Radio Lento podcast

Cold clear water flows, through a dell beneath trees. Hidden behind brambles. A place for the foraging bee. Here, is a place that's miles away. Is a place, steep down beside a country road, that's left alone.  

Chiffchaff, mistle thrush, pheasant, great tit, rook, wood pigeon, wren. All singing and calling. All free to be themselves in this remote, almost wilderness.

It's a mid week morning in April. Another working day for people, just begun. Beneath their few passing cars, behind the brambles, down the dell, the stream flows. Flows on, and flows steadily. An open secret, rich with birdsong, that they'll never get to know. 

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This section is from a twelve hour unattended recording we made up in the hills of mid Wales in 2019. Human made noise levels are extremely low. At one point a wren perches on the tree where we left the microphones, and sings directly overhead. The stream you hear runs from left to right of the soundview, and down the valley into Ceri, a village in Montgomeryshire, Powys.

Listen to other episodes in this series.

It was last weekend when we made a long train journey out to the North Essex coast, to reach Walton-on-the-Naze. We planned the trip because our maps showed it to be an area out on a limb, and free of major roads. Finding good potential locations for making quiet recordings is very much a main mission for us these days. Quiet is a scarce resource. Long periods of quiet, in wide open landscapes, is even rarer. Scarcer, and even more valuable.

Stepping off the train, we could see Felixstowe across the other side of the estuary. As we walked towards the town with a scattering of other just arriveds, our kit bag with the mics sounded noisy. Something inside, perhaps the metal tripod, knocked and rattled. Shifting it about didn't work. On towards the sea. On past the closed off-season shops. And then we realised. It always takes a while for us city dwellers to realise. It's not the bag that's started rattling. It's the quietness of this place!

Arriving at the nature reserve, along the stony coastal path, an information board told of the rocks being of the eocene epoch, of yielding sharks teeth and other fossils. The land around us had mostly emptied of human things. So down onto the sand we strode, wind cuffing in our ears, we headed straight to walk along the bottom of the chalk cliffs.

It was the sound of a fresh water stream-let that caught our attention. Trickling down the weather-beaten and sea-eroded cliff, forming a small clear pool. A pool surrounded by sand, and by chunks of fallen rock. Chalky, forgiving rocks, some brittle, that break apart within the hand. We played with the rocks and turned to listen to the sea. How the cliff wall mirrored the crashing waves, seemed to emphasise its light blue grey tones. A crisp, bright, wide openness, blended with the contented voices of children, searching for fossils, and couples, walking their dogs. 

A good place to record. A good place to take this sound photograph of the beachscape, in January, at Walton-on-the-Naze.

December is a very quiet month for natural sound out here in the walkable wilderness. Wind moaning in the telegraph wires, and rain spattering into flooded puddles. And when you reach them, the woods, down long lanes and a muddy footpath, the song birds haven't yet begun to sing. But stop, qwell the noise of your boots, and listen. Wait.... Let all sense of motion go. A few moments are all that's needed.

It comes, more as a feeling than a sound, though it comes from sound. An awareness, of the surrounding wood. The wood as one, huge, still presence. One, huge, reverberant reservoir, of hushing quiet, that has you immersed within it. The wind rises, and falls. The calls of distant birds echo through the voids. Occasionally, the creaking sound, as solid tree trunks bend with the pressure of moving air.

The hushing is made as the banks of cold winter wind brush over the high tree tops, and through into the countless boughs and bare branches. Each one, each bough and branch, each one in their thousands, in their millions, generates small trails of invisible, turbulent air. White noise streamers, that shower down, to land on our ears. We hear it, as waves of infinitely spatial hushing. The sound of the whole forest, as it brushes against the wind.

This was recorded in Comb's Wood, Hertfordshire in December. 

How it is, that a winter weekend city walk, can end up like this - by the seaside! How an inner city landscape, with its roads and concrete valleys between misty mid-distance skyscrapers, can be faded from consciousness by simply hopping over one, very long, brick wall. 

