Customer Reviews

Conet Project: Recordings of Short Wave

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to tell you the truth, the first time i heard(with my headphones on sitting in front of my computer at two in the morning)this kept me up all night. i hardly slept. there's something mysterious, and creepy about these recordings: the distant voice reading random numbers, and meaningless words with covert meanings intended for spies anywhere in the world (i have this picture in my mind of spies listening at night or early morning on their shortwave radios, a pencil and a paper in hand deciphering these mesages with their one time pads). that's why these discs are so intriguing: they are public broadcasts and yet they' re undecipherable...at least for us. and i think it's that mystery of something hidden, and unknown that lures us in.


there's four discs. and there's a very nice booklet included as well with all the info you need about the recordings and some essays about the numbers stations.

check out www.archive.org(and type in "conet project" in the search)if you wanna hear some samples or download the whole album.

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1234567890, ACHTUNG!

The current re-press of The Conet Project is identical to the original, in every detail but one. This edition has 4 CDs, the 80 page booklet and *two* postcards instead of one.

The second postcard will enable you to take part in a world-wide experiment we are unleashing, called "The Conet Project: Six Degrees of Separation". We are using these cards to attempt to track down the staff that operated Numbers Stations in the past, wherever in the world they are now living.

Everyone on earth is connected to everyone else; it only takes six steps to get from any one person to any other person on the planet, hence the phrase 'Six Degrees of Separation'. If this really is the case, then we should be able to track down people who worked in Numbers Stations from the last three decades, simply by deploying the special cards that we have produced.

Hopefully the people that we are able to locate (and that are willing to divulge their secrets to us) will have kept a private, detailed record of what they did, the decisions that were made, who made them, why, and everything else we are keen to know. We may finally find out why a little girl's voice was thought to be appropriate for use in a Numbers Station!

Order your copy now!

ENDE

Learn to count in different languages!

When I heard about this boxset I pretty much knew I had to have it. The label, Irdial, has actually made the recordings available for free download on the internet, and you can also download a PDF of the brochure, but I wanted the package, which is actually very nice! The broadcasts were definitely not made with any artistic intentions, but what Irdial has done is indeed a work of art.

I had a shortwave radio as a kid and would go to the rooftop of my apt. building to listen to all kinds of stuff, like Radio Moscow ("Welcome to Moscow Mailbag") as well as ranting and raving about "imperialistas yanquis" from Cuba. There's all kinds of other weird stuff, like Universal Time stations, weird noises, and the mysterious "numbers stations", which are the subject matter of this collection. I had no idea what these were at the time.

Listening to these recordings is truly surreal. On one hand it is incredibly mundane, with either a totally bored-sounding human or an electronically generated voice reading off numbers and letters. On the other hand listening to these while thinking about the possible hidden messages is quite creepy. It's quite possible that at least some of these messages were instructions that lead to someone's death or "disappearance". What adds to the surrealistic effect is the goofy music, or in one case cartoon character voice, that bookends the reading of the numbers. Particularly creepy is the use of a little girl's voice in one of them! For full effect, listen to these while driving late at night, especially away from the city lights. Try to image yourself listening to instructions while undercover.

Some of it is just bleeps and blurbs, sometimes mixed with the whining and roaring electromagnetic jamming devices, which attempt to block the transmissions. This stuff can sound like the "musique concrete" of early experimental electronic recording artists.

The booklet is amazingly detailed and comprehensive. Irdial have gone through great lengths to put this together and are to be comnended for it.

Clearly this is not for everybody, but people fascinated by espionage, and people with a taste for the quirky and bizarre will dig it. I can't say that I'm likely to play it very often, although it would be fun to sneak in a piece or two into the playlist at a party :)! One side benefit for me is that I am learning how to count in Romanian!

UNU DOI TREI PATRU CINCI

TERMINAT! TERMINAT! TERMINAT!