Suffolk Wood (part 9) - the hour before dawn with owls and nocturnal animals

You're not alone here, in this seaside town. A place of hot pasties, hot cups of tea, and families on a day out. A place of rolling Atlantic waves. This is East Looe on the coast of Cornwall. Thick grey sky. April cold. A sprinkling of rain, But shut your eyes, and it could be summer.  Find a good spot on the sand. You may need to move once or twice. Be guided by your ears. Then chuck your rucksack down, lean against it with your umbrella angled so its just behind, and you'll have the perfect spot for an uninterrupted cinematic sound-view of the crashing waves. In all their crisp textural detail. And spatial glory. Can you hear which way the longshore drift goes? Maybe not yet. It can take a few minutes. While you wait notice how there's an interesting mix of garden birds and sea birds here. A mistle thrush far left, or is it a blackbird? A wren too, far right. Beyond where the little children are playing. The waves feel powerful in this spot on the sand. Powerful, Sometimes thunderous. Coming, and going, in long swaying rhythms. Coming, and going, with wide spacious calm inbetween. 

A fresh Cornish spring day last week, along the West Looe River valley. Hear an area of ancient woodland. Described as the lungs of Looe. It's Cornish rainforest. Trees, that go back in time, farther than we can imagine. Walk inland, with the river to your right. Soon it'll be endless oaks, trunks covered with moss, all around you. As far as the eye can see. Ahead, where the muddy footpath goes. And behind, from where you've come. From left high up the steep sided valley. All the way down to touch the clean span of tidal water, that glints peacefully between the line of smaller trees.  From high in the treetops above your head, the calls of rooks echo for half a mile or more. Birds sing crisp, and less harshly in these parts. They have no human noise to compete with. You can hear woodland birds, estuary birds, and sea birds all together here. Against a backdrop of beautiful, deep brown, undulating noise. Oak forest noise.  The subtle harmonious sound that steady sea air makes when it moves over oak does seem to us to have a deep and richly brown sound-feel. It's a sound that's so spatial. So invigorating to the senses. We believe it is one of the most valuable and important sensory ingredients, of what some call a forest bathing experience. We loved every moment of it, and of being within the true precious quiet of Kilminorth Woods. 

A birds ear view over Plymouth in the far south west of England. Plymouth in a fast gusting storm. Storm Kathleen. This is how it sounded from behind the huge plate glass window of a comfortable cushioned room on the fourth floor of a hotel the night before last. The hotel overlooks a district called The Hoe, where one of the original Eddystone Lighthouses now stands. We climbed Seaton's Tower just before making this recording. Inside the narrow corkscrew stairways, the rounded structure was rumbling loudly, like being inside a giant organ pipe. A few hours later, the wind was still fierce. Taken with the microphones on a tripod facing out a few inches away from the rain stippled glass (not at all how a sound recording is conventionally made) the air pressure was pressing so hard that whispering gusts were whistling and almost singing through the window seals, left and right. Somehow, though captured entirely from within the hotel room, the soundscape is wide and open. A blended scape, formed both from the interior cushioned acoustic of the hotel room and the wide open windswept city beyond.  Far right of scene, cars can be heard passing along a rain soaked road. Left of scene air whistles through the window seal. The calls of seagulls light up the spacious sky, flying despite the extreme conditions. The building rumbles subsonically. The sound of Plymouth, an exposed coastal city, in Storm Kathleen. It's a sound photograph that without the protection of the window, would not have been possible to make. 

