The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations (Irdial-Discs)
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When I first heard The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, my thoughts ran immediately to poor, lonesome 2X2L. The four-CD set is a mind-boggling collection of dispassionate, disembodied voices reading lists of numbers and sometimes letters in many languages, over crashing waves of lush, unfiltered radio static, occasionally accompanied by perky robotic musical themes borrowed from hell’s own ice cream truck. The collection was first issued in 1997 by a small British label, Irdial-Discs, whose other big release is a two-CD collection of the low-frequency radio signals emitted by electromagnetic phenomena like the northern lights. Irdial owner Akin Fernandez first heard a numbers station in the course of pursuing an obsession with the shortwave transmission of weather faxes. Five years and much research and networking later, he released The Conet Project in a limited edition of 500. A few months ago, due to (relatively) popular demand, he finally re-pressed it.
Unlike AM or FM stations, which dutifully identify themselves every few minutes, numbers stations transmit their signals anonymously on various shortwave bands 24 hours a day. They carry no identifying information, and their content generally consists of little more than the voice of a man, woman, or child, sometimes real and sometimes synthesized, spieling the aforementioned codes. Listeners over the years have given the voices names–some of them affectionate, like Cynthia, the Babbler, the Sexy Lady, or Bulgarian Betty, some of them more simply descriptive, like Spanish Lady. The music, when it appears, is apparently designed to alert the listener that the message is starting or ending. One long-standing station is colloquially referred to as the Lincolnshire Poacher for the calliope-esque version of the British folk tune it uses as an introduction.
At first listen the set seems as impenetrable as the monolith in 2001, but eventually, confronted with actual audible evidence of secret maneuverings that most of us will never, ever be privy to, you can almost feel the wash from the black helicopters’ rotors on the back of your neck. Taken one at a time, the recordings baffle and confound, but absorbed one after the other they blur together in a hypnotic fugue. If mathematics is the language of the universe, they’re the numerical equivalent of Kurt Schwitters’s dadaist sonata, Ursonate. (“Rakete bee bee? / Rakete bee zee.”) Or maybe, if William S. Burroughs was correct that “language is a virus from outer space,” they’re an inoculation against phonetic infection.
