281 Night rain in the Pyrenees (sleep safe with chimes)

Beside the only road leading out of Sant Llorenc de la Muga we found a small group of trees. We didn't have much time. The sky was pitch black and the ground beneath our feet was streaming with water that'd all come down a few minutes ago in a deluge with simultaneous flashes of forked lightening so powerful, so bright, they'd temporarily frozen us to the spot. We shone our torch from tree to tree, searching for a suitable trunk that might provide some shelter for the Lento box. The road was deserted. Traffic was not an issue. Only one more village lay beyond, where the road literally ended.      A patch of bare trunk came into view between rain soaked leaves. Around us every thing glistened. And dripped. Every shrub. Every branch. Every leaf.  To the eyes and to the ears it was a rich sparkling sensory experience, that seemed interchangeable. Reaching through we tied the Lento box onto the trunk, angled it onto the wide landscape scene, and left it to record alone through the night.  This segment of time was captured from just before 3am to just after 4am. Heavy rain falls and the sky periodically grumbles with thunder, but eventually it eases off. To the right of scene one and sometimes more tiny beeps can be heard from time to time. We aren't sure what creatures make these delicately fleeting sounds. Frogs perhaps, lizards, or insects? The sounds are both soft and yet very distinguishable in the soundscape, and comforting for some curious reason. The medieval clock on the church of Sant Llorenc strikes the quarters and the hours through the night. Ancient bells seem even more enchanting when heard in the dead of night, and through crystal clear rain.

Our friends told us that in Sant Llorenc the weather changes towards the end of August. Endless days of thick summer heat gives way to something altogether more dramatic. Ominous black clouds the size of cities. Rain drops like translucent grapes. Fork lightening like you see at the cinema. Thunder, that carves open the sky, like unimaginably huge boulders crashing downwards from the high mountain peaks.  We followed the river Muga out of Sant Llorenc, into the valley beyond. Our aim was to reach a reservoir which we thought may be a good place to leave the Lento box to make an overnight recording. Eventually, along rough tracks surrounded by dense trees and noisy cicadas, we reached the water. Our way however was blocked. Two white horses.  Impressive creatures. Standing astride the track. They had their backs towards us. We stopped, and watched, and kept our distance. Despite facing the other way the horses knew we were there. In low voices we shared ideas on what to do, whilst continuing to watch. Both stood firm. They were expressing only the smallest of movements through their tails.  Some time passed. It felt like they were communicating something to us. But what? The valley with all its assorted cicadas seemed, somehow, to have fallen silent. We decided not to try to pass them. Something perhaps in the way they moved their tails said turn back. So we turned back. Returning along the track we entered an area of the valley where the shallow river sounded unusually sonorous. The way the water tumbled over the rocks. the depth, and the particular arrangement of the trees. Just off the track a tree looked down into the gorge, so we tied the lento box to it. It was the perfect place for it to record. Perhaps, if we could have read the tails of the horses, this was what they were trying to say. Record back where you've come. Where it's sheltered. And where the river wrills. There's a storm. Coming.

For this second August intermission we've once again brought together multiple recordings made across a location to share as one very long non-stop piece.  This episode is our second ever "Lento Long". Three hours of spatial sound landscape captured from the Kielder Forest in Northumberland in the North East of England near to the Scottish border. It may all be sleep safe, depending on your own personal sensitivities to bird song which is prominent throughout the first 90 minutes. The latter 90 minutes is captured quiet from the night.  Here's a guide to what you'll hear. - The episode opens with a daytime sound-view from an avenue of tall firs situated east of the giant Kielder reservoir. Banks of fresh morning air is pressing through the firs in soft hushing undulations, and bright birds are singing from everywhere.        - At 49 minutes you seamlessly travel over the water by five miles to the south west of the reservoir, to a densely forested area just below the Kielder Observatory. It's afternoon. The woodland ambience is alive with a white noise haze created by a clean rushing stream, countless willow warblers, and gentle surges of rich brown noise created as banks of wind filter through Grandis Firs some tall as 15 storey buildings. - At 1 hour 36 minutes this Kielder day becomes Kielder night. Returning to the same peaceful location you were east of the reservoir, this time to experience the sound-view of the reservoir at night. Those pristine hours before dawn, when only owls and echoes roam the spaces between the trees, velvety hushes of rich brown noise waft down from avenues of tall fir trees, and nocturnal geese can be heard flying far out over the ink black water. The episodes we blended together to make this Lento Long are 257, 247, 222 and 240, where you can read in detail about each location. * Lento resumes a weekly service of captured quiet from new places in September. We have some gorgeous new locations to share with you! Thanks to everyone for listening. 

