Radio Lento podcast

It was late. Everybody had gone to bed. The remote cottage where we were staying in the Quantock Hills still felt warm, even though the oil burner had knocked itself off a while ago. Despite this, the place had started to feel, well, a bit strange and I wasn't quite sure what the feeling was.  I put the kettle on and the strange feeling went away. I made the tea, set the kettle back on its stand, stirred the pot, replaced the lid, forgot about the feeling. But then it was back. Intriguing.  I stepped up out of the kitchen into the back porch where the burner room emitted a faint electrical hum and a rich smell of heating oil. Was it coming from in here? No. The snug lounge then. No. It was coming from behind where I'd just been, the back porch. I stood, stock still. Listening.  The feeling was real. It was the presence of something. Not a thing or a spirit or anything like that. It was space. The feeling was of the hint of a space beyond the confines of the cottage. My hand went to the latch of the little back door. One bolt. Another. A chain too, all needing undoing. I lent back my weight and the door eased. With a woody squeak it jerked free from its jam.  Swinging the door gently open, I stepped out. And there it was. The raw source of the feeling. The space that I had somehow sensed was enveloping the cosy and near silent cottage. A whole landscape. Audible by its near trees and far contours. Aural presences, stretching from the back door over miles up into the Quantocks. A night world shrouded in almost complete darkness, brushed by rain, and autumnal wind. This was the moment. This is what I heard. 

We found this quiet place in West Somerset. Afternoon waves softly breaking along a rocky beach under October sunshine. The low landscape of Wales visible across the water. Lilstock. A port in bygone times, according to someone we met coming the other way. Now disused. A landscape of stony footpaths. Dense patches of shrubbery around outcrops of trees. Endless meadows and dry ditches. Fresh water streams and in the far distance on the clifftops, the boxy structures and cranes of Hinkley Point.  Human made sound was present but what really drew our ears were the long periods of near pristine quiet. Quiet lets the aural detail of natural landscapes be truly seen. Here, a beach not of sand or shingle, but of piles of rocks and small boulders. We tied the Lento box to a tree off the footpath about thirty yards from the shoreline, and left it to record the breaking waves alone. A little cricket was cricketing in the grass to the left of the mics. For late October we were surprised. As we walked away we saw a large plastic blue barrel, captured by high tide rocks, roll its way loose and into the water. Then we watched it for a while set sail in the onshore breeze whilst exploring the rocks and boulders in the fresh afternoon air. When we returned an hour or so later to collect the Lento box we could still see the barrel. It'd floated up the coast past the mics. Listening back to the recording we could  picture it, moving with the waves, from left to right of scene. One empty barrel that'd taken itself to sea, for a slow, silent voyage. * Let us know if you think this episode is sleep safe. We know there are sounds of people (mainly us) playing distantly on the beach and for some this sense of the presence of people may feel sleep safe, but others perhaps not. 

