A montage of music and natural sounds from the world’s northernmost freshwater lake in Siberia where you’ll hear the calls of Lapland buntings, oriental golden plovers and ptarmigans. We also visit Ein Bokek Canyon in Israel, where the chirps of graceful warblers compete with the rasping sounds of Tristram’s grackles. Then we head to Dyfed in Wales, where an early morning chorus of chaffinches and wrends is joined by the gentle bleating of sheep and lambs on the hillsides. We end in Tanzania, an...
Jun 20, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode 4/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude. In the fourth of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - Horatio Clare searches for his footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes him along the banks of the River Ilmenau from Medingen to Bienebuttel.
Jun 20, 2019•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nightingales singing, with musicians responding to them, in the Sussex woods. They are joined under the trees by Clive Bell playing bamboo flute, and by folk singer Sam Lee. .
Jun 11, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Composer Iain Chambers takes a sound recording field trip around Orford Ness in Suffolk. This site – an isolated shingle spit on the Suffolk coast – once played a key role in the UK's development of radar and ballistics. Since buying Orford Ness from the Ministry of Defence in 1993, the National Trust's policy has been one of 'managed decline' – these buildings are now overrun by nature. The excitement felt by Bletchley Park's wartime codebreakers was once felt here too: Britain's greatest scien...
Jun 05, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from a canal in The Camargue where nightingales and swifts greet the morning and from an oasis in Oman where cinnamon-breasted rock buntings are singing happily near a gentle waterfall. We also take a journey along the South Tyne in Northumbria, and as the water bubbles away you can hear the calls of crossbills, meadow pipits and a goshawk. Finally, there’s a dawn chorus and a dramatic thunderstorm on the Parana River in northern Argentina, close to the bord...
May 31, 2019•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Immerse yourself in this river setting with Petroc Trelawny - with sounds of the Severn recorded along, and within, the flowing water.
May 23, 2019•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nathaniel Mann joins lonely seafarers on a container ship for some modern sea shanties.
May 23, 2019•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Slow Radio for Radio 3's Along the River week. Musician Tim Shaw and producer Julian May collaborate with a Northumbrian burn to create a piece - The Water's Music 'He made his habitation beside the water's music'. This line, from a poem by Martyn Crucefix, lodged in the mind of radio producer Julian May, inspiring an ambition - to collaborate with a brook to create a composition. By moving rocks and logs might the sounds of the stream be adjusted, 'tuned', and might a piece of music slowly emer...
May 21, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast The magical North Pennines landscape of deaf shepherd-poet Josephine Dickinson, which is the backdrop to her real and imagined sound world.
May 10, 2019•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from a dawn chorus on a lakeshore in southeast Sweden, the liquid call of the Australian magpie from a mangrove swamp in Queensland, hippos grunting and splashing in Malawi’s Shire River, and skylarks singing overhead while curlews intone their desolate cries around Deadwater Fell in Northumberland.
Apr 25, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode 3/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude. In the third of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes us through the beeches of the Oderwald and on into the town of Wolfenbuttel.
Apr 23, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to another Slow Radio podcast. In this episode, there are the mesmerising sounds of storm Erik tearing through the rigging and halyards on the boats in Blyth harbour, Northumberland. We glide to Ouse Washes in the Fenland country where Bewick's swans, coots, lapwings, reed buntings and skylarks fill the air with song. And in the evening heavy seas of Gossabrough on Yell Island, Northern Shetland, there are eiders, Arctic terns, fulmars, skylarks and wrens. The music includes Tom Waits’s ...
Mar 22, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Radio 3 transports listeners to Trinidad, just off the coast of Venezuela, immersing them in the sounds of the Caribbean island, with writer and actor Elisha Efua Bartels as a guide. Through the sounds of three Port-of Spain gardens - her home by the river in Diego Martin, a garden in the lush valleys of St Ann’s, to a house up in the hills, Elisha reflects on the rich tropical sounds of the island. Frogs, hummingbirds, parrots and occasional rainfall form a slowly shifting, vivid soundscape. We...
