Rotating one’s Yagi

This Sunday 5th May 2024 on the shortwave bands, Imaginary Stations bring you a radio premier, Test Cards on Radio. It will be beamed to Europe via Shortwave Gold at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz.

The show is a must for fans of test cards and TV trade test transmissions alike and will feature all kinds of frequency tones for radio calibration purposes, an exclusive ten minute chat with Stooky Bill (*subject to availability) and test card related music from around the world. So get up on your roof and rotate your yagi, adjust your brightness and vertical hold and tune in on Sunday.

In the beginning (there was Jack)

This morning whilst on an early morning mission to Deptford we caught this poster in a pub window. It’s for Wednesday’s May Day celebrations featuring an appearance of Fowlers Troop and the Deptford Jack in the Green (more on them here which even includes a Hawkwind and Pink Fairies connection!)

The great John Rogers has got a interesting little film that explains the celebrations a little more. Looks like a fun day!

All this talk of May Day revelry reminded us of one spring evening years ago when we were going to London Bridge station and followed a man dressed as a tree walking with a lady who was sporadically ringing an old school bell. We made a bit of a detour so we could capture more of the madness and just before we turned off for the station we had to see what it was all about. “Excuse me mate, could you explain more about your get up” we said to the tree man/man tree to which he curtly replied, “Mayday?” We were told that day and by a bloke with a painted green face.

 

And talking of John Rogers, here is again the two part excellent walk of the “Magic” River Quaggy, which is a “much watch”.

Music to drive any frosts away

Here’s two great tunes for a Tuesday evening to drive any chance of the frost away.

The first is a lovely middle eastern-inspired mix of an Adrian Sherwood live track. It’s a wonderful piece of instrumental reggae called Sinnervisions from the great Spy From Cairo who makes some brilliant music that we have featured before and this one is really up there! More about his stuff here.

 

And from 2015 from Blackboard Revision we have Blackboard Horns from Lee Scratch Perry, Danny Boyle and Danny Red. Wonderful horns with some fantastic bass!

 

And here’s another track or two from each of the artists for good measure!

 

Get those buckets out, possibly

This scene is from a couple of years ago but this weekend we may go back in the time machine and relive it as it’s going to be 2°C overnight on Sunday, supposedly.

We’ve got spuds that have sprouted and even some coriander seed that have propagated outdoors so it’s better to be safe than sorry. We reckon give it a couple of more weeks and we’ll be out of the danger zone but then again remember that snappy old-time gardening saying “Button to chin, till May be in, cast not a clout, till May be out. If you lose your seed spuds you will get angry and swear and shout”.

The sun’s out this morning, the sky is blue but it’s still nippy. Whether we’ll be in the garden today for long is another thing. So for this sunny morning, here’s a tune by Billy Hope with Riding West which has a bit of a Steptoe and Son vibe to it.

Tune of the afternoon

We’re ashamed to say we’ve never heard this tune before. It’s from the great King Sunny Ade and it’s a dubby version of Ja Funmi and it is wonderful 7 minute piece of music.

We found out about this tune from listening to a great mixcloud show called Jah Wobble’s 10 Commandments of dub. It’s just a collection of the tunes, no interview with Wobble or anything but the tunes are all good ones! For the full track listings see here. Well worth listening to if you like a bit of dub.

(Internet) radio connects us all

A big thanks to The Rhythm Doctor for playing Jasmine Tutum & Madtone‘s What is Man/Promised Land (Blossoms Kitchen dubplate mix) on this week’s Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room on IDA Radio at 5.33 minutes in then followed by The Nairobi Sisters Promised Land dub.

So you fancy an excellent Monday morning listen tune into IDA Radio (Tallinn) at 9am – 11am for the best in jazz, downbeat, dub, ambient, reggae and lots of other eclectic stuff. It’s well worth tuning into! There’s lot of the shows archived here.

Sophisticated frost protection for beginners

Here’s an example of one of our cheapskate frost protection schemes in situ in the bed at the bottom of the garden. We’ve got a couple of split bin bags down to keep the weeds out and the soil warm, an old vase, some glacé cherry containers and an old plastic cloche we found in the street years ago. They may be not look pretty but they will hopefully work to keep that damn frost out!

Thank goodness, there wasn’t a frost last night. Now the SE23 weather forecast has changed a bit, tonight is still supposedly going to be 5°C, tomorrow 9°C and from Friday night to Sunday night there’s lows of 3°C during the wee hours. So the protection will be back on for the next few nights and of course be taken off during the day if it heats up a little like when the sun came out today for a couple of hours.

We’ve seen online all sorts of frost protection from old clothes, net curtains to random bits of fabric draped over bamboo canes in a teepee. It’s not about what it looks like more about if it’ll work or not and what you have at hand, punk rock style.

And here’s a nice chilled tune made by a punk rocker so it says on Bandcamp, it’s from “Dan Rincon, longtime drummer of the prolific psych-punk band OSEES’” and the tune is called MotorRhythm, Wooden and it’s a good one if like us, you like a bit of out there downbeat.

A fine Friday morning tune (even though the weather isn’t)

It’s supposedly going to be a sunny weekend so we may be going out in the garden and even sticking those indoor sowed vegetable plants out to harden them off so they get used to the weather they’ll be eventually facing outside. Take them out when it starts to warm up in the morning and bring them in when it starts getting cold.

To cheer us up we’re listening to a wonderful tune called Promised Land from The Nairobi Sisters (Terrie Nairobi and Judy Mowatt). It’s a different slice of reggae and it’s the version which is the tune (the one on the Gayfeet pressing is in our opinion a slighty better mix to the Flames release as there’s more of the killer hand drums). We only found out recently the tunes has been sampled by a few people including A Tribe Called Quest for “Whateva Will Be”. A tune for a Friday!

The Flames release is now available again thanks to the excellent Death Is Not The End bandcamp that has a wealth of great stuff to search through.

We’ll throw in the scratches for free

We love a seven inch single here at Weeds and were going through some old mixes and found this one called One Deck Pete presents The Skybird Singles Club. It’s from a shortwave broadcast of Radio Skybird from August 2023 and thought it would be good to post it up here. We hope there’s a couple you haven’t heard before. Here’s the tracklistings:

Rotary Connection – Like a rolling stone
Weekend – The view from her room
Earl Curry – One whole year baby
Felice Taylor – I feel love comin’ on
Toby Nelson – You don’t need me

Watch your eyes

Sadly we in Europe won’t be able to see the forthcoming eclipse next Monday but here’s the next best thing, KSOL – The Eclipse Edition from The Imaginary Stations crew. It’s a show that will bring you an eclipse experience without looking up skywards.

Treat yourself to some path of totality classics from DJ Frederick, Justin Patrick Moore over the hour and at 16.04 minutes in is a 15 minute mix from One Deck Pete with “Can you seen Baily’s Beads?”.
Tracklistings:
A Man called Adam – Moon
Cosmos – Summer in space (Mark’s Harmonic 33 mix)
Cedric Im Brooks – Blackness of Darkness
Cornell Campbell – Stars
Do remember to wear eye protection when you listen to this show!

Here’s the great trailer for KSOL:

And a treat from the great DJ Algoriddim on the Stars rhythm: