Radio Lento podcast12 Aug 2025

278 Lento Long - Quantocks collection (180 minutes)

It's August intermission time! This year we've decided to bring together recordings from more than one location in a specific geographic area and share them as a long non-stop episode.

This is our first ever "Lento Long" at 3 hours. A chance to aurally travel across a geographic area and experience it from different perspectives.

Depending on your own personal sensitivities to human made sound, it may be sleep safe. Children can distantly be heard playing on the beaches, and at just over an hour a microlight gradually drones over. For us this creates a wonderful sense of beach-time, where nothing in the world feels urgent anymore, but not everyone may respond in the same way so we haven't officially labelled this Lento Long as *sleep safe*.

Here's a guide to what you'll hear.

- The first hour is from the edge of the rocky beach at Lilstock in West Somerset, your back lent against a comfortable tree as the waves wash left to right with the longshore drift. - At one hour this blends into the rarified ambience of Kilve beach at low tide, a soundscape carried into awareness with the gradual progression of a little microlight that slowly drones over high above. - At one hour thirty, day becomes night. A weatherfront is passing over a remote cottage half way up West Quantoxhead. Fresh currents of Somerset air press freely through a bank of trees behind the cottage, setting their leaves and branches swaying, and hushing in richly undulating white noise. - At just after two hours thirty, you invisibly reappear, sitting beside a secluded stream farther up the hill. You're listening to the pristine sound of water flowing off the top of West Quantoxhead, with the gentle company of two resting sheep nearby.

The episodes we blended together to make this Lento Long are 244, 254, 248, 255 and 249, where you can read in detail about each location. They were all recorded in late October 2024.

We'll release another Lento Long next week and resume the weekly service from the start of September.

Thanks to everyone for listening.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(300)

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

291 High tide turning - the Crouch Estuary in Essex (sleep safe)

The waves settle into wavelets. The wavelets settle to calm. Then it's just the pure sound of estuary emptiness, at night. Following on from episode 288 it's several hours later, about 4 in the mornin...

1 Feb 49min