Category Archives: Dub Gardening

Jumps and scratches free with every mix!

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Here’s a brand new (old) mix from One Deck Pete with tunes obtained from car parks in this big city of ours, out of various boxes, vinyl strewn over blankets from stalls next to “geezers” selling fake perfume and bin bags. No returns please and cash only, Okay?

Here’s the tracklistings:
Bob Marley – Mr Chatterbox
Willie Lindo – Midnight
Bob Andy – You don’t know
The Revolutionaries – MPLA + Version
I Roy – Cow Town Skank
Augustus Pablo – Cow Town Version
John Holt – Stranger in love
The Tennors – Pressure and slide
John Holt – Moving Away
The Revolutionaries – Revolution dub

 

Gardening all over the world (as Status Quo may have sang)

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Thanks to our Downbeat on Shortwave collaborator and gardening friend Jesse Yuen who was out and about in his garden in Perth last weekend and sent us some pictures. (Top Picture) “It’s about 4.30pm in the afternoon, but there’s beautiful light because there’s a bush fire burning somewhere, so the smoke is giving everything a bit of a golden hue.”

He’s just acquired a new plant, a yellow flowering kangaroo paw. “I salvaged them from a house down the road about to be knocked down as I was on my way to DJ at a bush doof. I’ve been keeping it alive in a pot in the backyard until the weather cooled down and I had a chance to plant it.” That’s a find! More on the plant here.

He also got himself a eucalyptus macrocarpa for his garden. As he told us “This one is an absolute beauty. We’ve been on the waiting list at our local nursery for about six months, but some people wait for over two years. It’s a native, but it’s rare to buy it at a nursery. Check out pictures of it in an adult form to see how it gets.” See pic below, blimmin ‘eck!

And related to the kangaroo paw, here’s some pictures of the bush doof Jesse was DJing at and it looks a looks a great one!

He also said, “I’m gardening to the sounds of the preview of an amazing sounding downtempo album by local Australian artist Freda” and here’s a track from it.

 

Cheers for keeping us updated Jesse and the garden (and the bush rdoof) looks great!

More numbers station business

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This evening we tapped in “Soulful Electronica” into the search engine on Bandcamp and guess what came up as an example of the genre? The seminal Conet Project put together by Akin Fernandez! More on the LP featuring numbers stations and the like here.

It’s been a long while since we looked at the tracklistings but one called (G21) Random Pop stood out so we played it. Listening to the recording, the station’s two note interval signal plays and in the background there’s a strange tune with a Tom Waits in German sounding vocal. The interval signal and the tune sounded very familiar to us, why did we know this one?

We had to dig deep but the name random pop was a clue of sorts as it was a title of a great track from Juche out of Cincinnati, that we had used on a shortwave mix of old. That was it. Here’s the Juche track Random Pop that uses the G21 track as an influence. The rest of their self-titled LP is great if you love numbers stations and we would have loved to have it on the ltd edition cassette. You can’t beat a numbers station sample.

Waiting in the (roots) garden

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The Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room on IDA radio is a wonderful mix up business of a Monday morning radio show and as you know, we love it here. This week’s show is a bit of a first, and features a great interview with Rakesh Rootsman Rak and a lovely reggae selection featuring Ernest Ranglin, The Twinkle Brothers, Aswad, I-Natural, Culture, Prince Lincoln and The Royal Rasses, The Natural Ites and more.

In the interview there’s talk of Rootsman Rak’s work which involves growing food, forest gardens, working with nature, permaculture and (as Gerry Hectic mentioned on his Facebook) “ethical gardening ideas”. Well worth tuning in and having a listen. Do have a look at Rootsman Rak’s site here and bit more about him here.

Cheers for The Rhythm Doctor for having some gardening reggae business on his show and Gerry Hectic for letting us know about it this morning.

In usual cases we are not keen on the dentist

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Here’s a nice warped sounding (like when you get a off-centre jamaican pressing from the days of old) 80 bpm tune from Dentist called Kiss to warm you up for a day where it may be 20 degrees Celcius over here in SE23. Crazy weather eh?