Today marks four years of Radio Lento! We launched on 29 March 2020. Since then, a hundred and forty hours of material shared. Hundreds of thousands of ad-free and cost-free downloads. Long-form audio recordings. Of natural and empty places. In high precision spacious sound. Real aural essences of what it is to be present and immersed in a real place.  We've not missed a week since March 2020. Rural and country places. Coastal and tidal places. Edgelands. Brutal landscapes. Sonorous interior spaces. In wind and rain. Under the forces of nature. Broad daylight and the dead of night. We're interested not in any particular thing, but in the sound of every thing. In soundscapes that are most often not experienced. Because they seem empty. Places where nothing seems to be happening. Places filled with the delicate and the subtle. The soft, and the fragile. Aural environments that only through focusing over time, form in the mind's eye of the listener. Four years of producing Lento and we do still struggle to explain to people what Lento is. Is it mindfulness? Well, it could be, but we aren't really thinking of that when we make the recordings. Is it nature? Not specifically. Is it an experimental podcast? We are definitely not experimenting. Perhaps the ordinary, the everyday, the subtle, the long-form, is just too off the beaten track. We add that Lento is slow growing, but that we do get quite a lot of good feedback. They often say why don't you do a marketing plan? We say we can't really make one because the value of the material is in the the listeners heads not ours. They say you could combine it with someone doing guided meditation. We explain that any talking at all would ruin Lento. And they ask how do people know how to listen to it? And we say they just have to work it out for themselves. And they don't say anything. And we stare at each other.  And after a few moments of thought they say your pod sounds amazing. And we ask if they have listened to it? And they say they will. And we explain it's harder than it seems to capture real authentic quiet, properly, because the places we can get to are almost always scattered with human made noise but when we do practice patience, quiet does eventually come, and that really makes each recording. And they seem to be thinking about it, but not know what to say next. And then we talk about something else. And we hope they might try listening, in a quiet place of course, with a pair of headphones or ear pods, so they can hear the captured quiet properly.  In this special edition to mark four years we retrace our steps through six 10 minute segments from these episodes:  17 Dusk in the Forest of Dean  26 Delicate sifting waves at Felixstowe Ferry  139 A passing storm from the attic of an old house 128 Persistent rain at night in an urban garden  192 Spring wildlife on the Hoo Peninsula, Kent  136 Ocean breakers near St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland  Listen to each episode in full via our blog. Our grateful thanks to everyone who listens and supports Lento.  

In late December 2020 we were given permission to make a long form landscape recording of Abney Park nature reserve in north east London. Abney Park is an area of long established woodland, surrounded by busy streets and major roads carrying traffic in and out of central London. It's an oasis of tranquility used by locals to escape from urban living, that very convincingly does look like deep rural woodland. Muddy paths between tall trees, with the advantage if you take the right routes, to never see the city beyond. To the ear though, the city is usually very much there and present. All around. And from above. Planes heading to London's airports pass almost directly overhead, often separated by only a minute or so. Sirens circling. Helicopters hovering too. Wondering along the muddy paths and admiring the specimen trees can require some considerable zoning out of the aural experience, depending on the action of the day and weather conditions.  What we've found though, by going back through our archive, is this recording. It is one we made on Christmas Day, in between lockdowns and when air travel was substantially reduced. The sounds of the city are of course still present, but greatly softened. The wind can be heard murmurating through the trees. The birds form the primary sound sources. Their crisp songs echo, and reverberate through the empty woodland. It's a unique soundscape, that is unlikely to happen again.  You can of course still witness periods of tranquility within Abney Park. We do every time we go. And there are times in this recording when the presence of human activity approaches that which is normal now. What is we think different, and demonstrated in this piece of captured quiet, is just how long the peace lasts. And just how delicate the wide panoramic sound of the city rumble is, compared to today.  We'd like to think this recording might serve as a benchmark for future city designers. and for everyone to listen to, as an example of what north east London can, and did sound like, with human made noise re-balanced with the natural world. 

Nothe Fort in Weymouth, on the Dorset coast. An old sea fort that celebrated its 150th birthday in 2022. For most of these years, it has been able to stand, looking out to the sea around Portland, amidst pristine clear night silence.   Against the velvety quiet, tidal water ebbs and flows, rises and falls, swells and recedes, softly, around semi-submerged rocks. It's water that has a slow motion, sleepy  sound. It's a soundscape that will have been heard by many a night watchman. And perhaps also the odd  soul, curious enough to be awake at this time.  But did the sea sound the same here 150 years ago as it does now? It isn't possible to say. We can't ask the people who knew. The sea, the rocks, the currents do change over long spans of time. So perhaps they did hear something slightly different, back then. Or maybe not. What we can hear in this recording, that we made by leaving the Lento box overnight in a tree beside Nothe Fort, capturing and witnessing the night hours, is from April 2023. We hope to get back to Nothe Fort before too long, to explore the museum again, and make another overnight recording that future generations will be able to listen to, and compare, with how it sounds to them, in 150 years time. 

Everything sounds different in the night. Close things sound sharper. More precise. That which is farther away, sounds larger, though it is still farther away. The sound image of the night, is curiously paradoxical. And yet in an evolutionary way, it is the night context where our hearing may have fundamentally developed to fulfill its primary role. Here we're back for a second time, amidst the upland trees that surround this hidden dell, to take in this captured quiet from the night. To really listen to the sense of atmosphere that exists when nobody is about. The rilling water, however subtle and unnoticeable during the day, fills the scene. Amplified by the heightened reflectivity of the leaves above. It's about two o'clock in the morning. Almost all the sheep on the surrounding pastures are silent. Floating, like tiny clouds, just above the pitch dark ground.  From time to time, the sky opens up with the sound of a passing plane. Nocturnal flights that for us make this place edgeland. The effect is to light up the full width of the landscape. Reveal, temporarily the vastness of the land. Its plunging contours. Its luscious fields. Its gritstone walls. Ancient barns. Sleeping farmhouses. All at rest, under an empty, windless sky.  For a daytime listen from this place, go to episode 207.

