Cheers to Spike from Morschen43 for sending us the video for his single MV Ross Revenge For Ever! which we featured in the last post.
Here’s more on the great boat from the great offshoreradiomuseum here.
Big shout to Fenny for playing this on last week’s On the Wire. It’s a wonderful bit of music from Cerys Hafana called Helynt Ryfeddol which features a triple harp. It’s a tune that reveals itself with every listen and one that will fit in just fine on the next instalment of HARP from Imaginary stations.
A big thanks to our good friend Rich R up in the Lake District for sending over the photograph of his cosmos (and a shout to Debby H too, as the seeds came from her plants). Rich writes, “Really cold here today, wind chill feels like 2°C. With hard frosts and snow on the way, I thought I’d better send you this pic of the cosmos before it’s too late.”
Brilliant stuff, Rich – thanks again (and to Debby H) for sharing!
It’s a Thursday night so here’s some tunes. The first one is a lovely bit of deep dub from Submersible (from Singapore via Lithuania) called Teak Forest.
And then a bit of Cumbia rebajada that for some reason reminds us of those fairground steam driven organs. Mad stuff indeed!
And here’s the tune at it’s proper speed. What do you reckon is the best? The slow or the fast version. Pretty bonkers stuff either way.
It’s been just 8 days since we received some egyptian/walking onion bulblets and as soon as we got them, we put them in a pot as directed and stuck it on the packed kitchen windowsill. We ordered our bulblets from Real Seeds, and although we only paid for one, they kindly included a few extras—just in case. We noticed yesterday two had germinated and there may even be more to come! Great value by the way as they cost £3.29 for one. We’ll keep you posted.
And here’s a realy wonderful track to accompany those onions bulblets.
www
On this Guys Fawkes night, a big shout goes out to our good friend Marc B for sending us the musical recommendation above, an NTS show from Dan Jagger Ball on Mixcloud. There’s some wonderful stuff on it including the first tune from the great Roy Shirley with the wonderful Music is the key on the Amalgamated label here.
On hearing Roy Shirley, we remembered a TV show in the Aquarius series from 1976 about British reggae (below) which we taped thanks to Max Betamax when it was reshown in the mid 1980’s. The great Roy Shirley is in it (with Rico on trombone) alongside other reggae greats including Aswad, The Cimarrons, Sir Coxson, Matumbi, Tito Simon, Ijahman Levi with an stripped down version of Jah Heavy Load, Geoffrey Chung, a star jumper or two and also Nicky Thomas who gives a sterling performance of What love is at 20 mins in at Chalk Farm studios (next door to The Belmont that must have seen a few reggae artists having a pint there) and ends with a clip from Count Suckle‘s legendary Q club in Paddington.
It’s a show well worth watching if you love a bit of time travelling and good music. Reggae, you can’t beat it!
Cheers to our good music/gardening/radio friend Justin Patrick Moore for sending over this musical recommendation in an ambient downbeat style called The haunted testcard tapes by Alpha Seven. Haunted Testcard is a lovely bit of electronica and a great one to drift off to. By the way the cover of the LP is great too!
There’s another testcard connection as Pete Roberts of Alpha Seven was also a member of Testcard F, remember them?
The next we’ve chosen (above) is a numbers stations related tune and you know we love one of them here. There’s quite a few on Bandcamp if you tap in “Numbers Stations” under the search. Some are of an industrial or harsh experimental nature which all have their place but it is nice to hear something in a more chilled out style. The track even has some morse in there as well. Double radio-related bonus. Cheers for the musical tip Justin.
And by the way if you want to get into a saturday spy mode, pretend you are secret agent 001 and fancy listening to some numbers stations have a look here and see if there’s a transmission coming up.
Don’t worry you don’t need a shortwave radio hidden in a bar of soap or disguised as a loaf of Hovis to listen in, just click the link ( in blue under “Next station in so and so minutes”) and it will bring you to a online SDR (software defined radio) all ready tuned in and ready to decode. Make sure you have a biro and a rough book at the ready.
Big thanks to the horticultural team at Thompson & Morgan for their helpful advice following Jesse Yuen’s post the other day (here) about ongoing problems with Bermuda Buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae*). It’s looks like a chemical weedkiller (which Jesse is not going to use) can’t rid a garden of them.
“Bermuda Buttercups are a plant that you may have to learn to garden with rather than against. Pulling up plants always leaves tiny bulbils behind that grow into new plants, it can also result in the spread of bulbils to new areas. These bulbils act as storage organs which are very persistent, lying dormant beneath cardboard or mulch for months, possibly years, so that as soon as the ground is exposed to light they re-emerge. Constant hoeing will help to deplete the bulbils, but again – it will take years for this to have any effect.”
