Grant Hutchinson / Posts

Wednesday
October 6, 2004

1:05 PM

Grant Hutchinson
Conet

Audio Espionage

Let's say you're appreciating the design and typography of something like these vintage shortwave radio verification cards. You really should be bathed in the appropriate sonic ambience to fully appreciate the visuals. May I recommend background audio courtesy of The Conet Project? This massive collection of recordings of so-called 'shortwave numbers stations' is at once, both eerily beautiful and poignantly cryptic. While the individual tracks are free for the taking, the full-blown quadruple CD package is certainly a tempting investment.

Comments

This is weird... like waking up and realizing you live in a spy novel.

And then I said …
Tom
  • Wednesday October 6, 2004 3:38 PM
  • Tom

... and that maybe the cold war hasn't quite thawed out all the way yet. Regardless of the origin of or reason behind the broadcasts, this collection is an amazing archive of a very specific genre of sound creation. If you're completely fascinated by all this, there's another compilation in the form of an interactive disc. Although the number of tracks included is smaller, The Numbers Racket also supplies various bits of background information along with the audio for each station.

And then I said …
Grant
  • Thursday October 7, 2004 9:01 AM
  • Grant

I had always wondered about the origin of the eerie repeating sample at the end of the Wilco song "Poor Places" - the sample from which the album title Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is derived. After a few seconds into this Conet Project recording and I had an answer... who knew there would be such an intriguing story behind it!

And then I said …
Lawrence O'Toole
  • Thursday October 7, 2004 11:10 AM
  • Lawrence O'Toole

Lawrence:

Check out Subsystence for an article by Irdial-Discs owner Akin Fernandez about this very topic.

And then I said …
Ken Meier
  • Friday October 8, 2004 1:28 PM
  • Ken Meier

I know this post is old, but numbers stations have recently come back into the limelight because ot this mysterious Craiglist posting...

And then I said …
primerinc.com
  • Tuesday June 6, 2006 1:42 PM
  • primerinc.com

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