Radio Lento podcast

We love the ambience of Sant Llorence de la Muga, a small village high in the Pyrenees. It's a beautifully peaceful place but we know the sound of the bells every quarter are not ideal for those wanting to spend time with the rain, the open peacefulness of mountainous quiet, and the occasional beeps of what we think are nocturnal frogs. So, this passage of time is from episode 281, adjusted. 

With the chimes carefully spliced out, this piece of captured quiet runs from just before 3am to just after 4am. Heavy rain begins to fall and the sky grumbles with thunder. The rain then eases off allowing you to hear beyond the distant white noise of the nearby shallow river and deeper into the night landscape. You may hear to the right of scene one and sometimes more tiny beeps from time to time. We think these are frogs. The sounds are both soft and yet very distinguishable in the soundscape. And comforting too, for some curious reason.

Welcome back to Radio Lento and a new year of captured quiet from natural places. It's so good you are here.

To open 2026 we're heading back to rural Shropshire which we visited last year thanks to a listener recommendation. We found so many perfect places on this trip in May.

Remember almost every Lento soundscape is made when there's nobody about, not even us. What you hear is a fully authentic passage of time recorded in high definition spatial sound, ideal for headphone or Airpod listening. Each recording is captured using a one-shot true-timeline method and through the same device, the Lento box, which we also call our sound camera. Our aim is to capture long-form sound images that let you engage as directly as possible with the landscape, so it speaks for itself, without us or anybody else to get in the way. And wildlife does sound better when there are no people about.

The exact location of the Lento box on this recording is Poles Coppice, a nature reserve surrounded by farmland and grassy moors. We gave it #LentoApproved status. It's spring. Weather conditions are fair. Wind very light, just 2 to 3 knots, with occasional gusts of 10 to 15 knots. Wind gusts can often be heard sweeping through the oak trees, from left to right of scene. When this happens you really get a sense of the physical space around you (especially if you are listening on headphones or Airpods).

* This passage of time begins with the last few fragile moments of night quiet. Then the very first bird of the new day begins to sing. Gradually, as time passes and the sky grows in luminosity, more birds start to sing. After about 15 minutes the dawn chorus is underway. It continues over the full 75 minutes of this episode segment, shifting and changing in pace and intensity. It's subtle and interesting how the changes blend into one another, and happen almost like movements of a symphony, though we aren't that keen on imposing human ideas onto the patterns of nature. We can't talk to birds and ask them what they are singing and why, but we can apply our human ability to bear witness to this amazing phenomenon without interfering or disturbing it.

Tied to a railing, the Lento box records alone. It's about two in the morning along the river bank east of Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex. Wind is blowing inland from the east, light, gusting to moderate. Sky dark, and heavy with cloud. Huge rainclouds are approaching, currently located out over the North Sea. When they arrive this whole area will be subjected to long periods of persistent, often squally rain, lasting well into the next day.

For now though the Lento box is dry. Its microphones capturing just the sound of the incoming tide as it steadily advances up the seawall. Angled directly towards Wallasea Island, the expanse of estuary water between the seawall and the opposite bank of the River Crouch can be heard as a wide and spatial backdrop.

Throughout this 30 minute passage of nocturnal time, the way the water plays along the seawall constantly develops and evolves. Sometimes individual waves form into resonant airpockets, producing fleetingly melodic notes. Wave energies surge and dissipate, surge and dissipate, edging closer and closer to the microphones on the rising tide. What's consistent is the timbre of the water as it washes over the rippled ridges of the seawall. To us silvery. Each individual wave captured in sharp spatial detail that you can experience in full using headphones or AirPods.

At twenty three minutes an aircraft approaches from the east and passes over Wallasea Island. From left to right of scene. Reveals across the empty void of the sky how human activity can still be heard over this otherwise wild and empty landscape.

* This sound photograph of the tidal River Crouch comes from a twelve hour non-stop overnight recording we made back in August 2021. For more sections of time from this same location please browse the Lento archive.

The still luminous sky above the sheer rock cliffs was turning an even deeper shade of blue, as we stepped down onto the wet sand of the beach at Boggle Hole. For a moment we just had to stand. Take it all in. Wide stretches of undulating sand. Half submerged boulders like sleeping elephants. Towering rock faces so vertical and so angled that they catch and reflect every breaking wave, every calling bird, every clack of a dislodged stone, back into your ears, so you hear them for a second time.

The tide's been receding for several hours. We turn right, and walk to find a good spot to record. We follow the band of newly exposed sand along the tidal zone, dodging pools of stranded water. See sea birds swooping, then landing, momentarily. Snatch up a morsel. Then they're up and flying again.

Herring gulls circle high overhead. Black headed gulls pass like projectiles, screeching for the empty air in front of them to get out of the way. Their bold cries caught, and reflected, by the plummeting cliffs of sheer vertical rock. This we know, we hear, we see, we feel, is a rarified place. A landscape of exceptional quality.

It doesn't matter how many hundreds of miles we have to go to find places like this, it's always worth it. Environments where extreme quiet and extreme spatialness coexist, together, for hours. Undisturbed. Uninterrupted. Unspoiled. We found a spot, then left the Lento box on a tripod to record the scene alone, in the gathering dark.

* We made this recording, or more accurately we took this sound photograph of Boggle Hole beach one evening last August whilst staying at the Youth Hostel. It's one of the most spatial sound captures we've made this year. Listen with headphones in a quiet place, and let yourself settle into the passage of time, to let your ears adjust and get the full spatial effect.

Capturing the sound-feel of real night quiet is special. It requires a lot of time and a location where quiet naturally occurs in more than just a fleeting way. Quiet is not silence. Silence is the absence of sound, whereas quiet happens when everything in the landscape is still audible. Just softer, and slower.

Night brings quiet to natural and edgeland places. It enables us to better hear an environment's true spatialness and blend of sound signatures. By tying the Lento box to a tree looking down over the Warren on the Kent coast and exposing the microphones for over 50 hours non-stop, long periods of naturally occurring quiet were captured that serve as a true impression of this place.

In this 90-minute passage of time taken from the dead of night on the second day of the recording, the sea can be heard distantly crashing onto the beach at the foot of the Warren. It surges and retreats, in slow unfurling rhythms. Close to the microphones, in the leaf litter around the tree, crickets call to each other in regular patterns, like naturally occurring clocks. Banks of wind blow in from time to time, gently ruffling leaves from left to right of scene. Sounds of indistinct origin sometimes echo across the valley, revealing the true width and depth of the space and far cries of seagulls, high flying in the vastness of the night sky.  

Of course this is England, and only a short distance from France. The headlights of French cars are sometimes visible from this very point. The Strait of Dover is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and a flight path runs directly over this area. Despite these mechanisms of human life, the planes that do overfly during this passage of time are quite gentle in the way they traverse the sky. It is the night quiet, and the sea, and the crickets that speak for themselves, and mean we just have to share this recording so everyone can be a sound-witness to the quiet of this place.

* We made this recording back in August 2024. We didn't actually intend to leave the Lento box out recording for so long (into a third day) but we're glad we did.