So up and over the flood wall you go, with its curved brick top, and down you drop, not onto but into, something else. Something else entirely. Beach! 

Yes a beach. A real beach! A wild watery foreshore, with blustery winds, and rushing white horses, and liberating rejuvenating scrunchy shingle under foot. You walk, over the unsteady ground, with a rolling swagger. You walk, right up to the water's edge, right into its bright white noise, its refreshing spray. 

And everything, from only moments ago, is suddenly forgotten. Forgotten because now you remember. Remember what it is you are living for. This! Children playing amongst bright ringing stones. The thrum of deep channel cruisers. An accidentally discovered beach, beside the Thames, at Rotherhithe. Tidal breakers. Winter beach.

There is always quiet. Somewhere. All the time great swathes of it do exist. But these, are the farthest from reach.

Here though, is some, within reach. Quiet, that from its highest point, is within sight of a major city. Within sight of busy roads. Buried behind nature's natural barriers, this quiet, lies beside a single-track lane. 

Water flowing along the valley bottom. Fills the air with pleasant noise. Birds, singing out across the steep soft pastures. Mellifluous. Mid-morning voices.

To the right a distant farm. To the left, dense woodland at the mouth of a leafy ravine. Ahead, a sleepy farm building, hidden beneath tall dark trees.

Over this mild, favourable hour, a lone car passes. It labours up the steeply winding lane, past the tree that holds the microphones, then coasts back down a short while later. A country car. The only one. On country business. 

This section of audio is from a twelve hour recording we made of time passing in a quiet valley in June last year. We spent some days in the area and made a second overnight recording further down the valley in a different spot. Episode 89 and 78 are taken from the second location. The brook, about 100 yards in front of the microphones, runs left to right across the sound-view, and defines the Cheshire / Derbyshire border.

With Benfleet behind, see ahead the footpath to Leigh-on-Sea. It's a beckoning line to the horizon. But for now, we can just let it go. Let it go because something else beckons. Something sky sized. Breezing in from the flat reflecting water. A presence, that's been there all along. 

So turn off the path and stride down, down through the thick grass. Head straight to the land water boundary. The ground will soften, and soften again, but keep going. In careful steps, press on through the ankle deep squelch, around the slippery half submerged stones, until the vegetation beneath your feet feels like a semi floating bed of sponge. This, is the last walkable point. The point where you just have to stop, and listen, because the presence of this place has got so strong. 

In front, is the exposed mud, patterned with trickling remnants of the high tide. Further on, a bright reflected sky. A sky reverberant, with the bending tones of a passing propeller plane.

It's the sense of wide, wide open that makes this place so overwhelmingly present. And one might respond to it with an equally strong feeling, an awareness somehow, that what's here and happening outside, is happening inside too. Pure openness. But not emptiness. This place is vast, but not empty. It is filled with fresh blustery winds, and patrolled by tiny, flapping sparks. These are the wild birds. And this, is their world.

The tripod sinks deep into the sponge-like vegetation, but finds its place, so we attach the mics and leave them, wrapped in a wind absorbent hat, to record alone. As we climb away, back up the slippery bank, we hear them, the wild birds, coming back to see what it is we left behind.

Six strikes St Mary's bell, and it's a new day. A new woodland day, with time returned to normal. The wood pigeons coo it. The cow lows it. The buzzard whistles it and the rooks crow it, from the high tree tops. The cockerel crows it too. A new day, for this wood, just to be.

Footsteps? Someone! Steady strides. Wading boot deep into the forest pool, down, and into it through a flood bank of leaves. It's the woodsman, come to tend the forest. Come to clear its tangles and fallen branches. But we think the woodsman's come not just for work, but for a swim. A swim and a bathe in the forest's atmosphere. Its still sense of emptiness, the rippling bands of peace between the trees. Its high vertical walls, of quiet.