It's August intermission time! This year we've decided to bring together recordings from more than one location in a specific geographic area and share them as a long non-stop episode.  This is our first ever "Lento Long" at 3 hours. A chance to aurally travel across a geographic area and experience it from different perspectives. Depending on your own personal sensitivities to human made sound, it may be sleep safe. Children can distantly be heard playing on the beaches, and at just over an hour a microlight gradually drones over. For us this creates a wonderful sense of beach-time, where nothing in the world feels urgent anymore, but not everyone may respond in the same way so we haven't officially labelled this Lento Long as *sleep safe*. Here's a guide to what you'll hear. - The first hour is from the edge of the rocky beach at Lilstock in West Somerset, your back lent against a comfortable tree as the waves wash left to right with the longshore drift.  - At one hour this blends into the rarified ambience of Kilve beach at low tide, a soundscape carried into awareness with the gradual progression of a little microlight that slowly drones over high above. - At one hour thirty, day becomes night. A weatherfront is passing over a remote cottage half way up West Quantoxhead. Fresh currents of Somerset air press freely through a bank of trees behind the cottage, setting their leaves and branches swaying, and hushing in richly undulating white noise.  - At just after two hours thirty, you invisibly reappear, sitting beside a secluded stream farther up the hill. You're listening to the pristine sound of water flowing off the top of West Quantoxhead, with the gentle company of two resting sheep nearby.  The episodes we blended together to make this Lento Long are 244, 254, 248, 255 and 249, where you can read in detail about each location. They were all recorded in late October 2024. We'll release another Lento Long next week and resume the weekly service from the start of September. Thanks to everyone for listening.

This week we're returning to Shelve Wood in Shropshire to witness another hour from the unaccompanied overnight capture we made in June. This section of time includes the effects of a strong weather front. It sweeps over the dense woodland, creating rich spatial waves of naturally occurring white, brown and grey noise.  Because the Lento box spent the whole night alone immersed within the forest, recording in high definition binaural sound, by listening back with headphones or Airpods we're able to aurally locate ourselves within Shelve Wood itself. Become aural witnesses. Hearing as if we are there, how time passed, surrounded by the trees. the sense of space. How each tree responds in its own unique way to the wind. And the rain drops, that find their way all the way down through the thick firs, to land on the forest floor.  * This section of time is from the early hours of the morning. The fir tree that held the Lento box was impressively tall. The Lento box captures the acoustical space of the forest facing outwards from the trunk, five feet (human height) above the ground. It's a vast reverberant zone that apart from the tree trunks, is essentially an empty space between the soft cushion of the forest floor and the ceiling of dense fir needles twenty feet above. In this zone the natural noises of the forest travel over long distances. 

It's not often we record from the back garden. The spot is suburban. Grassy and full of tangled shrubs yes, and encircled by a sprawling wisteria too that visually at least gives a verdantly self contained feel. But foliage while beguiling the eye does not strain out the roads and street sounds of the city. Or the sky. Flight paved, plane lined, jet rumbled. No, quiet is never in abundance here.  At the end of last week, after a long run of bone dry conditions, the day came when rain was forecast. As day turned to dusk, the sky that'd been different shades of blue for so long, turned an opaque grey. The dark did not bring cool. If anything the air gained heat. As we set up the Lento box to record, the air moved around our bare arms and legs like warm weightless water. We could almost feel with our skin how the rain was starting to form. We left the box alone on the grass, by the wisteria, to record all night. A night of half conscious dreams of rain, pounding on the roof. Of liberally flowing water. Of a loudly chortling drain. Of dawn birds singing through aural mists of green things dripping. Listening back, witnessing the passage of time when the first rain began to fall, what struck us most was how delicious the first rain felt. Perhaps it's joy. The plants at last are having a drink. As time passes, other feelings come about. This is good rain. Heavy rain. Quenching rain. The birds will be able to bathe in shallow puddles gathered between roofs, and the world will sparkle, clean, when the light comes. But what we also gained from a long listen to this section of time, was the transition. How different the environment sounds and feels towards the end. Echoes and a pleasant sheen of aural silkyness. And endless things dripping. And what we didn't expect to hear, bees starting their days from the very first rays of daylight. And hints of swifts screaming overhead. 

