Radio Lento podcast

Hearing London at night from a small patch of grass bordered by shrubs, flowering plants and a bay tree, a typical garden in Hackney enclosed within old brick-built walls. Just before 3am distant machines began to fill the air with gentle undulating washes of sound. The effect is pleasantly soporific. It's a wide landscape recording and quite delicate, best through headphones or on speakers when everything is quiet.

At the bottom of a steep-sided thickly wooded and uninhabited valley in the rural county of Derbyshire, England, this babbling brook fills the night air with its watery melodies. In this recording made in early summer, the occasional pair of owls can be heard, and what might be creatures flitting in the shallow water. It's an unedited recording of a real place, part of a 14 hour non-stop take to capture the essence of the valley, and so includes some human activity too, nothing much, the odd car passing on a distant road and a few aircraft of different types over-flying the hills.

Best with headphones or earbuds if you have some handy. At times steep and very rocky, this is a surround-sound audio recording of a walk through trees and scrub that's alive with cicadas. It is August, early evening and the temperature has subsided to a luxurious 30 degrees. The path never ended. It led us into the wilderness. Lots of space to listen, relax and unwind.

It is mid-August. The early sun is lighting up the treetops against a pale blue sky. You're hiding out in this rural wood which is typical of any in the South East of England. You're listening to it waking up with the sounds of jovial wood pigeons, rasping rooks, sparkling wrens and robins. Rabbits hop about between the trees, over carpets of dry leaves. As if from nowhere a woodman starts work, clearing fallen branches. Miles away, the A12 flows with traffic, softened by the distance into an oceanic haze. Pheasants prowl under the lazy arc of a passing jet aircraft. Escape to this secret place and watch through your ears as the new day unfurls.