It isn't often we hear strange calls coming out of our long overnight captures, but this was one. The dead of night deep in the Forest of Dean, and a call that from the quiet emptiness begins to echo. Human?  Dog?  Muntjac deer? All three, or none? Muntjac deer are commonly heard repeating a single harsh bark across rural landscapes at night though this sound doesn't quite match the sound signature of muntjac, nor indeed dog, or human. The calling persists over ten minutes, seemingly human, then changing into something very much not human. What it is we can't know.  The sound comes from mid-left of scene. Whatever is making it is some distance from the microphones, which are tethered to the trunk of a huge oak tree growing beside a trickling brook hidden beneath dense undergrowth. To mid-right of scene is a country road that bisects the forest. Nocturnal cars occasionally speed through. The effect is curious, like a sudden wind is gathering in the trees, only to just as suddenly disappear. As the calling continues a tawny owl joins in. It hoots in that nervous kind of way they do sometimes, but then changes. Becomes a wavering quivering bleat, something like a new born lamb. It is fleeting. Then it is gone.  Building ideas of what is in the world around us from this kind of highly spatial binaural soundscape, especially from times and locations few of us are used to being within, can lead our imaginations into strange places. Notions of the supernatural. Happenings and occurrences beyond the normal boundaries. However to the eye, and if it weren't pitch dark, the scene would bear no comparison to what the mind perceives of this forest through hearing. There'd be no overwhelming sense of wide open space, no possibility of reverberances or echoes or happenings going on far away. Indeed no concept of distance at all. This is because what surrounds the oak tree is of course more trees. Lovely huge trees, draped in broad waxy leaves so green and so numerous the eye simply accepts the image as one vast surface of textured colour. A vail. The green vails make this huge forest place, from an eye-s perspective, just what is close. A walled garden. Safe, because it is completely hidden from view.  These very different perspectives of the same place reveal how hearing and sight fulfill substantially different roles when we are immersed in natural places. The hearing and sight we have was evolved in forest environments over millions of years. Within a world of green vails and visually obstructed views, sound travels freely, passes through leaves and around the solid structures of trees. Sound is spatial as sight is, has depth, width, and many other spatially sensitive qualities. It affords us with detailed information we need to gain a three dimensional spatial image of the world beyond what we can see. These complex interleaved vibrations land on our eardrums and are modelled spatially to alert us to the presence of things, what they are doing, and their location in space. But what sound also does, and what we as Lento are most intrigued to capture, is to convey and confirm to a vigilant mind that nothing is also happening. Not nothing as in silence. Instead, it is that sweet, soft, murmurating texture of half meaningful sound, like billowing fabrics, that simply say yes, the world is all there.  * This segment is from a 72 hour non-stop recording we made in May 2022 in the Forest of Dean. After the callings and the owls are gone, a little creature can be heard scuffling and making tiny quivering tweeting sounds as it goes. Soft planes pass over this area, helping to dispel any notions that this strange sounding place is anything other than the familiar world we all live in. 

Daytime contentedness can be found here. Between the rustling leaves and trees of Folkestone Warren that rolls greenly down towards the sea. We couldn't have known when we set up the Lento box under hot early August sunshine that the next day of recording would bring such strong breezes.  This strip of natural Kentish land is made of green plunging wilderness. It has a campsite next to a rocky and sandy beach. There's a cliff top cafe too, from where you can see France on a clear day. After stopping for a cup of tea, follow one of the steep paths, down into a sea of green. Find a gap between the trees. Try listening for the actual sea. For echoes of children, distantly playing on the beach. For a passing train on the hidden railway. The buzzard. Slowly circling.  Wind that waves in the branches, shakes and rustles the leaves, may not to the eye look particularly calm. And yet to the ear, these movements sound calm. We definitely feel a physical response to strong undulating breezes as they press and sigh through banks of trees. This daytime section capturing the sound-feel of this place reveals how time passes here, an ordinary weekday in early August.

An hour of uninterrupted white noise. Naturally occurring and fully spatial. Captured by the Lento box last weekend from a tree overlooking the beach under Folkestone Warren. Low soft rumbling of the crashing waves. Mid-range curtains of dark grey-blue backwash, that seem to billow and shimmer like hanging fabrics. Fine layers of crisper whiter noise, formed from the frothing and fizzing sea water as it is churned and blown by the night wind. The subtle hiss as countless leaves catch in the undulating wind.  The scene is of the wide open beach. And of the tide, very gradually going out. A breeze, quite firm at around 18 knotts, is whisking up the waves. The place is entirely deserted. It's around 4:30 am. Several hours until dawn breaks. Being a raw location recording there are a few planes that traverse the sky, though their sound easily dissolves between the waves. Something, perhaps a small mammal, pads up to the tree holding the mics, then carries on to wherever it's going. A dark bush cricket occasionally starts up as well. It's quite late in the season for them.   The ground underneath the tree holding the mics is layered in dry leaves left over from the summer. Just ahead, down a steep drop, the ground transitions into large jumbled boulders. This strip of loose rock is in range of the high tide, and probably is semi-submerged when the spring tide coincides with a North Sea surge. During the day people pick their way over these rocks in search of fossils. Folkestone is so we're told a fossil rich area. Our objective for travelling back to this beach location in Folkestone was to capture the reflected sounds the high tide makes as it laps around the boulders under the trees. We witnessed these sounds earlier in August, but ran out of time to properly record them. Returning last weekend to try again we found there was an 18 knott wind whipping everything up, and a different and wilder seascape. What we have managed to capture though is how the receding tide in this particular location produces a rich and very stable source of uninterrupted natural white noise. Naturally occurring white noise sounds so simple and yet is infinitely complex. These seemingly contradictory qualities may be why natural white noise from real places like this promote both wakeful concentration and vigilant restfulness, that unconscious conscious state of mind where you seem to be able to perceive  everything around you as one fulfilling thought. A thought so in and of itself complete, it frees you from the need to think of anything else.

