Enough with the carols, give me surf tunes

Happy holidays, folks. Hope some of you have enjoyed the swell the last few days. I’ve been kept out of the water due to a surf-related injury – I took a board in the ribs. Damn rib injuries take forever to mend.

If I were to get wet now, I’d set myself back a couple of weeks. My goal is to get back in the water on for our traditional New Year’s Day (or Eve) surf.

In the meantime, I’ll kick back and enjoy the Christmas chaos. While doing so, I’ll be skipping the Xmas carols and tuning into some surf music. If you weren’t aware, Scotia Surfer has a little online surf radio station – click here to check it out.

The station has a compilation of some of the greatest surf tunes of all time (the good stuff; not Beach Boys). We also play some new surf tunes by independent artists.

The station is broadcast on Live365.com, a network of online radio stations run mostly by amateurs. Because it’s on this network, Scotia Surfer has listeners from all over the world. In fact, the last time I checked, the station has listeners from over 40 countries, from the U.S. to Japan to Brazil to Morocco. We even had four listeners from the land-locked mountains of Austria in the last month.

Occasionally, we’ll get emails from musicians sending us songs and requesting airplay on the station. Sometimes the music is a little weird and far from being classified as surf music. Other times will get some of the cheesy Beach Boys-Jimmy Buffet-style stuff. Fun, but not fit for the station.

Once in a while we’ll get lucky and get some true surf tunes. Recently, we received an email from a California-based musician named Michael Quest, who sent us Q-Surf, a decent surf tune which we added to the playlist.

If you’re in a band and you play surf-related music, please send us a song, and we’ll try to get it on the station. We also play a style of music called Exotica, which is the jazzy, laidback type of music you’d listen to while sipping on a Mai Tai at a Tiki Bar in Hawaii.

For those of you who simply like listening to music, I highly recommend Scotia Surfer radio this Christmas as an alternative to songs about snow, trees, deer and a jolly fat man.