Cheers to Steve Barker from the excellent On The Wireradio show for letting us know about the wonderful online radio station that is Radio is a Foreign Countryhere. As it describes itself: “An endless stream of obscure (and mostly retro) global music and audio ephemera.” Crazy is not the word.
There’s a whole load of stations to have a listen to here from Shortwave, Exotic, 24/7 Nature Radio, Oddball (including Mechanical Music Radio), American Elsewhere (WBCM Radio Bristol) and tons more. It is such an eclectic selection and for God’s sake, don’t touch that dial. Cheers again Steve!
The set released a few days again on Bandcamp features 12 tracks featuring some heavy guitars, some whistling on Noir Y Voir(which would fit in on the Imaginary Stations WSTL show), a version of MV Ross Revenge For Ever (UK), which initially made us to get in touch with Spike through the pirate radio connection, and a great version of Madtone’s Dark Dread called Dark Dread / Toi … , L’Homme…
Give it a listen and name your price. Cheers Spike!
We don’t usually look back in time but by chance we saw this earlier, which originally was posted on Weeds on July 10th 2016. Have a read/listen. Thanks again to Steve Barker for sending us this at the time!
Socialism Train – 19 in a socialist reggae style
Big thanks to Steve Barker from the excellent On The Wire on BBC Radio Lancashire for supplying this ace reggae chart for us. On The Wire has been playing the best in reggae, dub, electronica, ambient and all sorts of eclectic business weekly for over 30 years and is available on listen again here.
So here’s the tunes and there’s some crackers on here. If the tune is not featured, click on the links to view on youtube.
Cheers again to Steve for the chart, shouts to Fenny and Jim at On The Wire too. Keep up the good work!
1.Ethiopians – Socialism Train
2. The Mighty Diamonds – I need a roof
3. The Heptones – Equal rights
4. Peter Tosh – Get up, stand up
5. Burning Spear – Social living
6. Abyssinians – This Land is for everyone
7. Derrick Morgan – People’s decision
8. Max Romeo – Socialism is love
9. Dillinger – Crashie First Socialist
10. King Tubby – Big Youth fights against capitalism
To listen to the wonderful programme that is On The Wire, it is no longer on BBC Radio Lanchashire but check the blogspot here.
It’s also on Totally Radio on Sundays at 6pm here. It’s well worth a listen.
Here’s a great tune that was played on last week’s show from L.S. Diezel & Launch DAT called “Poor Man’s Glory”. There’s even a south London Tai Chi connection with this one!
Earlier this afternoon we tuned into Downbeat on Shortwave (brought to us via Imaginary Stations) using The University of Twente’s online SDR here. Propagation wasn’t brilliant but we got a signal, unlike the sound of static on our shortwave receiver at home. Hopefully tomorrow’s conditions will be better and the later timing of the transmission helps. Here’s what was heard.
Imaginary Stations bring you music you don’t usually hear on the shortwaves every week and has an archive that is well worth looking through here. Expect the unexpected as they say and a whole lot more! Never mind the genre, it’s all about great music on the shortwave bands with some added remixing thanks to the ionosphere and those groundwaves.
Tune in here tomorrow at 1300 UTC (2pm UK) and 2000 UTC (9pm UK) for some chilled out sounds from Jesse Yuen and One Deck Pete. A big shout to all the Imaginary Stations crew: Fred and NanSea, Justin Patrick Moore and Marc from Belgium. Here’s to more eclectic programming on shortwave!
Reading the latest article on SWLing Posthere 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 websitehere.
Cheers to our mate Will for sending us this musical recommendation, a collection called Bootlegs II by Tribilin Sound and there’s 34 tracks for 10 US dollars which is a bargain. The opener The Poor Man Cumbia has a bit of the warped out sounds of an off-centre pressing and is a do over we think of Barrington Levi‘s Poor Man’s Style. Wonderful stuff!
And we love the mad remix of José María Arguedas’ Carnaval De Tambobamba. There’s a little bit of everything on this set from Massive Attack and Madonna and well worth investigating.
We were compiling some tunes for a space leaning shortwave mix and came across this belter of a dub. It’s off a set called Moon Dub EP by Invadread. The track is by Baodub and called Dub of the moon and it is one catchy dub and has a touch of the Keith Levine’s in there and a bit of a Doctor Who vibe somewhere. A tune!
Another moon themed tune…
As the lyrics go “Neil Armstrong the first human on the Moon and the Pan Afros the first men to play the tune”. Brilliant!
A big shout to our good friend Dr Strangedub who presents The Echo Chamber (with DJ Baby Swiss ) on KFAI out of Minneapolis, Minnesota for playing Jasmine Tutum &Madtone‘s Earth Citizen on this morning’s show at 37mins in (tune in here).
As we have said many times before, the Echo Chamber is the show to tune into on a Wednesday morning at 8am UK time for 4 hours (count them) of reggae, dub, downtempo and all sorts of bass heavy stuff and more. Cheers again Dr Strangedub!
And here’s a great track from the show called Don’t worry what the people think about you (Dub) from Dubblestandart & Jasmine Tutum.
Just looking through tunes for this weekend’s jolly at AUDIOTOPIAand found this odd tune from a long time ago which is very very catchy. It’s OMFO with Gutusl Electro. Excellent stuff! As they used to say on the adverts: Bring out the bag pipes!
Here’s the audio of yesterday’s transmission from Imaginary Stations, a show called XRPT, a compilation of Imaginary Stations shows past, present and future. It’s an interesting listen and includes contributions from all the crew, DJ Frederick, Justin Patrick Moore and at 21 minutes in is a mix from One Deck Pete called Bits and Pieces (nothing to do with Smiley Miley and The Radio 1 Roadshow of course!)
Bits and Pieces tracks:
Donut Specialist – As advertised (KMRT)
Alan Ginsberg vs Anima Universalis Into The forest – A supermarket in California (KMRT)
Beatz for Food – Frozen Food (KMRT)
The Conet Project – Phonetic Alphabet NATO (WORD)
Giorgio (Moroder) – Stop (WORD)
Christine Miller – Word Sound and Power (WORD)
Ham QSO – What’s it like being a token male? (KNTS)
Kwook – Calling all stations 1 (KNTS)
Jodey Kendrick – QYJ 9 (KNTS)
Here’s news about the new album from our gardening mate Spike 
It’s also on Totally Radio on Sundays at 6pm 
