Slow Radio Folgen

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.

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 No One Knows I’m Gone performed by The Unthanks, Troyte (Elgar’s evocation of a thunderstorm), Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark, Alan Hovhaness’s Prayer of St. Gregory and Jim Ghedi’s folk masterwork Fortingall Yew.

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 pass through cycles of warm sunshine, then heavy tropical rain, each change reflected in the types of calls we hear from the birdlife and frogs. These aren’t rarefied idylls though - on a warm evening parrots noisily flock through, disturbing the peace. Sometimes a radio or the sound of a party drifts up from the valley below; dogs bark, cockerels crow. Elisha describes the extent to which she’s both sustained by, and living at the mercy of, the wildlife around her – the parrots so loud she can’t hear the TV, the frogs soothing her to sleep at night - and how the sounds evoke a strong sense of 'home' for her.