Last week we shared wide time captured from a North Norfolk beach as night fell. This week it's wide time from the vast interior of the Kielder Forest. Human-free night vastness is an experience so out of reach to us, and indeed to most people, that travelling with the Lento box to bring it back in the raw is always top of our list. Kielder is a mostly uninhabited landscape made of hills, trees and water. It is England's largest fir plantation on the north east border with Scotland. You may remember we travelled there in May to find and capture new episodes. This section of time is from around 3am. The Lento box is recording alone laid against the trunk of a fir tree on the east side of the 9 mile long reservoir.  The sound landscape of Kielder at night is extremely spatial and delicate. Made up of subtle changing movements of air over miles of fir trees. Of occasional nocturnal flying geese. Of echoes, layered upon echoes. Of tiny twigs and branches shifting as the trees gradually droop their boughs in response to the night cool. But these sounds though precious are not of themselves what makes the experience of being immersed within the Kielder Forest so special. And they are not the main aural presence we left the Lento box out alone to witness.  What we wanted to capture from within Kielder above anything else, was the phenomenon of wide time. Wide time is not of itself audible. It's made of nothing. Or more accurately, emptiness. To gain a sense of wide time you have to allow yourself to mentally tune into it. And that takes time. And a quiet place to listen. And decent headphones or equivalent. And a long form spatial audio recording that comes directly from the natural emptiness of Kielder Forest at night. A place where wide time happens. 

Holme Dunes, Norfolk.  At low tide, and with night approaching, we finally managed to set up the Lento box on a tripod on the sand, mics facing out to sea. It was the curlews at dusk, framed within the vastness of the empty beach, that we wanted to capture as a photograph in sound. It felt good to have reached a spot to record, after a lot of walking. It was though still only the mid-point of the intertidal zone. A very low tide.   The mid-point proved interesting. Such a low tide leaves exposed an enormous area of flat hard sand. The landscape seems to guide the sound of the sea into your ears over long distances, and from very wide angles. It's what we love the most. That feeling of being very very small in a vast open and entirely naturally formed space. Naturally formed, naturally murmurating, and with magical fleeting calls of curlew. We explored the area around the box for a while, then realised we had a problem. Light. The levels had been dropping while we'd been walking. Ten minutes into the record we turned round from the end of the sunset and realised the land behind us had gone almost completely black. Getting up the beach would be ok but finding the narrow and indistinct footpaths where we'd come through the dunes was definitely not going to be ok. There were no street lights or navigation points.  But the atmosphere was so exhilarating, so precious, we let the box record for just a few more minutes. We then scooped it up and hastily began the next mission, to find our way back. This is why episode 239 is shorter than usual. Shorter but we feel important to share because it conveys some of the sound-feel of being out in a vast intertidal zone, empty other than the curlew, with night fast approaching. 

On the breeze, rich scents of hot Norfolk farmland. In the air, tiny wippling birds. Some swallows? Across the field, and across the next, a combine harvester large as a house. And quick as a car. It sails low over the far meadow, like a paddle steamer on a bright green sea. Standing on the Peddars Way, Lento box in hand, we've stopped to take in the heat, and to listen. Wide carpets of crickets are cricketing all around the meadow grass. They're happy. Baking like us, under a hot midday sun. We search for a tree. For a natural tripod. We scan the thickets that line this ancient route. It is quite a silent process, and the box swings gently. It's waiting for us to find it a good spot. The spot it needs is specific. An aural point in the landscape where everything meaningful can not just be heard but heard in a spatially balanced way. An aural meeting point where the box will "see" the whole landscape as a sound photograph. Eventually we find a very old oak tree completely covered in hairlike moss. It's amazing. Very carefully we rest the box between two intersecting boughs and check how the sound photograph is going to "look" through a pair of stereo headphones. Good we quietly say, providing this breeze doesn't ruffle the surrounding leaves too much. The weather seems fair and stable, so we leave the box to record alone.  * We captured this sound-scene (our 100th unique location and 25th county) on Norfolk farmland on a hot July day. The old oak tree stands on the Peddars Way, a 49-mile National Trail which follows the route of a Roman Road. Tiny birds flit and flutter amongst the thickets under the wide sky where rumbles of distant military jets can sometimes be heard. A combine harvester is at work far right of scene. If you're able to hear high pitched crickets, their sound sometimes wafts in an out too from the meadow. Red kites overhead too.  Thanks for listening, and to Lento supporters who've helped us to bring 100 UK landscape locations in high definition spatial sound to this free podcast service.

