Radio Lento podcast

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…

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 fade…

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 withi…

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. …

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 hig…

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 abs…

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. Omni…

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 autumna…

When we set up to record, there were no signs of the weather front. It was late evening. Low tide. We'd followed the path East along the river out of Burnham-on-Crouch and come across a Second World …

Day has arrived, and there's no mystery about it. Gone the voids. Gone the echoes. Gone the skewed sense of time, magnified, with distance overlapping. 5am, and it's here and there and all about. The…

Out of the 240 chalk streams globally, 160 are (or were) in England. 

For a moment, I thought I heard a splosh and the whip of a fishing rod. But how? Ankle deep in dusty soft leaf litter, several ya…

Rain. Rain falling in the night. Falling in the night when there's nobody about to hear it. Falling onto a little ramshackle garden made up of upturned pots, a patch of leaf scattered concrete, and a…

Up in the April hills of Wales, beside an empty road.
Behind the brambles, down a dell, a stream, over bare stone rolls.
What sing you mistle thrush?

The inbetween of holly trees, is lit by morning…

Three years ago we made another overnight recording at the edge of a rural wood. It turned out to be one of those night's when almost nothing stirred, just the faintest susurrations of wind in trees …

Deep and spaciously detailed night quiet, at the edge of the tidal river Crouch in rural Essex. Wind on water. Rain on water. Night birds over water. Water upon water. A real piece of time, captured …

We're going back to early June this year, to the rich and intermingled singing of birds that happens at dawn throughout the spring and early summer. In Britain it's called the dawn chorus, a behaviou…

Above the mud silt beach, it's all bright clouds, moving. Then the sun breaks through. The river is stretching wide here, left to right, silently carrying the land's outflow through marshes, and out …

They look as if they are swimming in it. The banks of trees. Tense into the current, swaying, twisting in sympathy with the changing wind. Like they're wading out into on-coming waves, wading out to …

High tide on the River Crouch. Night. Not a soul about. Small bobbly waves gamboling along the brimming tideline. Playful, in swilling swirls, reaching for one more inch of land, before the ebb. From…

Last day of August. Pleasant sunshine, blue sky. Wind 1 to 2 knots, barely noticeable. Standing tall with motionless leaves, the trees are leaning into the warmth, letting their limbs soak up every a…