Radio Lento podcast21 Aug 2021

Rising tide in the rock garden - the sea wall near Bradwell-on-Sea

Stop walking! There's a place to sit. Roll up your jacket to make a cushion and perch on the rocks, just for a moment, to take in the view. Look! Over the expanse of cloud-dappled water, beyond, where the outgoing surge of the river Blackwater swirls into the North Sea, that's Mersea Island. From here, just a sliver of low lying land.

A few miles up the coast, though not yet in sight, are the two giant blockhouses of the now decommissioned and quiescent Bradwell nuclear power station built in 1957. Between the cuffing gusts of the onshore breeze, the air here feels unusually still of human noise. Unusually crisp, unusually vibrant with textural sounds. Deep inside clouds and far out over the channel, are some passing rumbles. Not thunder, more like low flying military jets patrolling and underlining some invisible boundary out there, over the sea. Their distant rumblings not only illuminate, through sound, the infinite void of the sky, but bring contrast to the very tiniest, very closest of sounds. Countless fine edged movements, of a sand made of featherlight shells. Shifting and sifting, picked up and dropped, by gentle, inquisitive waves.

Somehow, a quarter of an hour has passed. The rock pools between the sunken concrete barges that make up the sea wall, are now filling, and swirling, with the rising tide. Moving back up the rocks, above the high water mark, you find a new place to sit, and watch, as the pools overflow, merge into one another, to become new areas of wide open sea. The planes are gone. The footpath beckons. But you stay for a little while longer, just to listen to the changing sounds of the fast disappearing rock garden.

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Episoder(300)

299 Owls of Big Wood (sleep safe with owls)

Night woodland. Sonorous owls. Soft nocturnal breezes catching high in the broad-leafed trees. A panoramic woodland in spatial sound, collected by the Lento box alone. Always so fascinating to us is h...

14 Jul 50min

298 Thunderstorm over sonorous rural woodland (warning - sudden shock thunderclaps)

Last month on the evening of 26 May a huge lightning storm centred over a remote wooded area on the Leicestershire-Rutland border where we had left the Lento box alone to record. From where we were st...

20 Jun 1h 32min

297 Sonorous rural woodland before an approaching storm

Last week we took the Lento box to capture the natural soundscapes of rural Leicestershire and Rutland. Our visit coincided with the warmest May temperatures on record and as it turned out the most po...

2 Jun 1h 1min

296 Looking out on Portland Harbour part 2

Here beneath the tree again, at the water's edge. Looking out on Portland Harbour. Left of scene the sunlit parapets of Nothe Fort. Ahead the flat sun-drenched sea, with lazy waves rolling in over hal...

11 Mai 44min

295 Low tide on the causeway - part II (sleep safe with occasional herring gulls and oyster catchers)

A soundscene, of an island. Asleep. Between the tides. About this time last year we visited Burgh Island in Devon on the south west coast of England. We made two long-form overnight recordings while w...

16 Apr 1h 1min

294 Dawn in Shelve Wood Shropshire with cuckoo

The moment we entered Shelve Wood we knew it was a perfect place to record. Shropshire is sparsely populated. There's only one B road in the Shelve Wood area. The country lanes carry little traffic, a...

21 Mar 1h 1min

293 Pools of Rye Harbour (sleep safe)

The Lento box records alone, tied to a tree, behind thickets of gorse. The night hours pass. The microphones capture the panoramic peace of this wild coastal landscape. Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on t...

2 Mar 1h

292 Moorland trees in December gales - Derbyshire (sleep safe after owls at start)

Exposed moorland trees create a strong natural source of undulating white noise when shouldering the brunt of a winter gale. The sounds they produce are uniquely enchanting and an absolute delight to...

12 Feb 1h