It is first light. Birds are waking. Beginning to fill the air with sonorous sounds of life. A few dark bush crickets are still cricketing, just, though soon they'll go quiet for the day. The view is of green. More green. And yet more green. A whole valley of thickly growing thickets, trees, and dense shrubs, slowly emerging into visual reality under an increasingly luminous dawn sky.  Another form of energy that illuminates this steep verdant valley, is from the sea about a third of a mile down from the recording location. It's acoustic presence perfuses the air, just as light does from the sky. The aural daylight if we can call it that, is brightest at high tide, and darkest at low. Sea light does not flow evenly as light from the sky does. It flows in slow undulating breaths. Follows every contour of the ground. Brushes through every tree, branch, leaf and shrub. Reminds us that like the sky, a huge mass of something unimaginably huge, is there, and moving, beyond our view.  * This is the third segment from the new series of sound landscape recordings we made last month at The Warren in Folkestone. Episode 235 was from the dead of night, and this segment is how dawn sounded at the same location.   ** NOT sleep safe due to noisy gulls and wood pigeons!

Capturing the experience and 'sound-feel' of crashing waves is always a challenge. Strong on-shore breezes and the unbridled energy of thousand ton waves breaking over unyielding rock can simply be too much for sensitive microphones. Yet as we sit on the concrete sea defences, bathed in hot afternoon August sun, waiting for the first tingles of cold sea spray to land on our legs, the experience is as serene as it is thrilling. How can this be? Something huge, heavy and aurally overwhelming is also serenely calming and relaxing? Our ears hear the landscape around us and let us feel its space and physicality. Hearing, in a way, is a kind of touching. Given the power and tumult of these waves as they break over the rocks, it isn't possible to be bodily touching them, but we can touch their weight and mass through our ears. Layers of white noise produced by crashing waves, rising and falling, folding over each other, straddling us with their weight, reveals how mere vibrations in the air that land on our eardrums are instantly sensed and translated into physical responses. Responses that are felt as a result of being heard. This is what we mean by 'sound feel'. We might say the thrill is the head's response, the excitement that comes with loudness and chaos. The serenity is the bodily response. Nerves, bones and muscles, relaxing, as they do when massaged.  So sitting on the sea wall facing crashing waves, hot in the sunshine and still in earshot of the odd cricket hiding in the seagrass, is a bath and a massage. Wild sweet peas dancing in the breeze on an empty path. Buzzards circling overhead. We feel drawn to this ragged edge of land and to capture it as an audio experience that can be re-experienced when we cannot physically be there.  * This piece of time we captured in early August from a nearby location to last week's episode (235) from Folkestone in Kent. This stretch of exposed beach at the foot of The Warren. Two perspectives on the same stretch of coast called the Strait of Dover. Without the sea, The Warren would not exist in the aurally rich way it does. 

Welcome back to a new Lento season of captured quiet. Sound landscapes from real places. This segment of spatial audio, best through headphones, was captured on the Kent coast in early August from beside a winding path in a steeply wooded area of Folkestone called the Warren. France is visible from this elevated spot. Around half a mile below, is the beach and the crashing waves. It is midnight.  The ground here is sandy and dry. The only way through is the path which winds down and around and down again, almost endlessly, between trees huddled behind thick shrubs and blackberry bushes. Eventually you come out by a railway line. It seems out of place so close to the sea. Before you reach the beach, there's a cluster of tall trees with long rope swings. The environment is so green and steep and tangled that it has a uniquely soft sound feel.   Here, on this August night, dark bush crickets form the main sound-scene against a back drop of distant crashing waves. One stridulates close to the Lento box. Another type of cricket, lower in tone, is audible over to the left. We have not heard this type of night cricket in England before. A few trains pass in the valley below, and a few planes too, though Folkestone has generally quite a quiet sky.  To get the true aural essence from this audio, which is from an exceptionally soft and quiet location where you'd need to strain your ears to hear everything that is there, try to listen with headphone volume set so you can just hear the murmurings of the sea below. Find somewhere quiet to listen to this episode and you'll get more from it. 