Dave didn’t get in the way

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Good to hear from Mike & Julia, just outside the parish of Coventry for getting in touch again. Mike mentioned that they had a bit of trouble from Storm Dave up there the other day too, “It’s a bit feisty up here.”

He went on to say “We’ve been busy getting a new patch of the garden ready today. Here’s the before and after shots. Still some work to do but you get the general gist. Slabs and bark and a veg trug and some old metal storage tins with flowers added.”

Great for sending the pics over as the patch looks great! We look forward to seeing how the garden grows up there and do send us more pics as the year develops. Here’s a good post with some nice pics from their garden last year here.

Dave visited Bristol too

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We also had a report from Kit, G5KIT from Bristol who was telling us that “Storm Dave is definitely making his presence felt, and it’s just been too windy to do anything other than see how much ground the cleavers have claimed in their battle for the parsley patch (below). Instead, we’ve been entertained by watching the magpies and crows battling for tactical supremacy in the trees across the road (above)”. Funny enough you say that Kit, as yesterday morning there was some magpies and crow business going on in the trees at the back of us. Are the birds fighting back in the aftermath of Dave?

Cheers to Kit for sending us a Moon mix inspired by the Artemis rocket trip presently orbiting that moon of ours. #TheMoonConnectsUsAll

Astronomy Domine – Pink Floyd
Space Truckin’ – Deep Purple
2000 Light Years from Home – The Rolling Stones
There’s a Moon in the Sky – The B52’s
Supersonic Rocket Ship – The Kinks

And for the Bank Holiday Gardening Monday here’s a couple of moon related tunes.

 

It only takes a minute

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Reading the latest article on SWLing Post here about BBC interval signals, it reminded us of the wonderfully simple and direct “B–B–C” in the tonic scale used on shortwave for the BBC World Service and other transmissions to Africa.

We’ve always loved it and recently used it in a one-minute slightly odd piece from Madtone called “It Is AI, but we created it” for the 60 Sec Radio 2026 contest here, where “anything is possible as long as it’s 60 seconds long.”

The piece is below and features the said BBC interval signal alongside an excerpt of an strange ham radio conversation on 2 metres about AI generated music. We’re not that keen on AI generated music here funnily enough.

The contest is still open, so if you have 60 seconds radio collage, send it to the website here.

Before Dave came

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Yesterday was a lovely day. We started on the garden early, around 7:30am, when it was still grey and a little cold but as the hours passed, the weather gradually improved. After lunch, the grass was cut and looked great in the sunshine. The top right-hand corner of the lawn is the “wild area,” a tribute to a cat who passed away last year and loved to sleep there among the longer grass. Now the cat has gone, a fox has been kipping there on and off.

The side bed towards the bottom of the garden was cleared, and in place of the weeds, wildflower seeds were sown. It’s still cold, so whether they’ll thrive remains to be seen as it’s a bit of frost pocket down there. We were also told by a neighbour a few doors down that an underground stream runs through the gardens around that area. Whether that is true or not we’re not sure, but the soil is a bit on the boggy side around there.

Talking of seeds, one of our favourites plants has to be Night Scented Stock (above). While they may not be the most visually striking of plants, their fragrance more than makes up for it, especially on warm summer evenings when placed by an open back door.

Something we picked up last year as a single plant from Herne Hill Market was Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’. It’s now doing well and starting to spread nicely at the bottom of the garden by the pond. It gets semi-shade there, along with a daily watering (without overdoing it), and it seems to love the spot. We’ve since added a couple more plants from eBay. They’re still quite small, but we’re sure it won’t be long before they begin to spread too.

Happy Easter weekend (gardening) everyone!

Continuing the Dave theme:

Northern beaches and birds

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Many thanks to Rich in the Lake District for sharing a couple of photos he took from his recent break in South West Scotland, where he visited Gatehouse of Fleet, Portpatrick, and the South Ayrshire coast. As he put it, “Spectacular, but cold.”

Above is a great picture of Ross Bay, while below is an ace shot of a red kite in flight, showing its distinctive long, deeply forked tail (we have just read about the tail so didn’t have a clue about it before). More information about the red kite here.