Radio Lento podcast

This is real quiet from the middle of the night, captured from a point above the harbour of St Abbs on the East Coast of Scotland. Car-free. Plane-free. Just the sparse and spacious cries of circling…

At the top of the old Victorian house are several flights of dim, dark stairs. Steep. Narrow. Cold. They lead up to a pair of rarely used attic rooms. As you climb, you feel the dust on the banisters…

Dusk gathering, we found a stony path, and followed it. Microphones still in the rucksack. It'd been a long day, and we still hadn't found the right place to record. Time. Night approaching. 

Two pai…

Up a soily slope, almost too steep to climb, nestled in against the smooth trunk of a tree, the microphones are recording. Recording the sound of solitude. 

Dry inside their weatherproof box. Listeni…

Wide silent sky. Still warm air. Having followed a country footpath across miles of open farmland you reach a stony bank and, like a natural magic trick, it leads you down onto a deserted, shingle be…

This is a segment of time from a clearing deep in the Forest of Dean. Echoing birds in full voice. Soft hushing breezes in high treetops. Then, over time, a band of fresh summer rain, falling in rich…

Up steep steps from the sandy beach, and a birds-ear view of ocean breakers from a thicket, perched half-way up the cliff. Several hours to go before low tide. Directly ahead slow rolling waves, brea…

A rare night amongst nights. A dark landscape, subdued, beneath immense and invisible storm clouds. It's just past eleven thirty on Monday the fifth of September 2022. The kitchen was in darkness. Th…

Warm sunlit afternoon. Late August. On the nature reserve at Mucking, beside the Thames in Essex. A bird hide. Perched on a steep bank amongst reeds, looking out on a strip of newly exposed mud. Tide…

A straight and stony path heads through open country, towards the sea. Beside the track, amongst land in-between, a tree. Lone and leafy. Like a sentry. Exposed and standing. It watches the sea birds…

Children play on a soft sandy beach by the Essex Wildlife Trust nature reserve at Stanford-le-Hope. When the tide goes out, this amazing hidden beach is revealed. Water laps. Families bask in the sun…

It's the dead of night. Along an exposed stretch of seawall East of Burnham-on-Crouch, a deluge has started. Rain lashes down from a pitch black sky onto the swirling water of an out-going tide. This…

Wondering along the path from Althorn to North Fambridge in Essex. Skylarks! Their contented never-ending songs, wheeling about slowly in the warm thermals somewhere, high above. Almost as far as the…

Begin, by a country church on the hills above Harlow in Essex, and at the foot of a jovial fir tree, hushed by warm wind. It's a sunny afternoon and a blackbird is singing in the secluded churchyard …

After an hour's steep upward toil, through a thickly wooded gorge and along some very precipitous granite rock formations, you reach a wooden footbridge. Here the landscape's totally changed. Just de…

For this week's episode we're back in the Forest of Dean for a different kind of captured quiet. Quiet that transforms from one thing to another. A kind of sonic metamorphosis. 

The segment from this…

Heavily, this winter rain falls. Persistent. Cold. Wet. Refreshing. In waves. In sprinkling flurries. Over time. Onto the huge tarpaulin stretched across the yard, each drop's long downward journey i…

With Wrabness station behind us, the footpath stretched ahead. A warm summer day. Skylarks singing overhead. Sweet scented breezes freshening the clean, optimistic air. 

Soon, a huge expanse of natur…

To be a remote seawall, on a stretch of tidal estuary. 
To see the days and nights not as periods of time, but as slowly undulating waves.
To feel the weight of water, twice rising, twice falling. 
T…

A band of cloud slowly drifts towards a sunlit clearing, deep in the Forest of Dean. It's morning in late May, and the birds are lighting up the space in sound as brightly as the sun. Wrens. Blackcap…