Mar 08, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from ravens on the Norwegian tundra around Tromso; upwelling of cold water currents at night in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean off the Galapagos islands; a MacGregor’s bowerbird in a New Guinean rainforest displaying its vocal talents to attract a mate, and the splashes of ice laden water moving and lapping on the shore of a river on Hokkaido Island, permeated by distant calls from goldeneye and whooper swans passing overhead.
Feb 25, 2019•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Travel writer Horatio Clare walks in the Black Forest in Germany, thinking about the Romantic tradition of the Wanderer, and observing the sights and sounds of the forest
Feb 14, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast The slow build of a midsummer dawn chorus in Snowdonia, North Wales, interwoven with the sounds of the brooks, streams, and rivers that creep through the hillsides down to the lake by the village: this programme is a tribute to the landscape and past poets of the heart of Snowdonia. An isolated farmhouse near Trawsfynydd was the birthplace of the iconic Welsh shepherd-poet Hedd Wyn. But there were hundreds more like him in this mountainous corner of Wales: the sons and daughters of tenant farmer...
Feb 08, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of music and natural sounds from a nightingale singing in a reforested WWI battlefield in Belgium, a sunrise over Wolverton Creek in north Norfolk with curlew and pink-footed geese, the Ngorongoro mountain crater in Tanzania with tropical boubou and weaver birds, and a national park Karnataka, India where you'll hear croaking frogs and wild gaur bellowing to one another.
Feb 05, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A montage of sounds from the forests around Squam Lake, New Hampshire during the Fall, including the songs of the Carolina wren, red-breasted nuthatch and rufous-sided towhie; a Northern flicker tapping insistently on a tree trunk; red squirrels and chipmunks foraging for food, a pair of loons calling distantly from the misty lake and a barred owl hooting as it begins its nocturnal hunt.
Jan 25, 2019•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Irish cows make their way up to the winter grazing grounds high above Galway Bay
Jan 24, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode 2/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude. In the second of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for his footsteps - and his ghost - the putative route takes him into the Harz Mountains and up to its highest point, the Brocken Summit.
Jan 24, 2019•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Horatio Clare retraces the 20-year-old JS Bach's 250-mile journey to visit his hero Buxtehude in Lubeck. Episode 1 of 5. This is a repeat of an episode originally published in December 2017.
Jan 17, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have yourself a serene little Radio 3 Christmas with the sounds of reindeer, festive music and a secret, enchanted wood. This special edition of the Slow Radio Podcast comprises two very different audio recordings. The first is of reindeer, and more of them than you’d need to pull even a very high profile sleigh. No, this recording, contributed by BBC Four, is of 2,500 of the creatures as they slowly migrate, clinking their bells and eating. And the reindeer are followed by a December sunrise re...
Dec 20, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Benedictine monks speak about their experiences of divine love against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.
Dec 20, 2018•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Benedictine monks speak about how they find focus, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.
Dec 20, 2018•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Benedictine monks meditate on the subject of work - from cooking to weaving and beekeeping - against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.
Dec 20, 2018•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Monks from Downside, Belmont and Pluscarden Abbeys meditate on the subject of prayer, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.
Dec 20, 2018•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Monks from Downside, Belmont and Pluscarden Abbeys meditate on the nature of silence, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.
Dec 20, 2018•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kalahari means ‘large thirst’ in the local language and between November and February summer temperatures can reach well over 40 degrees centigrade. To avoid the dry desiccating heat much of the wildlife has adopted nocturnal habits. Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson captures the changing soundscape from dusk to dawn, when you can see very little but hear everything; from the close up sounds of insects to the far-carrying contact calls of spotted hyenas. Producer Sarah Blunt...
Dec 06, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Spoken in the remote forest region of Älvdalen - a place thick with forest and steep valleys - Elfdalian used to be the main language of the area, but Swedish has increasingly become dominant and few young people speak it today. In this slow radio edit, we hear a collage of forest sounds and local voices, travelling through Älvdalen, exploring some of the mysteries of the language and its links to Sweden's ancient, Viking past.
Nov 29, 2018•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Step into Sherwood Forest at night with tawny owls calling to each other in the trees. As daylight comes, a flock of long tailed tits forages through the branches.
Nov 22, 2018•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
