Radio Lento podcast

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 so…

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 apar…

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 …

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 au…

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 wa…

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 trac…

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 ab…

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 T…

Time aside. And at rest. A quiet, leafy space. Folkestone, on the Kent coast. An area called the Warren, where forested steeps slope and tumble into the sandy wash of the sea.

It's early August 2022.…

Dusk has come, and the Forest of Dean is, very gradually, darkening.
Silence, like dew, is beginning to settle in the voids and hollows between the trees.
Shadows, and echoes, are everywhere.

In th…

There's a bench. Perfectly perched, by the sandy steps that lead steeply down onto Coldingham Sands. Perfectly perched, because the sound-view from this bench is so wide, and the angle just right to …

Dawn. Bright morning sky. High pressure, barometer rising. A vast quiet sky, etched with a few scudding clouds picked out by the light of the rising sun. Gone is the tranquil hush of night. These rem…

For the very last episode of 2022, and because it's so cold and dank, we want to use the magic of spatial sound landscape recording to teleport back into the summer! It's August 2017, and our microph…

A barn, that's stood alone on the steeply sloping fields below the summit of Black Hill in Derbyshire, for longer than anyone can remember. This is the sound atmosphere from inside, recorded around 1…

Changing weather. Shifting scenes. The east coast of Scotland above St Abbs. A landscape whose geography leaves it exposed to everything that the sky can bring. Wind. Rain. Mist. Brilliant, revelator…

Hear. This solitude. This real captured quiet. This authentic air. From horizon to horizon. Near empty of human-made noise. Aural solitude. Rare? Becoming rarer? It is there though. It does exist. Ou…

High in the Derbyshire hills, a century-old garden is being blown dry by brisk morning air. It's quiet. Sheltered. Surrounded by strong gritstone walls and tall trees. Over the lower wall is a perfec…

Peering out from atop the high seawall of Nothe Fort. Two o'clock in the morning. High tide, and the sea below feels so near. Overhead the sky is faintly luminous. But is dense black, out over the se…

It's gone dark. It's 21:15. And you're standing on platform 1 of the railway station in Penzance. Bright lamps light the long platforms, and seaside smells waft in the air. Wheely bag at your side, y…

An exposed tree, looking down upon the town of Wooler, high in the Northumberland hills. It stands amidst wide open fields, by an empty bench and an overgrown footpath. It stands. And it feels the ti…