Welcome to this final intermission of August 2024, a specially blended episode of soundscapes from wild and exposed places taken from the last year of Lento. The first three sound-scenes reveal aural views of the outside world seen from within interior places. A coastal hotel room, the belfry of an ancient church, and inside a bird hide. The final sound-scene is of an exposed estuary by Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, and a slow passing ship. Each portrays the essences of wild places.   214 Storm over hotel peninsula A birds ear view over Plymouth in the far south west of England. This is how Storm Kathleen sounded from behind the huge plate glass window of a comfortable cushioned room on the fourth floor of a hotel. The hotel overlooks a district called The Hoe, where one of the original Eddystone Lighthouses now stands. the wind was fierce, whistling almost singing through the window seals. A blended soundscape, formed from the interior acoustic of the hotel room and the wide open windswept night beyond.  200 Windswept night in the belfry of Rye Church Up steep ladders on the top platform of the belfry inside Rye Church, the ancient clock counts through this small night hour. Its regular sound blends with long and undulating gusts of fresh sea air. Air that's travelled, over miles of sand, shingle and marshland, from out on the open sea. Moving air sighs between the shuttered rafters and rattles the steel flagpole outside on the castellated parapet wall. Knocks the dead weight of a loose slab of stonework out on the belfry roof.  194 Inside a bird hide The atmosphere inside a bird hide is quite unusual, as interior spaces go. Low wind moaning in the drooping wires between telegraph poles. Whispering rushes and siffing seed heads of marsh grasses. Indistinguishable shifting murmurings, of the surrounding landscape, blown in through low letterbox windows. To the ear there is a lot of outside to be heard inside a bird hide. A fleeting curlew. A humming propeller plane. A distant pair of passing footsteps on the gravel towpath.  196 Estuary bleak passing ship Warm inside an all-weather coat and facing out across the water. Sat, boots wedged against the top ridge of the slanted seawall. There's rain in the air. Time to take in this wild estuary place. Right of scene the small Essex town of Burnham-on-Crouch. Directly ahead across the water Wallasea Island. Left of scene wild swirling water stretches seven miles to the North Sea. Sit tight, here on the seawall. This is empty time, to listen to the landscape and a slow passing ship.

Welcome to intermission 3 of 4 and another specially blended soundscape taken from the last year of Lento. The theme is rain. Gorgeous, refreshing, soothing rain. Four sound-scenes that reveal the way falling rain varies in texture and feel across four different locations.  204 Rain falls on steep craggy woodland (*sleep safe)  Fresh rain. Fresh woodland rain, from Miller's Dale in Derbyshire. From a hedgehog's perspective. Low on the forest floor, amidst the leaf litter, and the tangled ivy. As the new day began to dawn, the Lento box listened, Faithfully capturing the aural experience of the falling rain on dense woodland in the Derbyshire Dales. This rain can be heard falling onto wide waxy leaves against many layers of more diffused rain falling onto hundreds of tall trees, and a white noise vail rising up from the river flowing over rocks in the valley below.  228 Summer rain under the wisteria (*sleep safe) Nocturnal rain falling over many little back gardens, in waves of varying intensities. we wanted to hear what rain sounded like when the city had fallen completely quiet, and the Lento box was exposed, sheltered only under plants. We waited for a night where persistent rain was forecast and left the Lento box out, beneath a large wisteria plant, close to an old Victorian brick wall. This sound-view of rain is shaped by the way each drop lands on the wisteria leaves immediately above and around the microphones, the intimate reflections caused by the garden wall, against a backdrop of more diffused rain landing over shrubs, a yard to the left, and many gardens beyond.  197 December rain light to moderate (*sleep safe) Captured from only a matter of about ten yards from the previous segment, this rain sounds entirely different. Different because the gardens are in deep winter and the air Temperature was only around 7 degrees. Enough to drift the ice cold raindrops and ruffle the leading edge of the wide tarpaulin that we'd stretched over our back yard for shelter. You can really feel how each falling drop heightens the spatialness and emptiness of this calm city night scape.  189 Night rain falls on a drystone wall (*sleep safe) This rainy sound view was recorded from the top of a drystone wall overlooking fields of nocturnal sheep, in the North Yorkshire market town of Settle. Rain comes and goes. It's a very ordinary field in many ways, and not far from a very ordinary sounding B road with some occasional night traffic on it. Combined with the odd soft arching plane, the sound view exudes a pleasantly harmonious aural fabric that is soporific and sleep safe. This segment last about fifteen minutes and in contrast to the previous segment is centred in a huge and dramatic landscape of plunging moors and lushous green meadows. 