To mark Radio Lento's 100th episode, we wanted to share this, a special recording. It is the eleventh segment from the twelve hour overnight recording we made of an empty wood in Dedham Vale. Lento began at episode 1 with a 30 minute clip from this same segment, done back then as a test, to see if the whole idea might work. Thanks to everyone who's listened and especially to those who've got in touch to tell us what Lento recordings mean to them. You've inspired us to make these 100 episodes, to keep searching for new places to record, and to develop better methods for capturing the essence of these natural places in detailed, spatial sound. 

Huge thanks to everyone who has made a donation too. Every pound goes towards the costs of Radio Lento, which is funded by us.

We always try to make a recording in the landscape after it's just snowed. It's so quiet. And the quiet is palpable. The effect is unique and wonderful, and is down to the way freshly fallen snow absorbs sound. By absorbing it so well though, there is virtually nothing for the microphones to pick up, and so none of these recordings have ever properly worked.

Over Christmas 2014, whilst staying with family up in the hills of Derbyshire, it snowed, and snowed, for days and days. And so we recorded, and recorded, for days and days too. Each time, on playback through headphones, the spatial sense of landscape quiet, the effect we strive to capture in all our recordings, was entirely missing. 

A few days later, just before ten o'clock at night, the snow began to fall again. The landscape was frozen, after days of freeze thaw. And this time, instead of absorbing sound, the icy snow was reflecting it. As the snow fell, every tiny fragment and particle of it made a sound, in varying degrees from the finest of fine dust, to sounds almost like leaves dropping, to distinctly heavier scattering ice falls. There was a lazy wind in the trees too, moving through as soft murmuring white noise. Occasionally, it was strong enough to push off the lighter accumulations of snow and ice, causing it to fall between the branches, and down onto the frozen ground below. For the first time, the snowy landscape sounded spatial, and the microphones were able to capture the feeling of being out amongst snow laden trees, within a wide open, and frozen landscape. The old clocks can be heard chiming ten inside the house, and towards the end of this unusually short episode for us, far away geese, and foxes too.

Merry Christmas everyone! From Radio Lento we wish you and your family a happy and sound new year. 

A passing ship, in the night, is like a thought in slow motion. A thought sailing in, from out on the ocean. A thought made of bulk timber upon steel. Made of engine, rudder and wheel. tangible. Omnipotent. But a thought unseen. In perfect dark. In perfect, peninsula darkness.

From this place upon the seawall, the nocturnal transit begins, as a warm, pulsating hum. As a low down sound rising slowly, in the east. A vast, timber laden hulk, that to the inflowing tide, feels like nothing more than a drifting feather. To it, a feather adrift. To us, a ship.

This soundscape is another excerpt from the twelve hour overnight recording we made last summer in Essex, about seven miles inland from the North Sea along the tidal River Crouch. The mics, which we tied to a seawall railing while we slept in a nearby inn, captured this chance event in total darkness, an event that we feel makes for one of the most compelling listens, of all the river sounds. A passing ship! a ship that comes, and never seems to go. A hum, among the washing waves.

Still air. Quiet parkland. It's 8am, before the people come. Empty paths. Untrodden grass. Mist lifting. On the face of it, nothing is happening. But nothing needs to happen. This is a bright autumnal Sunday morning in late September. 

To the listener, the scene is panoramic, and one enveloped in another kind of mist. Consistent. Never lifting, never changing. From night to day, from month to month, from year to year, a mist made of sound. A flow of pure and natural white noise, infinitely spatial, present throughout every shadowed space beneath the trees. The weir. Its soft surrounding balm.

Lulle Brook is a tributary of the Thames at Cookham, just off the Thames Path National Trail. We heard it from afar, when we first came, long before we knew what it was. A noise on the horizon. A noise with a soft, gravitational pull. In the solitude of the empty parkland, with nobody about, the flowing water instils peace into the air. Widens the sense of space. Throws a canvas on which the birds can paint on their sparse, autumnal calls. Wrens, robins, screeching green parrots, tchacking jackdaws, finches, some distant high passing geese.