182 Night scapes special - August intermission 4 (sleep safe)

For this last August intermission episode we've made you a montage of *sleep safe* sound-scenes selected from four overnight recordings.

From the sea wall at Burnham-on-Crouch, looking out over panoramic tidal estuary waters by Wallasea Island. An oak tree deep within the Forest of Dean where woodcock make their roding flights. A remote fishing village harbour under empty skies in South East Scotland. To a rural wood in Suffolk where we made our first ever overnight recording.

Here are some short descriptions plus links to the episodes so you can hear them in full.

126 The seawall and the night patrolling curlews

To be a remote seawall, on a stretch of tidal estuary. To see the days and nights not as periods of time, but as slowly undulating waves. To feel the weight of water, twice rising, twice falling. To hear, the lone patrolling curlews. This is Burnham-on-Crouch around 4am, looking out across the tidal waters towards Wallasea Island

129 Pristine quiet to early dawn

A clearing, deep within an expansive forest, where the night air carries so little sound that only the trickling stream can be heard. The stream's sound reflects narrowly off the trunk of the tree, like the flickering light of a campfire. But when a woodcock flies by, on its roding flight, the sense of space is temporarily revealed. This segment of overnight recording we made in the Forest of Dean. It begins at around 4am when the space around the oak tree holding the microphones is still pitch dark.

140 Fishing village harbour at night

Real quiet from the middle of the night, captured from a point above the harbour of St Abbs on the East Coast of Scotland. Car-free. Plane-free. Just the sparse and spacious cries of circling gulls over harbour waves, and the faintest hum of a fishing vessel anchored somewhere out at sea. This remote, thousand-year-old fishing village is to us a place defined by its quiet horizons and empty, plane-less skies.

74 Night shallowing in a Suffolk Wood

It's 3am in our first ever twelve hour overnight sound landscape recording. A Wood in Dedham Vale, Suffolk. Balmy August night. the Lento mics left alone to capture the sound landscape from deep within the uninhabited woodland. they revealed dark bush crickets, chirruping the passing of time. Wind moving softly over the tree tops. the distant bell of St Mary's church, floating through the space beneath the trees, striking three. Nocturnal animals treading lightly over dry leaves. This 2017 recording opened up a whole new world to us, and inspired us to make more recordings and share them through Radio Lento.