125 May rain in the Forest of Dean

Full Episode description

A band of cloud slowly drifts towards a sunlit clearing, deep in the Forest of Dean. It’s morning in late May, and the birds are lighting up the space in sound as brightly as the sun. Wrens. Blackcaps. Song thrush. Over the forest floor, tangled vines warm in the heat. High above the approaching clouds, a jet plane softly rumbles by. Perhaps some of its passengers are dreaming of falling rain, in a cool quiet woodland.

We’ve been scanning for rain, through the 72 hours of audio we recorded last month in the Forest of Dean, because it is always so rejuvenating to listen to.  Falling rain, and the aural ambiences that come before and after it, seem to play to our atavistic instincts. Those ancient, ancestral compulsions that reveal that our thirst for water reaches far beyond the mere act of drinking it.

Here’s what the mics we left alone in the forest captured, from the trunk of an old oak tree beside a hidden clearing, as a shower of fresh May rain passes over.

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