A bright April day has dawned in Derbyshire earlier in the spring. The air is unusually still for this time of year and this upland location. At just under a thousand feet barely a breeze is ruffling the trees surrounding the mics. These are the same trees that can be heard so powerfully in episode 250 - Moorland trees in mid-winter gales.  Far across the valley, stretching from far left to far right of scene, a country road threads its way over the moors. It links the small Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge to the busier Cheshire town of Macclesfield about seven miles away. Due to a major land slip and road closure on the next valley, there is less traffic, though you can hear occasional cars threading the tarmac way through the landscape from time to time.   Mid left down the field, a woodpecker. In the same copse, a song thrush. From different points in the mid-distance seesawing great tits. Wrens too, and wood pigeons, and a chif chaf, and a pheasant.  Deep in the valley, geese can be heard over the reservoir. What made this segment of the overnight recording feel special though was the blackbird.  As time passes the blackbird lands on a branch of the apple tree directly above the Lento box, and sings so sonorously. And then does it again, as if it knows how special it is to witness a singing blackbird so close. 

(pronounced Birr Island) This long, slow Devon day, is drawing softly to a close. Looking out to sea, the sky beyond has already fallen velvet black. It's midnight. Scattered lamps shine on Burgh Island. It looks from here more like a dark thicket, afloat on a vast water field. With glow worms, hiding.  The tide's in now. Closed around the island. Encircled it, with rich undulating sound. Filled up the wide sandy beach, for as far as the eye can see, with swirling shallows. Ankle deep. As the sea meets itself coming in across the causeway, it splashes up fingers of crisp white spray.       Some gulls are still aloft. High wheeling, but mostly quiet. Silently weaving between the stars. Riding on the diurnal winds. the off-shore breeze, or land breeze, created by the land-sea temperature contrast that happens at this time of night. * As with all Lento episodes it can take several minutes for your listening brain to properly switch into the soundscape. This one hour segment is from an overnight recording we made in April. The Lento box is perched on a second floor balcony looking straight down the causeway towards Burgh island, which is only about 200 yards from the box. Due to the topography of the beach and how it contours around the island, the sound-shape of the sea is interestingly different to other coastal locations we've captured. The breakers form and gather spatially, often very slowly, with long periods of swirling eddies in between. High tide is reached towards the end of this segment. Moderately strong wind gusts sometimes buffer the microphones. As a recording location it is exposed. We've applied some spot rumble reduction when this happens just to improve the experience for headphone / Airpod listeners.

Oak trees have a very particular sound this time of year. It's to do with the leaves. Their texture, shape and contours. How they catch and filter the breeze. On a warm spring day, like this one the Lento box captured last month in rural Shropshire, you can hear the softness of the moving air sonified by banks of oak leaves. The scene around the microphone box, tied to the trunk of a relatively young oak tree, is endlessly rural. Ahead, over a bank thick with tangled shrubs, a wide field, vibrant green, is dotted with sheep and lambs. Song birds sing out from around the small nature reserve. A place called Poles Coppice. A point on the landscape with many neatly hidden well occupied perches. Birds are like nothing else. Their songs illuminate dusky shadows between the trees. And carry far. Over fields, bathed in late afternoon sun. And sheep, dutifully grazing   * Poles Coppice nature reserve is quite remote and has a lovely sound-feel, thanks to its resident birds and oak trees. the country road that can sometimes be heard mid-left of scene (far distant) leads to a small town called Minsterley. When that day last month we set out to capture the spring sound of Shropshire we auditioned various locations before eventually stumbling upon this particularly peaceful little place. Thank you to the guardians of Poles Coppice who created this nature reserve. We are so glad to be able to share its natural sound.  ** Poles Coppice is officially #LentoApproved.

Experiencing the spatial sense of emptiness, in a natural place, when there's nobody about, endlessly fascinates us. We built a high resolution immersive sound capture device to study it. We find natural places to leave it out recording alone, to capture quiet scenes in sound. Of time passing. We are all intrinsically hyper-attentive to the possible presence of people within our surroundings. Any movement that might signal another person in the vicinity, fundamentally changes our thoughts. It deflects our mind's eye from fully connecting with the place. This is why we always set out to record in largely uninhabited locations that are good sources of naturally occurring sound. Before Lento came about, the question of whether or not a falling tree makes a sound when there's no one around to hear it, proved puzzlingly difficult to argue in classroom discussions. If only we could send back in time this sound-scene of Shelve Wood in Shropshire, that we recorded last month. Yes, remote listening is a thing. Be there and yet not be there to hear the trees. Slow banks of shifting air, brushing softly, panoramically, through the firs. And every drop of rain, that finds its way down, between the branches, to land on the soft dry carpet of the forest floor. Shelve Wood has an acoustic that conveys space. A vast space. It is a space that, especially at night, murmerates with deep, velvety echoes. Hushes. Thousands of conifers and spruce, moving together, in natural sympathy with the wind. * This section of time is from a 12-hour overnight recording we made last month in beautiful Shropshire. The fir tree that held the Lento box was impressively tall, and peaceful.