Welcome to intermission 2, the second specially blended soundscape from the past year of Lento. This week's theme is waves and shorelines. There are four sections that blend effortlessly into each other. The sound-view into each watery place lasts around eleven minutes and enables you to compare and contrast the wide variations in aural detail from place to place, beach to beach, and at different times of the day  and night.  185 Onshore breeze on Chesil beach  Chesil beach has an astonishingly powerful aural presence. The Lento sound camera is pointing directly out too sea, about fifteen yards from the breaking waves, capturing the deep visceral sound feel of this steep and stark Beach. The heft of the receding waves, as they haul back huge quantities of heavy spherical shingle. The advancing waves, curling and then breaking into white sound walls of spray. And the ever flowing on-shore breeze. Through listening you can feel the weight, shape, and rhythm of this 18 mile long beach on the Jurassic coast of Southern England. 216 Sat on the sand of East Looe beach A perfect spot for an uninterrupted cinematic sound-view of crashing waves on East Looe beach in Cornwall. Waves in all their crisp textural detail. Can you hear which way the longshore drift goes? It can take a few minutes. The waves feel powerful in this spot on the sand. Sometimes thunderous. Thunderous, and yet calming at the same time. the presence of the seawall (behind) and pier (to right of scene) gives this beach an unusually enclosed sound feel.  188 Rock seat on Rye Harbour beach Near a limpet covered wall, beaten into shape by high tide waves and squally weather, are some rocks submerged in shingle. Rye Harbour shingle. Advancing waves keep rolling in. Splashing and breaking, as much onto each other as they do onto the smart grey contoured shingle. Rye Harbour feels as wild as it is panoramically empty. So enjoy some empty time, just listening to the crashing waves as the tide slowly goes out.   211 Nothe Fort at night - quiet swirling waves These are lazy waves. Rolling and slooping over half submerged rocks. Being the dead of night the quiet in this place is Pristine. The Lento box is recording from a tree looking out over the water beside Nothe Fort in Weymouth. The sound view of these waves, against such a perfect backdrop of solid nocturnal silence, is highly spatial and aurally clear. It's why we've travelled back to this precise location twice to capture their sound.

Welcome to our first intermission episode. August is an especially busy recording month for us so while we are away, we want to share with you some specially blended soundscapes from the past year of Lento. This week's theme is streams and rivers. There are four sections that blend effortlessly into each other. The sound-view into each watery place lasts around eleven minutes.    209 Downstream of the old mill Steep meadows all about, sloping down into a water meadow in the Derbyshire hills. The water's running fast. So much rain. The woodland birds are singing across the valley in their full spring song. This is dawn, on a wonderfully bright spring morning.  184 River rilling through Millers Dale  Here's the night sound of the river Wye flowing through Miller's Dale in the Derbyshire Dales. Open country water. Cool. Refreshing. Consistent.  226 Perhaps a perfect upland stream  This stream follows a country road high in the empty hills above the small town of Ceri in the Welsh county of Powys. We've shared many sections from this 2019 recording over the four years of Lento. The area feels magical, being very near to the Ceri Ridgeway (Kerry in English) an ancient route used for trading between Wales and England. This section of time is from the dead of night where no wildlife is audible, the entire focus is of the stream, and the acoustical properties of the hidden dell ankle deep in dry leaves.  203 Dartmoor stream  Below a stone circle high on Dartmoor called the Nine Maidens there is this racing stream. It threads down through steep sloping pastures, enters an area of dense forest, and Becomes enmeshed with the sound signatures of tall, reflective, overhanging trees. 

