179 Rain scapes special - August intermission 1 (sleep safe)

Radio Lento podcast

We're taking an intermission during August. Rather than disappearing, we're sharing a different type of episode, each with a theme, using some of the best bits from previous episodes. This week's theme is rain.

Here are four glorious rain scapes. Travel with the rain as it falls, on a wide open coastal landscape, a walled garden in London, and on high moorland woods in Derbyshire.

Here are the descriptions and episode links so you can listen to them in full.

146 Fresh air along the Creel Path
The Creel Path has been trodden by fisherman on their way to work from Coldingham to the harbour at St Abbs in Scotland, for a thousand years. It's a landscape whose geography leaves it exposed to everything that the sky can bring. By locating our mics within the natural shelter of a tree, and letting them record alone for twelve hours, we were able to capture the full width, depth and range of this place and its unique soundscape.

128 Persistent rain
Heavily, this winter rain falls. Persistent. Cold. Wet. Refreshing. In waves. In sprinkling flurries. Over time. Onto the huge tarpaulin stretched across the yard. Each drop's long downward journey is both completed, and revealed, in one tiny moment. Is this just plain old rain? Listen in, especially through a pair of headphones, and layer upon layer of spatially detailed rich textured sound will to you become revealed.

167 An hour under moorland trees
There is nothing and no one about. You. Here. Hidden. Up in the Derbyshire hills. Sat, on dry leaf litter, lent against a gently slanted tree trunk. Listening. Just an hour. Under moorland trees. An hour to listen, to the weather, the flurries of rain And the steady ever-changing wind.

156 Sheltered under night rain
The city sleeps, under a dark impenetrable sky. In one garden, sheltered under a wide tarpaulin, microphones are recording. Alone. On top of a tripod, and standing, as high as a person. Listening. The tarpaulin, is to them a canvas. It lets them see the rain. In all its spatial detail. A transcriber. A taught thin surface, that catches each raindrop, and changes its collided imprint into crisp edged, spatial sound.