I was having a conversation with Hornet Montana last week via e-mail (he just turned 50 years old!) and we traded Wikipedia links regarding numbers stations and shortwave radio broadcast ephemera. If you haven’t noticed, his website has taken on a new look of its own recently. And last week he posted a clip of Yosemite Sam from a number station likely located in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico (paging Dr. William Fowler Collins!). Apparently the station surfaced in December of 2004 and — according to Wikipedia — “The transmission begins on one of the frequencies. Ten seconds later, it is repeated on the next higher frequency, and so on for a total of two minutes. The entire pattern takes precisely two minutes, and always begins seven seconds after the top of an hour. Each transmission starts with a data burst lasting 0.8 seconds, followed by the voice of Yosemite Sam exclaiming: “Varmint, I’m a-gonna-b-b-b-bloooow yah t’smithereens!” The purpose and origin of the station remain unknown.
Number stations. So cool! So mysterious! For the uninformed, those are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin, and evidence suppers popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. Although never publicly acknowledged, as recently as ten years ago the US government tried five men for spying on America for Cuba. That group had received and decoded messages that were broadcast from a Cuban numbers station. These stations date as far back as the 1950s, have played a part in the mythology of LOST, and even influenced a really bad album by Wilco. That Wilco album, by the way, featured an unauthorized Conet Project sample that resulted in a $30,000 lawsuit won by Irdial Disc.
So, what is the Conet Project? In short, it is a four-disc compilation of shortwave radio broadcasts from numbers stations from around the world, broadcast in different languages and all very likely containing some amount of encrypted information intended for spies currently in the field. Amateur radio enthusiasts have been charting and collecting recordings of numbers stations for decades, and there seem to be some similarities that transcend language or location: a deadpan voice recites random (well, probably not random) numbers over and over, a morse code signal beeps a pattern, different noises or tones are incorporated to infer beginnings and ends of loops…it’s all really fucked up and amazing. After four discs of voices and tones and buzzes you start to feel like you’re tripping.
The Conet Project CD has been out-of-print for a few years now, but every once in a while Irdial presses a bunch more. Hopefully they aren’t done here, because it would be a shame for so many people to go through their lives without hearing and reading about this completely unique, incredible non-musical phenomenon.
The Conet Project
Recordings Of Shortwave Numbers Stations
Irdial Disc
MegaUpload DL Link
Selected Tracks:
– The Swedish Rhapsody
– English Man
– English Lady (Being Jammed)
– Russian Man
