Cheers to Spike from Morschen43 for sending these pictures of some great looking red skies from his house in Le Puy-en-Velay, France from the other evening. There’s some very moody looking clouds there!
It would be great to hear they had lovely weather the next day, proving that old proverb: ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’ was correct. Cheers Spike.
We’ve heard today in true British Bank Holiday style, that the current lovely weather we’re having is coming to an abrupt end this weekend. Typical! But to cheer us up here’s a couple of great photographs.
The first (above) is Rich in the Lake District’s back garden. Doesn’t it look great! As he said, “The bluebells are really high now”. That’s one chilled out view there Rich, we bet it’s a nice calm place to relax in!
And above is Debby H‘s garden in north London, more specifically the cosmos bed. Debby told us “I can’t believe the number of flowers that we have already on our cosmos plants. They’re only small, about 30 cm high. We planted them out about 3 weeks ago and most of the flowers have come since then. In previous years we haven’t had these many flowers till late summer.”
“I planted the seeds in mid-February, whereas I have done it in March previously. I kept half indoors on a windowsill, and the other half were moved to our plastic greenhouse. It doesn’t seem to have made any difference to how they are growing.” It’s always good to experiment and see what happens. Thanks for the report Debby, we scattered our cosmos seed all over the garden this year and not sure if any have come up or those damned slugs have had them. We will keep you all posted.
And thanks to the great blog from Penny Golightly here’s news of some free herbs seeds here. Cheers Penny!
Below is the studio version of this morning’s Imaginary Station’s WWLS – We Love Shortwave transmission from Radio Miami International featuring tunes and mixes from DJ Frederick, Justin Patrick Moore and Kit, G5KIT. If you love shortwave you’ll love WWLS!
At 22.45 there’s a mix from One Deck Pete called We love Shortwave. Here’s the tracklistings:
Radio Sweden Interval Signal
Triptica – Mysterious Radio Signals
Jasmine Tutum & Madtone – This Frequency
Shortwave Sounds – Reflections
Madtone – Spoken Words from Ibiza
Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble – Hiss n Listen
Gregory Morris & The 18th Parallel – Dub In Your Stereo (dub of Message in your radio by Kumar)
We recently attended a car boot at a South London car park at 6.45 am early doors, after gaining special “VIP Early Bird Dealer only access”, which basically meant handing six quid cash to a bloke on the gate while he chatted with a school boy on a pushbike.
One of the sellers was a vendor who looked like something out of Only Fools and Horses, battered Crombie, pork pie hat, two dinner plate sized badges and trousers hitched up a little too much showing some shin. He was pitched up next to an angry Millwall looking bloke selling large packs of bin bags and knock off perfume.
On the Crombie guy’s stall sat a Hohner Melodica. “Thirty quid,” he chirped. “Sixties original mate. It’s a beauty but the case is a bit bxggxred” Charming!
A “serious” muso type (so we thought) stepped up. He handled the instrument like he knew it inside out. “Mind if I play it?” he asked. “No bother, son,” came the reply from Del Boy.
We hesitated, bracing ourselves for some Augustus Pablo-style dub business. He took a breath, pursed his lips, looked around as if he was playing to a large crowd and proceeded to give a very bad short rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Even the Millwall guy selling the bin bags put his eyes up to heaven. It certainly weren’t Pablo…
Good luck to all for some great weather tomorrow for a spot of Sunday gardening!
Cheers to Spike from Morschen43 for sharing more photos of his garden in Le Puy-en-Velay, France. He was trying to take a pic of his apple tree and didn’t seen the blackbird on it that just didn’t move, so giving him a super picture and whistled a great tune as well!
Here’s some assorted photographs of the plum tree and some blossom around the garden. Spike certainly has a great looking garden and home!
And thanks to Spike, we heard this tune on his last Vampirefreaks radio show. It’s from Sidarsen and called Des Millards (from 4.51 mins in). It’s 18 mins long but it really is a bit of a hypnotising /strange one.
Here’s what Spike’s weekly radio show is all about: “Vampirefreaks is a show primarily focused on rock/punk but also covering the world of reggae, ska, dub, metal, hard rock, and sometimes hip-hop.” So if you love that stuff, tune in!
Cheers again to Spike for playing this tune as we’ve never heard of this before and for keeping up to date on the gardening tip. Keep those pictures and reports coming Spike!
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
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!
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.
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.
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?
Weeds up to me knees 