Lowlines

A quick update after quite a long pause. Lately I’ve been:1.⁠ ⁠Noodling with some new episodes! They might be shorter and scrappier but they’ll keep taking you to more low-down places and the people who live there2.⁠ ⁠Imagining a physical version of Lowlines - a place to get low in. As I explore this - and all things related re. body, people, and place - I’ve been writing about it on my Substack under the title of GET LOW. Find it at: lowlines.substack.com3.⁠ ⁠Getting juiced about joining the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective! They are a collective of independent audio makers, all under the umbrella of a shared love of place and the hyperlocal. I've picked out a show from the Hub & Spoke stable that I thought might flick your switches. It's called ‘Ode to Village Life’ from Rumble Strip - and I love how it captures the essence of place in the most everyday kind of ways. What makes a place feel like a place is so often made up of such ordinary elements that we might not always think about, but if removed, the whole scaffolding of that place can shift.

Two weeks at a plant medicine centre in the Peruvian Amazon - I thought this would be a good thorough deep dive and that I might get wiser and closer to the plants, but I soon discover that two weeks is nothing and that I know nothing. Everything at Aya Madre is a challenge to what you think you understand and who you think you are. An assault on the senses, a take-down of the ego, an all-out reckoning with not even the release of a firm conclusion.This final episode of the first season of Lowlines is the anti-conclusion episode. Give it up to the twisting, knotted vines and the soaring, deafening jungle chorus. Just go with it. I tried to…!CreditsFeaturing the voices of Maestra Estela, Maestra Yaca, Maestro Nestor and Maestro Daniel of Aya Madre and Jordan McIntosh, the wise apprenticeProduced by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts, Executive-Produced by Lina Prestwood of Scenery Studios, Mixing & Mastering: Jobina TinnemansMusic by Hannah Marshall and icoros sung by Maestra Estela, Maestra Yaca, Maestro Nestor and Maestro DanielTo go deeper into this episode head to low-lines.com

I’m looking for a desert woman, someone who is totally in tune with this powerful landscape and who might help me tune into its great vastness a little bit more. I hear in a Tucson cafe that Arivaca is ground zero for such women. I head down there - almost all the way to the border - and start asking around town for a desert woman. Who I end up spending time with is a long way from what I had imagined but who fills me with all kinds of ideas about what it is to belong to a place, to know it - and for it to know you.In Episode 4 we follow the lowlines to the La Gitana bar in Arivaca, the brittle dirt of a huntress’s land, discover an abandoned halfway house, a coven of new wave desert women in a secret bar at the back of a store - and then gravitate further down to the border to get up close with The Wall.CreditsFeaturing the voices of Samantha Moore, the Tumbleweed Cafe owners, the helpful folk at the Arivaca general store, to everyone in La Gitana, the coven of women at the Hilltop bar at the back of the Sasabe Store & Wholesale Mesquite Firewood, as well as the odd passer-by…Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts, Executive-Produced by Lina Prestwood of Scenery Studios, Mixing & Mastering: Jobina TinnemansMusic by Hannah Marshall To go deeper into this episode head to low-lines.com

Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana - bottom of the map, end of the world and one of the ‘fastest disappearing places on earth’. Once fertile farmland, the bird’s foot-like piece of land that stretches south from New Orleans is fraying and breaking away under the pressure of industrial canal systems, rising sea levels and a leveed Mississippi river, divorced from building up the land around her with all that rich sediment she carries. Something needs to be done - and fast - but for the communities of people who have been woven into this landscape for generations, it’s not a simple fix.In Episode 2 I meet up with passionate ecologist, Dave Baker under the shade of an ancient oak tree in New Orleans’ City Park to get the lowdown on the urgency of this local land loss. He’s terrified for the area, but what about those who are on the front line of it? I wanted to get onto the ground, so off we go down to the ‘end of the world’ to meet people who are watching it play out in real time.There are no neat tie-ups here, just a simmering sigh of foreboding and a hell of a lot of heart. Love you, Louisiana.CreditsFeaturing the voices of Dave Baker, Barbara at The Lighthouse Lodge, Mitch in his truck, Wade Pitre in his John Deere buggy, the Army Corps of Engineers guys up on the levy and Justine DeMolle at Changes RestaurantProduced by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts, Executive-Produced by Lina Prestwood of Scenery Studios, Mixing & Mastering: Jobina TinnemansMusic by Hannah Marshall To go deeper into this episode head to low-lines.com - including a BONUS EPISODE of the full conversation with Dave Baker.

Where are you right now? If you were asked to recall the details of the ground you just walked on - the way it felt beneath your feet…the smell… the sounds, the faces of the people you passed - could you do it? It’s possible you’re drawing a blank…and if that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place.I’m Petra Barran – a gatherer of people and food on the kerbs of London. I began as a food truck owner, cruising the UK, selling chocolate to any and everyone - and grew a whole multi-pronged street food organisation from there. But as my business took off and gave way to more and more meetings in glass buildings, the energy and genuine, spontaneous human connection that I thrived on started to fade away.I had this powerful urge to get…lower. To move down from my scrambled head and plant my feet back on the ground. So I stepped away from the business, packed up my stuff, bought a recorder and decided to let myself be pulled deep into magnetic places and meet those whose lives are shaped by them.No planning, no agenda and no neat conclusions. Just me, following and sharing threads, that are lower and closer to the ground. I call them Lowlines.To go deeper into Lowlines: low-lines.comProduced by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts, Executive-Produced by Lina Prestwood of Scenery StudiosPrologue Production and Sound Design by Lina PrestwoodMusic by Hannah Marshall