Here, take a seat on the bank. There's nobody about. Just you and the stream. And the birds of course. Cast your eyes around. Take it all in, before you get comfortable. Steep meadows all about, sloping down into this water meadow. With just you in it and a hazel tree, laden with catkins.   No wonder this water's running so fast. There's been so much rain. In one month, more than anyone can remember. Met Office says its a record. You can tell it's got pace because the surface over the larger boulders has a look like blown glass. It looks sculptural. And sounds sculptural too. Melodic, rather than white noise. With neat crisp, edges, as the outer surface of the water briskly curls and surges over the unevenness of the rocky stream bed. It's truly mesmerising, if you let yourself properly listen.  The woodland birds are singing across this valley in full spring song now. The one that sounds rich like a blackbird, repeating a phrase three or four times over, is a song thrush. Quite a few have made their home here in this secluded valley over the last couple of years. Something about them. Their clear, tuneful song. Their confidence in repetition, that brings an enchanted form of happiness. Happiness to be alive. Alive in this peaceful valley. Listening, to the rilling water as it flows through the water meadow.  * We are continuing to explore this valley in the Derbyshire hills from many different angles and locations. This recording is one segment from a twelve hour overnight capture we made a couple of weeks ago, from a new location. A few hundred yards upstream of the water meadow is an old mill. It's lain empty and as far as we know disused for longer than the thirty years we've been exploring the area. Being able to hear this stream, and the water that only a few minutes earlier had flown past that old deserted mill, somehow feels good. We hope you feel the same. And enjoy the photos too, taken as we collected the kit, in the fresh late morning light.   * Thanks for listening to Radio Lento. We'll be celebrating our 4th birthday in a few week's time. If you'd like to support us, you can do it here.

You can imagine them. The telegraph poles. The long line of them that stand along the Creel Path, on the east coast of Scotland. The thousand year old, empty Creel Path, that provides an ancient way between Coldingham and St Abbs.  Imagine them now it's night. The deserted path. Jutting up into the deep dark sky. Charcoal black. Standing firm against the wind. Holding the mile long cable from Coldingham to St Abbs. Standing. And feeling the cable's weight. Feeling in the wind, its low, moaning vibrations.  The tree, weather stunted and probably overlooked by almost all who stumble by on the rough stone track, holds and shelters the Lento microphones. Keeps them safe, as they listen out across the wild meadow before the sea. Waves, and ruffles its leaves, in the rising gusts of sea air. Waves, and braces, when it gets too strong. Braces, and relaxes again, as the air settles and stills.   When the air is still, the presence of the sea can clearly be heard. Mid-left of scene.  A wild sea, with waves crashing against the rocky cliffs of St Abbs. Seagulls can be heard too. Calling to each other. Their cries light up the spacious night sky. Sheep too, sometimes. And distantly, a marine vessel. Passing as a soft, gentle hum.    * Listen with headphones or ear pods to experience the full binaural width and depth of this often quite subtle sound photograph. Listen through time to gain a fuller picture of the aural landscape. Other Lento recordings captured on the Creel Path are episode 131 and episode 146.

Steep grassy meadows. Grazing sheep. Overgrown hedgerows. Thickets. Narrow stony streams, sometimes with sandy banks. Grit stone walls, with tumbled stones where weather and animals have made a way through. Thistles. Clumps of dense nettles. Patches of tall, well established woodland. A muddy farm beyond. And another behind. And hours, if you want, if you allow yourself, to lean elbows upon damp timbered gates, Put aside what's to do, and focus every part of your conscious mind on taking the landscape in.  Here, in the presence of trees, nestled half way up a Derbyshire moorland by a babbling stream, is a good place to practice  taking in the landscape. Where the non-human and the human worlds blend. It may look and often sound bucolic. but this is not in a strict sense wilderness. It's an edgeland. Farm machinery, A-roads, the flight paths to Manchester's ringway airport, though quite feint, are in range of hearing. But not distractingly so. Far off. Worlds, in a kind of pleasantly acceptable balance. This hour, is daytime. A bright morning in August. Clean. Sharp. In a country sort of way. Looking out onto the steep meadow in front, with sheep grazing, and under these tall well established trees, each fresh eddy of the clean flowing stream, reflects off the broad leaves above. Reflects, as soft shifting shadows do. And creates a sense of intimate, tree shaped, space.