Fir trees don't have what you might call normal leaves. Their leaves are needles. Each tree possesses many needles, too many to count. Especially when the height of these trees ranges from 12 to 23 stories high. Concentrated in these myriad tiny needles, is a wonderful and special power. Position yourself deep within a fir forest, with even the slightest of breezes blowing high above, and you'll feel it.  You'll notice it first as a sound in your ears, but that is only where it starts. The softest, the most velvety, the most spatially rich sound imaginable. Without realising it, the sound passes from your ears to become a sigh In your chest and lungs. Further it flows, permeating through your whole body. The more you tune yourself into the sound of the fir trees, the more you still your own motion, the more you detach from the need to think of anything else, the more the waves of relief flow. The sensation is real, a palpable response to the aural awe diffusing down into the  spaces beneath the firs. Fir trees we feel create such powerful and yet enchantingly delicate sounds, that since experiencing them high in the hills of Dentdale last summer we knew we had to try to capture more. More fir trees in more different contexts, across more ground. That meant we had ultimately to go to the Kielder Forest, the largest fir plantation in England.  This sound capture is from a location in the Kielder Forest called Forest Drive. After reaching the area and then following rough tracks cut through the forest over several miles, we reached a place where a huge section of plantation was visible processing down the valley. Row, after row, after row of tall fir trees. The effect was enchanting, and fixed us to the spot. As we stood looking the wind began to rise in the treetops. The sound came. Velvet brown waves, of physically rejuvenating sound. It took our breaths away.  If you are able to find a quiet and still spot to listen to this episode with a pair of good headphones or Airpods with noise cancellation, the Lento microphones have managed to faithfully capture quite a lot of the aural perfection that existed inside this huge forest, on that warm and blowy spring day earlier this year. 

On a warm May evening deep in the Forest of Dean, the sound of dusk is alive with birdsong from many different species. The air literally fizzes with the energy produced by avian communications. Their calls and songs echo over long distances, they reflect and bounce from tree trunk to tree trunk, reverberate and dissipate. It's the sheer quantity of solid surfaces that give this aural environment the quality of being inside a cathedral. A cathedral of trees.  As dusk advances the light levels drop. The soundscape thins, and simplifies. Many species stop singing, leaving aural space for the wood pigeons and song thrush. The lower overall sound levels mean the humming of countless bees and other insects can be heard. Noise from human activity seep and filter into the inner forest space too. It's a sound environment that's now leaning, to one side, and starting to reveal the tawny owls.  Night nearing, the strange call of the woodcock on its roding flight enters into your sound view. Half way between a quack and a call and ending with a squeak. Now the forest is wavering on the edge of reality. Rumbles from passing planes are captured within the cathedral like voids, and continue to reverberate as if the trees are purposefully holding onto the sound. Perhaps these old and ancient trees aren't sure what these sounds are? Maybe the trees are rolling the rumbles around within their leaves and branches, as we do with our hands and fingers to better understand a strange textured stone we pick up on a beach.  After darkness falls, reality falls too. Nothing makes sense anymore. The forest has become a hall of sound mirrors. The rumbles, the echoes, the distant hoots of owls, the shapeless calls of animals, billow thinly like floating vails of grey. There are the crisp trickles of a stream, hidden under tangled vines. And the heavy movement of several ground hugging creatures, perhaps badger, perhaps wild bore, grubbing about and snuffling for bits and pieces to eat. But what seems to be there, throughout, or perhaps issuing from underneath the land itself, is a deep, cavernous smouldering. Could this be the sound of the Earth itself? 

