Radio Lento podcast

We found our way to record this remote location late at night, and in near total darkness. A sheltered dell, with a fresh running stream. Earlier in the day, when everything was bathed in bright grey light, we'd walked through this secluded place on our way down from West Quantoxhead, and decided it might be a perfect spot for the Lento box to make a long overnight recording. There's a branch just above your right shoulder, my partner quietly calls up from below. Can you use that to lever yourself up? The height I'd just gained had markedly improved the spatial clarity of the wrilling stream, so just a little higher, I thought. We really need to be able to properly hear the full width and detail of the water, as it flows through the dell. How still this place is. How perfectly balanced it sounds, nestled within the wildness of this wide open West Somerset landscape. To reach the branch I had to work my way through a mass of prickled twigs in the dark while holding the Lento box in one hand. After some not insignificant effort, the branch, and my elbow, connect. I haul up, wedge in, and tie the box onto the trunk. To be sure this spot meets the criteria we've evolved over the years, I try to match my head with the box, and hold completely still. Listening. Absorbing the scene. Slightly adjusting the angle of the mics, so they can capture as much as possible of what it is I'm actually hearing. Good, I quietly call down, this is it.  We head back to where we are staying, leaving the Lento box to record alone, non-stop through the night. Without us or indeed anyone else about to witness, time passes. Looking down from the tree, the stream wrills, and the landscape murmurs its nocturnal murmurings. Sheep can be heard, sometimes moving vaguely, through the dark. And one seems to come to rest beneath the tree holding the mics. From time to time it makes the softest, most gentle noise, that a sheep can surely make.

Twelve strikes the clock, of St Mary's Church in Rye, East Sussex. Midnight. A sound that for anyone left awake, opens a new page. It's a new day, captured by the Lento box perched high above the churchyard, one night in mid-February. The new day reads like this. The gnarled limb of a winter tree beside the churchyard creaks against an undulating wind. The flagpole at the top of the belfry tower, rattles, like the mast of some windswept sailing ship.  The sky is heavy with cloud and dark. Coastal air ruffles and catches in the rooftops of huddled 14th century cottages. They look gathered in around the church, like a solid congregation. Time passes. Banks of wind rise, then subside. Creaks and rattles punctuate the night air. And the Quarterboy faintly chime out the quarters.  St Mary's has a good clean bell. It echoes off the huddled houses beautifully. Sonorous tones, that seem to ring out with the same golden grey hues of the stones from which this ancient coastal town is built. The skittering leaves blowing and the almost too faint silvery ding dongs of the Quarterboys.  * We captured this sound-view of St Mary's Church Rye last month on a freezing cold windswept night. We rested the Lento box on the outer ledge of a second floor window that looked over the churchyard and straight at the church itself (with a chain to stop it falling). Do let us know if you can hear the quarters being struck, they are subtle but just about audible. ** Explore more from Rye. Listen to the sound inside the belfry in episode 200. That was a windy night too.  *** We're building up to our 5th birthday. Watch this space! 

What a long-form sound landscape recording of the Derbyshire hills reveals, is space, weather, and birds.  A buzzard. Mistle thrush. Song thrush. Great tit. Geese. Wren. Robin. Jackdaw. Pheasant. Black cap. All present in their different ways. Buffeted by strong spring breezes under grey skies.     Ahead, down the fields, mid-left of scene, the rushing river fills the valley with soft white noise. Its sound is quite subtle, yet so present. So wide. And so constant. Over the thirty five years we've known this place, through all weathers, and all seasons, it's the river that's never changed. * Over the years we've shared many sound landscapes from this rural location in the Derbyshire hills. This until now unpublished segment comes from a 14 hour recording we made in mid-February 2022. We haven't been able to get there this month, so we're sharing this audio as a reminder of how the valley sounds now the spring is nearly here, as morning gets going.

Sometimes, when persistent rain is forecast overnight, we place the Lento box out in the back garden on a long battery to capture the sound. Falling rain is always enchanting, especially at night when the city is asleep.  We leave a large tarpaulin stretched across the yard to catch the raindrops as they fall. We position the microphone box centrally, angled up, so as the rain falls at random across the 4 metre by 3 metre surface. It captures a widely spatial sound-image of the rain.  Somewhere very high up in the clouds, there is a special place. It's directly above the tarpaulin. The droplets that form here will not fall unwitnessed, as rain normally does. The droplets will instead fall down into this episode. To soothe and calm many ears. This night rain. Under a large tarpaulin. 

It is almost high tide on Winchelsea Beach. Old timbers, buried in the shingle berm, point up into the hazy winter sky. You scrunch over the stones. Rest your hands on their sturdy weatherworn tops. And begin to take in the scene.   Clean sea air cuffs against your face. It smells faintly of salt, of sea wetted rock. The beach rakes sharply down into bright white froth. Then just blue-grey, out to the horizon. Nobody is about. Only distant shapes, of coasting sea birds.    Each wave comes and breaks onto the shingle. Some roll in straight. Others from the side. Some cross. Some break twice. Some rise slowly up, overbalance and crash in one thunderous crump onto the hard shingle. Others race furtively towards the land, as if they can't wait to meet it. Together, over time, they paint a picture in sound, of this mid February beach, under a wide open, winter hazy sky.  * We took this sound capture of the beach between Winchelsea and Rye Harbour a few days ago. The scene captures the weight and detail of the tidal breakers, and is best "seen" through headphones or Airpods. A little propeller plane flies over, and almost at the end a curlew can briefly be heard flying from right to left of scene, towards the Rye Harbour nature reserve.