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Radio Lento podcast

Podcast Radio Lento podcast
Hugh Huddy
Surround yourself with somewhere else. Captured quiet from natural places. Put the ”outside on” with headphones. Find us on Twitter @RadioLento. Support the pod...
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  • 247 Natural white noise from the firs of Kielder Forest
    This is segment II from a 6-hour sound capture we took earlier this year at Kielder Forest in Northumberland. Recorded in spring, the environment is rich with birdsong, mainly willow warblers whose song is a short and very cheerful descending scale. We'd been walking along one of the rough paths that thread through the forest below the Kielder Observatory and had found exactly what we'd travelled up to this specific area to record. The hushing sound of wind in tall fir trees.  Of course these are no ordinary trees. They are Grandis Firs. Vertically vast. Each the size of a 15 storey tower block, with huge drooping boughs draped in billions of tiny pine needles. Every needle catches in the wind and converts the energy into audible sound. Individually it's hard to imagine one could hear anything produced from one needle at all, but heard altogether, the sound is powerful. Deeply moving. Akin even to a spiritual experience. After finding a suitable tree to rest the Lento box against, we left it behind in the forest to record the scene alone, hoping the wind would not die down.  The wind continued to blow in slow undulating waves. And the willow warblers continued to sing their lovely droopy songs, no doubt perched on the droopy boughs of the giant firs. But the trees and the birds were not the only aural presences in this part of the forest. There's a rushing stream, flowing from left to right of scene. It issues its own fresh bright sound to the interior space of the forest, as it rushes down into the valley to join the city-sized reservoir below.  * At 18 minutes into this segment a plane flies over, but don't worry, it's relatively soft and gentle, flying high up above the clouds. It may initially be hard to tell whether the white noise is from the stream or wind in the firs in this recording. Over time, and as your ears adjust to the aural environment, the distinct qualities of the stream and the wind in the firs may resolve out. Both are highly spatial and texturally different. They often blend into one another, then part, like vails woven from different fabrics, billowing together in currents of air. ** Follow us on Bluesky or Ko-fi to keep up with Lento news. We recently celebrated a big Lento milestone!
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  • 246 Edgeland time by the Hythe Sound Mirror (sleep safe)
    Turn right off the towpath beside the Military Canal, cross the footbridge, locate the stile that leads onto the hill, then follow the rough footpath up into some impressive edgeland. It's rough. Grassy. Very thistly. And as you ascend it feels hard. Increasingly wild. It's somewhere up here, we say, striding firm against the gradient. But the thing's not marked on the map.   The Sound Mirror of Hythe is a large concrete parabolic dish. A giant ear, pointed out to sea, designed a hundred years ago, pre-RADAR for the early detection of incoming aircraft. Surely, we puff, a structure like this must stand out like a sore thumb? Well no. The steep ground has twists and folds. Ridges and bends that have to be walked. And no military installation worth its salt, however obsolete, is or should ever be easy to find.  We eventually see huddled low in the grass a squat blockhouse. A derelict radio receiving station, according to one historical website. Then we see the dish itself. A concrete shape, nestled against a steep bank, sadly now in a terrible state, trees growing up through its collapsing sections. Up close the dish is behind substantial chainwire fencing and surrounded by what amounts to a moat of evil shoulder high stinging nettles. Whatever evidence there may be of the 'listening chamber' said to reside at the foot of the structure, is not possible to see. It may indeed be buried under broken concrete.  We stood for a long time. Taking it all in. Despite its state, this dish is still active. Still reflecting and to some extent shaping the aural soundscape around it. Of course only from the listening chamber could one be an ear witness to what this structure was properly designed to do, but knowing that on some level it is still working, still channeling the soundscape from the sky above the sea, is, in a quiet way, thrilling. We found some shelter for the Lento box behind the radio receiving station, angling its view up the hill to capture both the near and far soundscapes. Near, wild wind whips through the edgeland grasses, a few crickets are cricketing. Mid-distance left, the sound mirror, about 40 yards. You can hear the wind when it catches in the trees growing in and around the dish and sometimes a yellowhammer. Right of scene is the hill rolling down into the valley. At the bottom the military canal. What filters in from behind the Lento box is from the coast and the ocean view. Toot toot of the steam railway that runs from Hythe, Dymchurch, Romney and Dungeness. Occasional distant echoes from circling seagulls and a construction site. Listening back we think some of these sounds at least are being reflected off the dish itself. 
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  • 245 Night rain on the edge of the Quantock hills (sleep safe)
    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. 
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  • 244 Rocky West Somerset beach (high-definition sound)
    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. 
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  • 243 Night callings in the Forest of Dean - interleaved worlds
    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. 
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