“Slow Radio,” The Podcast That Promotes Monks, Moose, and Inner Peace |

“Slow Radio,” The Podcast That Promotes Monks, Moose, and Inner Peace |

Many New Englanders who listened to public radio in the late twentieth century fondly remember the patient, gently eccentric classical-music show “Morning Pro Musica,” from WGBH. Its host, Robert J. Lurtsema, was affectionately known in many households as “Robert J.” The show was not too harsh, not too loud, not too fast. Lurtsema spoke in placid tones; he was unafraid to pause, at length. (“I’m not afraid of dead air,” he once said.) But the show’s true magic came from its birds. “Morning Pro Musica” began like the dawn—with several minutes of birdsong, chirping and warbling, which eventually transitioned into, say, Bach. It provided a frisson of joy, reminding us why we might want to get up in the first place.

The BBC Radio 3 show “Slow Radio,” which is available as a podcast, has a similar effect. On it, in episodes of fifteen minutes to half an hour, you can listen to sounds of the natural world—the Kalahari Desert, a mountain climb in the Lake District, slow sheep in southern Spain—but also those of monks, or clocks. One episode features forgotten sounds: “typewriters, weaving looms, old ticket-printing machines, and obsolete computers,” the current host, Verity Sharp, tells us. Some of that episode sounds like a fussy little racket; some sounds like a clacking long-lost friend. Several “Slow Radio” episodes involve walks, evocative in their footfalls, like an elegantly produced pocket dial. The show deftly blends luscious sounds, played with plenty of room to appreciate them, with human voices that offer the modest enlightenment of public radio. Sharp begins episodes by encouraging us to “pause, take some time out” or to “step back, let go, immerse yourself” but avoids veering into murmuring-cult-leader territory. Then we plunge in, and one British person or another takes us on a journey.

In an episode called “The Last Elfdalians,” we travel to Älvdalen, in the remote forests of central Sweden. There, around two thousand people speak Elfdalian, an ancient language thought to be connected to the Vikings. The episode has a baseline of forest birdsong; we meet a man and his barking dogs, hear older people speaking Elfdalian, segue into lovely traditional fiddle music and singing, and then start thinking about moose. “The first word I teach them is the word for ‘elk,’ or ‘moose,’ ” a woman says, before guiding Swedish children through other essential vocabulary: “cloudberry,” “rabbit.” We keep meandering through Älvdalen, hearing more Elfdalian, fiddling, song. All too soon, it ends; we might not want to leave.

Various “slow” movements have found popularity in recent years, in a perhaps unsurprising response to the pace of modern life. There’s slow food, which began in Italy as a protest against McDonald’s; slow TV, popularized in Norway, involving hours-long footage of train rides, knitting, or burning logs; slow travel; slow audio. All encourage the luxury of analog relaxation, reminding us of the Old Ways, real or romanticized. Nearly any sound you can imagine is available for streaming, many slow; not all have the desired effect. In December, I made a playlist called the Yule Log, featuring cozy burning and crackling sounds, which I enjoyed until I stopped paying attention and adrenaline shot through me like lightning. Fire, I suddenly realized, can be a stressful background noise in a prewar apartment building. On YouTube, where subcultures thrive, you can watch countless hours of supposedly tingle-inducing ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos, in which people slowly whisper to you and make various quiet noises, in a manner that I find nightmarish but others apparently find pleasurable; some are intended to thrill you to sleep. Apps meant to calm you down tell you to breathe and then turn on the rain; sometimes these work, and sometimes they make you feel like a slab of anxious humanity, for which lapping waves or croaking frogs are a paltry solution.

Podcasts employ a range of slow techniques. Vanessa Lowe’s beautiful “Nocturne,” now airing on KCRW, combines peaceful night sounds with music and narrative. The patience and gracefulness of “West Cork,” about an unsolved murder in rural Ireland, was so gentle on the ear, so evocative of place, that I liked to listen to it before bed. Drew Ackerman’s popular podcast “Sleep with Me,” which began in 2013, is meant to bore insomniacs to sleep—but for me it’s too self-conscious to be relaxing, inducing a feeling similar to social anxiety or secondary cringing.

The BBC, for whatever reason, is particularly good at slow audio. The ancient and beloved BBC 4 segment “The Shipping Forecast,” a report on wind and weather conditions for seafarers in the British Isles, predates so-called slow radio by some hundred and fifty years, but it serves a similarly cozy function; today, many just listen wistfully to its place names and gale reports, dreaming of Lundy and Dogger. Last week, on Christmas Eve, BBC Radio 3 featured “Winter Wanderer”—a delightful, amusing three hours of the travel writer Horatio Clare walking through the Black Forest, stamping briskly and musing about Pliny and conifers. Like many BBC shows, including the great “In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg,” these and “Slow Radio” appeal in part because of their straightforwardness and lack of self-congratulation. American podcasts, like American meditation apps and American public radio, aren’t always able to resist a tone of knowing whimsy, or self-delight. (To my ears, this is why the stodgy Robert J. Lurtsema held more charm than another famous pause enthusiast, the former WNYC mainstay Jonathan Schwartz.) “Slow Radio” tends to have an ideal blend of companionship and earthly randomness; it’s not a white-noise machine, but neither are its hosts and monks invasive or distracting. Even an episode of a late-night stroll with the BBC’s Nick Luscombe through Kabukicho, Tokyo’s entertainment and red-light district, has this effect: its clicking heels, fountains, “love hotels,” batting cages, and video-game music make us feel affectionate toward unseen people doing unseen things in the middle of the night—going about their humble lives, like the rest of us, hikers and warblers and elks, all around the world.

Sourse: newyorker.com

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