Radio Lento podcast2 Des 2023

196 Estuary bleak passing ship

Warm inside an all-weather coat. Facing out across the water. Sat, boots wedged against the top ridge of the slanted seawall. There's rain in the air. Thirty minutes to take in this wild estuary place, you tell yourself.

Right of scene the small Essex town of Burnham-on-Crouch. Directly ahead across the water Wallasea Island. Low lying. A vegetated slip of green land and an RSPB nature reserve. Left of scene wild swirling water stretches seven miles to the North Sea. Sit tight, here on the seawall. This is empty time, to listen to the landscape.

Wind from the east flattens the inflowing tide. Presses down the surface into shallow shifting wavelets. Translucent wavelets, that wash briskly along the concrete footings of the seawall. As time passes, and so very slowly, a warm hum slides into view. Harmonious. Reassuring. It's a ship. A ship approaching. Gradually, it draws level. Gradually, it crosses your line of view. Then, with clear water ahead it increases power. On a heading out to sea.

This landscape is sparse. Beautiful. Bleak. Ektachrome bleak.

* This is the very last segment of an amazing overnight recording the Lento box captured several years ago from the seawall just east of Burnham-on-Crouch. When we came back to collect the box it was waterlogged and we feared the whole recording was lost. Somehow it survived which makes all the episodes captured from this incredibly exposed location extra special. Listen to all the other segments in episodes 86, 90, 96, 111 and 126 - all listed in our post on episodes from Dengie.

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Episoder(300)

301 Tide turned on the causeway (sleep safe)

A soundscene of an island. Asleep. Between the tides. This passage of time is from a 2025 recording the Lento box made in Bigbury-on-Sea, tied to a palm tree facing onto the beach and out towards the ...

2 Sep 1h 2min

300 Suffolk maize field in coastal breezes

As the land bakes under the hot August sun, the heat rises and so draws cooler air in from over the sea. The resulting breeze is always fresh, and can flow quite strongly even when it isn't windy anyw...

13 Aug 55min

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