (a long, narrow structure built out into the water from a beach in order to prevent erosion.)

You pull yourself up and peer over, down into the gloom. The drop onto the beach beyond is too deep. But you don't turn back. Instead, you get yourself up onto the top timber beam, and sit, in a balanced position, and look out to sea.

With this bit of extra height you can really hear the width of the beach. The sea, and all the detail of its rolling waves. Their muffled thuds. their frothing crashes. The parnoramic rushing breakers that travel spatially, all the way from the far right to the far left of scene. Aural evidence of longshore drift.

Ten minutes later. Settled into the moment. Sense of time regulated not from within, but by the external passage of panoramic sound, you are still as a heron. Listening. Level and straight. Tuned deep, into the dynamic foaming of the intertidal zone.

*We captured this sound landscape photograph a few days ago whilst visiting Cooden Beach between Hastings and Eastbourne on the south coast of England. Only one aeroplane and one car are audible throughout this whole section of time, so we might be able to add Cooden Beach to Lento places with genuinely quiet horizons.

We captured this passage of time on a visit to some friends in Exeter last year in April during a spell of fine weather. It turned out to be a silky soft recording of a spring garden at dawn.

It's about 5am and the garden birds are just starting to sing against a backdrop of high circling seagulls. From here, the still sleeping city of Exeter exudes a panoramic aural presence. A wide, steadily murmurating vail of grey brown noise, that's reflecting, and reflecting again off the many parapet walls of the neighbourhood's buildings. 

We left the mics, as usual, to record alone overnight. Positioned on grass, a few metres from a wooden slatted fence and a pink cherry blossom, they witness the comings and goings of the resident birds. Tuneful robins, who by chance perch on the edges of their territories and sing at each other, like operatic performers, to the left and the right of scene. 

How charmingly familiar is their song. How liquid. Often shimmery, like sunlight tilted through sliding raindrops. 

At over 600 feet high, and visible for miles, this giant mass of steel pylon on Swanscombe Marsh on the Thames Estuary has a sister. They stand together, like monoliths either side of the sprawling Thames, holding up cables, and silently serving society's insatiable thirst for power.

After a shortish walk over the marsh from Swanscombe station, we arrived at the pylon on the Kent side bank. The ground directly beneath the pylon, in between its concrete footings, is flat. Barren, and crackling, under sharp pelting winter rain. Cold and already soaked, we unpack the audio equipment from our dripping rucksack and set up to record. As we pulled out its foldable legs, the mic stand oddly mirrored, on an atomic level, the skyscraper above.

We walked on along the new extension of the Thames Path and England Coast Path, and left the mics to record. Their job to capture, uninterrupted, this brutal sound landscape, and to whatever noises the pylon made. 

The sharp winter rain. The spatial murmurations of this panoramic edgeland world. The rushing sometimes humming noise the wind fleetingly made, as it surged through the loftiest sections of the pylon (centre of scene). The deep pulsating rumble, that we later found (when speeded up) seem to be the long span powerlines, singing subsonically in the wind. A brutally beautiful day under Britain's highest pylon.

*The last time we recorded on Swanscombe Marsh (summer 2021) we heard a cuckoo. Amazing! This still surviving natural land is so much more than meets the eye. Listen to episode 77.