Radio Lento
Not specifically for children, but each episode features a lovely landscape sound postcards in 3D immersive sound. Best with earphones. Listen while reading, resting or being mindful.
Not specifically for children, but each episode features a lovely landscape sound postcards in 3D immersive sound. Best with earphones. Listen while reading, resting or being mindful.
Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started: March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 278 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
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Night has fallen over the Forest of Dean. In the clearing where we left the microphones, the cool nocturnal air has begun to echo with the calls of tawny owls. Cars passing on the distant forest road hush like banks of wind through the high tree tops. Down on the forest floor, hidden beneath the twisted vines, a stream is revealed. Its watery eddies sparkle brightly through the darkness, reflected and amplified by the broad leaves above. When there’s no light in a forest everything sounds different. Sharper. What was close, is closer. Reverberant. What was far, is farther away. But between the echoes, there is silence. Between the tree trunks, branches crack, a creature squeals, a distant dog barks. Murmurs of murmurs seep through from the outside world. Falling softly on the gnarly bark of this ancient tree, in this giant forest where the owls live, these are the sounds of the night-time passing.
Tucked behind buildings, encircled by busy roads in the borough of Hackney in London, there’s Abney Park. It’s one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries of London with marble-topped tombs half hidden by vines. It is a designated nature reserve protecting a rich ecological environment. Locals nip in, to take their dogs for a walk, to clear their heads and to get lost on its winding paths. It’s home too for a rich variety of birds, including green parrots. Planted as an exotic arboretum in 1840, there are around 200 trees, some still remain from that first planting. It’s a mild October day, and the rain is falling. Everything is being drenched. After a long time walking under dripping canopy we find a spot for the microphones. Set back from the path it’s a small leafy hollow, bisected by a diagonal spur growing out of an old oak. The rain is falling heavier now, sifting down in waves down through the branches, pattering onto millions of waxy leaves. These old trees are bathing in it. They’re pushing away the noise of the city, and sheltering the tranquillity of Abney Park under their boughs.
While we went off to explore along the river banks of the Crouch, we left the microphones behind to record on the windowsill of a derelict shed just inside the deserted marina on the leeside of the prevailing wind. As time passes, yacht masts set shaking in the wind ring out, some like bells. Taught lines whistle. Restless halyards knock and settle. A redshank, some cawing crows, impatient gulls and a curlew. There are starlings too, perched on the power lines. A late foraging bee, a propeller plane, and some distant motorbikes on the B1010. It’s afternoon, but a cockerel makes it sound like morning. Two dogs bark distantly while two men tinker in a nearby shed beside some dry-landed rocked-over boats. A jet plane softly rumbles out to sea, far above the marina. There’s a flag near to this shed. In the wind it is restless, flapping and furling and unfurling.
Night has come, and owls, to clear the slate. In this wonderful old wood the August air is still and filled with brightly chirping crickets. A propeller plane hums into the Eastern sky, its sound mixes with the soft rumble of a high-altitude jet, and dissolves away over the wood. The feeling of peace is mesmerising. Hidden in their treetop nests, countless wood pigeons, wrens, robins and rooks are sleeping. Still as statues the trees stand waiting. Dead branches drop, some fall with a single thump, others clatter down through leaves. Sounds float into the wood blurrily from the world outside. Ducks and geese, hints of far-away night traffic on the A12, and ghostly echoes, cows and sheep grazing the surrounding meadows. Is time really passing or is the wood dreaming? It’s sifting yesterday away. Then, a bell strikes 1am. Beautiful. Crystal clear. The parish clock, several miles away and barely audible during the day. There are murmurs of a breeze throughout, and hazes of tiny delicate sounds like flurries of dry rain that come in waves. Perhaps leaves microscopically jostling in the cooling air.
Not a place for unstable microphones. A mile along the winding footpath beside the River Crouch, with Althorne railway station and the ringing masts of Bridgemarsh Marina behind us, the landscape ahead is barren and wonderful. We pass concrete river bank reinforcements like sculpted mounds, treacherous slippery with weed. Further on, we come upon a stony beach and leave the microphones to record on a tripod, at the water’s edge. We bid them farewell while we retire for a flask of tea. Drawn by the low tide and a waiting sea, fresh water streams urgently out, shallow over stones, rushing in sparkling eddies, blown this way and that by the equinoctial winds. But at 12 minutes alone and overcome by the pressure of air, the tripod keels over. It clanks onto newly exposed mud and stone, saved, by the outgoing tide. They carry on recording with flowing water perilously close. From this angle, the sound balance has shifted. Less river, more sky. A desolate grey sky, alive only with wind. The water hurries on. A lone redshank rings overhead. Gusts bully and blow. Wet mud glistens and dries. Then at 19 minutes seen from afar, back one of us runs over the stones, to set the tripod straight, to record a little more. The River Crouch is shrinking steadily, as it empties itself into the sea. Another lone bird passes. Then back we come again to collect the microphones and carry on with our walk to Burnham-on-Crouch.
It’s just after midday in August and very hot. Families are out on the beach sunbathing, children play in the water. At the shoreline, cool waves wash and dissolve onto the shingle. With each recession of a wave, water fizzes over the stones, sometimes frothing like bubbling champagne overflowing from a glass. The waves roll in on currents that lift and curl. Each wave kneads and brushes the shingle in its own unique way. The detail is intricate, each fragment of stone moves with it’s own audible signature. Sitting so close to moving water is like a balm to the ears. To celebrate six months of Radio Lento, here’s 19 minutes of watery ear balm from Felixstowe beach!
East Cliff overlooks the Channel and on a clear day like this, has a hazy view of France. On the way down to The Warren Beach, steep down a narrow winding path lined with stubby trees, we found a quiet spot to record, free of road noise. We left the microphones on a little tree overgrown with ivy, leaning out over a precipitous bank, thick with undergrowth and more trees overlooking a campsite below. Listen-in to the sound of the distant sea pervading the air like a soporific pillow. At 7 minutes, the scene is temporarily and dramatically interrupted by a World War II Spitfire. It appears from the land behind, heads briefly out towards France, before turning back. 45 minutes of coastal tranquillity returns. Now settle into the sound of the ocean murmuring with some comfortable wood pigeons, robins and seagulls. Light breezes ruffle leaves, children’s voices float up from the campsite, high planes cross the sky. At the foot of the cliff the odd train passes along the Folkestone to Dover railway line.
Basking in 30 degree heat borrowed from July, it’s a still September day. This forest, set in the Hertfordshire countryside, is at its calmest. As it is so quiet, it may take a little time for your ears to adjust. It is late on a Monday morning, there’s nobody else around to hear the woodland alive with the buzzing of insects and scattered bird calls of rooks, robins and wood pigeons.
Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started:
March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 278 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
When Chloe is sent off to live with her mysterious and eccentric grandmother she learns an unbelievable secret. Grandma Ivy is none other than Mother Nature herself! And Chloe is next in line to assume to the power and responsibility of the job. Can a twelve-year old learn to balance the entire world’s ecosystem while just trying to fit in at her new school? Only Mother Nature knows.
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