Earlier this week we left the Lento box out to record overnight. Persistent rain was forecast from midnight onwards after a spell of dry weather. We never lose interest in the sound of falling rain. Being outside during a shower invokes strong feelings that must have evolved over millions of years.  To make these local rain recordings we normally set the Lento box on a tripod underneath a tarpaulin that's stretched out over the back yard. The tarpaulin acts like a horizontal cinema screen, catching the drops on an X Y axis and producing the type of rainscape sound that we've shared in many other episodes. This time though we wanted to hear what the rain sounded like when the Lento box was exposed, sheltered only under plants.  We set the Lento box beyond the yard, close to an old Victorian brick wall. The space immediately around the box was dense with leafy foliage from a wisteria plant growing along the top of the wall. It provided good shelter, or so we thought.  The recording worked. The Lento box, while completely soaked, did reliably capture the wide and shifting soundscapes throughout the night, perfectly. Falling rain, as it came down over many little back gardens in waves of varying intensities and droplet sizes, determined by atmospheric conditions high above. But being so exposed to the elements, and sensitive to all kinds of sound, large heavy rain drops hit the box that fell between the wisteria's abundant leaves. Each drop landed on the box with a sharp tap. Hundreds of taps, maybe more than a thousand. Each drawing the ear's attention to the microphone box itself, which as with a camera should never be in shot.  Our choice was to scrap the recording, make a better overhead rain absorption solution and try again another night. Or listen through every second with a keen ear and a micro editing tool to unpick each drop that struck the box.  Of course we did the latter and it took six hours. Crazy perhaps, but as we cleaned off ten seconds, and then half a minute, and then two minutes, then five, the process developed a momentum of its own. Like restoring a damaged painting bit by bit, gradually restoring to clarity the spacious and detailed sound image of the night. The countless raindrops as they fell onto the wisteria and the leafy shrubs. A meditation on one unique night, of falling rain. 

Being out on a headland is an experience as fresh as it is freeing. Fresh because these steep craggy places resound continuously, without end, with the effects of ocean and wild weather. Freeing, because they let you feel with all your senses, the reality of the world. A world seven tenths covered in water. Like bathing in forest sound created by the micro-turbulances of air moving through countless leaves and branches, a headland soundscape is also formed from panoramic layers of natural white noise, created by the movement of water over countless rocks. Or should we call it white sound? Noise is usually associated with what is unwanted. These noises are wanted. So good, so therapeutic, that we feel it's worth travelling long distances with the Lento box to find them, and record them. The tricky bit is capturing the layers of white sounds from the landscape when we get to it. Headlands are windy locations, and the noise of wind cuffing in the microphones is what we work to avoid. The sound has to be from the landscape itself, and not from the microphone baffles. Here is another passage of time we recorded earlier this year at the headland in West Looe, Cornwall. Light rain falling delicately, and spatially, onto new green leaves, against a wide panoramic backdrop of well dispersed ocean breakers. It is a night landscape entirely free of human made noise. Between the slow undulating washes, a passing seabird can be heard mid-way through the capture.  * You can hear daybreak from this same location in episode 221. ** Our last four episodes have been *sleep safe*. If we have helped you rest this month, could you buy us a coffee? 

Perhaps it is, though you may know of one even more perfect. This stream follows a country road high in the empty hills above the small town of Ceri in the Welsh county of Powys. We've shared many sections from this 2019 recording over the four years of Lento. The area feels magical, being very near to the Ceri Ridgeway (Kerry in English) an ancient route used for trading between Wales and England. This section of time is from the dead of night where no wildlife is audible, the entire focus is of the stream, and the acoustical properties of the hidden dell ankle deep in dry leaves.  We often think about what it is that makes the sound of a perfect stream. The particular combinations of musical tones maybe, as the water flows down over uneven rocks. The spatial details that make it one coherent sound-scene, panoramic, from far left to far right. The unique blending of white noise properties, acoustic reflections and other phenomenon created by the complexity  of the physical space itself. Every one of these audible aspects are seen by our listening mind to form the sound image we hear. Every detail matters in the composition of the audible image, and aural phenomenon of a perfect stream.  if you've not yet tried listening to Lento through headphones or Airpods how about giving it a go. Phone and room speakers can't convey the spatial content central to Lento recordings and that are key to the sound-feel that we call 'captured quiet'. The quiet is what hangs between the voids in a long-form spatial soundscape. It is only perceivaable with headphones or Airpods and it can take ten minutes or more to begin to sense its presence.