“Even If you decide to use chemical weedkillers, timing of application is critical and you may have to do it more than once. You need to catch the plants just at the point before or on flowering. This is when the bulbils are exhausted of food whilst young bulbils are too small to survive. Not all plants will be at exactly the same stage so repeated applications for several years are required.”
Thanks again to all at Thompson & Morgan for imparting their knowledge about the plant that is giving our good dub gardening friend Jesse a headache at the moment.
*The specific epithet pes-caprae means ‘goat’s-foot’, possibly in reference to the shape of the leaf. (wikipedia)
If you remember, our friend and Downbeat on Shortwave collaborator Jesse Yuen (of RTMFM’s North of The River Swan) moved into a new house in Perth last year and is doing some major work on his front garden. His last post was here and we’ve got an update and it’s a great one!
“Okay, so this is the next chapter in what I’m calling “re-wilding” our front yard…”, over to you Jesse:
The house was built in 1963 and right up to that point, our property was just undeveloped bushland. In the ’50s and ’60s the urban sprawl in Perth started to spread through our suburb and giant bush blocks owned by rich people were divided up into smaller lots and sold off as private properties. At the same time the government built road infrastructure through the area and our house was one of the first built on the street. We bought the house from the family who built it, who had raised a couple of generations of kids in it so when we moved in, it still felt very much like theirs.
We purposely let the front yard die, didn’t water the lawn for a year, ripped up the non-local vegetation and essentially completely neglected it. People walking past must have thought we were crackheads, because it was looking very rough by the end. The goal was to remove the effort of clearing it by hand, let it die naturally and create a sustainable garden that probably was similar to what would’ve been growing there 100 years ago.
We adopted a technique we’ve heard about called “smothering”, essentially covering the entire area in cardboard, watering it in so it moulded to the present topography and then laying a heavy amount of mulch on top. The weeds and the things we didn’t want would be starved of sunlight and oxygen so not being able to photosynthesise and die without needing any pesticides or laborious weeding.
We progressively laid cardboard over the entire garden and weighed it down with bricks then watered it all in, making it mushy and soft and moulding itself into the ground. I’ve been saving up cardboard for the last year, luckily moving house means you have a lot of the stuff on hand. It was great to use all our own cardboard rather than buy it and we also had some concrete around the house from renovations and stuff too. I salvaged a bunch of slabs from the back yard and made a cute little path through the front of the garden.
I was incredibly disheartened to find that within weeks, local weeds had figured out how to grow through the cardboard through the mulch (below). The primary villain in this war of weeds Is this one: Oxalis pes-caprae, commonly known as African wood-sorrel, Bermuda buttercup, Bermuda sorrel, buttercup oxalis, Cape sorrel, English weed, goat’s-foot, sourgrass, soursob or soursop.
Kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in Perth called it sour grass and we would eat the stems and the flowers for snacks, even though it is incredibly sour as the name suggests. Without a doubt if you were seen picking it, a kid would tell you that a dog probably had peed on that patch of sour grass but you’d probably ate it anyway. This weed comes from a bulb buried deep underground and I must’ve left tons of it buried in the soil because it’s everywhere now.
You can see how long its stem is (above), it’s probably extended itself maybe 20 cm to burst through the cardboard and the mulch to find the sunlight. Really impressive, life will find a way right? They have come up everywhere in the garden and I’m experimenting with pouring boiling water over it all because I refuse to use any chemical chemicals to kill the weeds.
By the way, these last couple of days was heavily soundtrack by this tender, contemporary jungle album by Coco Bryce.
Cheers Jesse for sharing your story and pictures, we really appreciate it and look forward to the next part which he says is a cracker. “There are some nice plants coming along in the yard and some of them are getting a lot of commentary from the neighbours as they walked past which is great too.”
Here’s a couple of electronica bits for the last Saturday of warmish weather before the cold comes in (so it said on the weather forecast on the telly this evening). The first tune was played by Steve Barker on the great On The Wire last week (here) and is called Forma III by Donato Dozzy & Sabla. Wonderful stuff!
And above another great one on the Serafin Audio Imprint out of Germany “supporting slow and beautiful music all around the world” from Mark Mywords & JOOR called Belzehuble (Ed Noodle Remix). A nice chilled one that builds as it goes along and ends with a bit of an acid house squelch. A tune for standing on chairs and flailing the arms about to for that long lost rave feeling from a time when going to bed at 10pm was frowned upon!
Weeds up to me knees 