Shortwave radio has never received the credit it deserves for shaping electronic music. Most early electronic musicians--especially those in Europe, where shortwave radio is more common than in the US--will tell you that their early musical education came from trying to sift through shortwave bands to pick up pirate stations all over the Atlantic. No doubt the act of sifting through walls of static to pick up a faint but hip signal can be seen as the inspiration for at least some of electronic music's obsession with distortion, aberration, and noise. A lot of electronic music, in fact, can be read as an elaborate attempt to give shape and purpose to random noise: to turn static into a signal.
If you think about it, number stations are doubly encased in interference. Not only are the signals themselves hard to pick up, but the messages are impenetrable. The artists behind The Conet Project understood both of these mysteries. By creating a work that is not only historically important (being, really, the primary introduction of numbers stations to the world at large) but also musically relevant, Irdial has created a powerful, evocative work that has, in recent years, inspired artists as varied as Cameron Crowe (Vanilla Sky) and Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) to tap into some of its power. This is a classic in every single sense of that word.
Index of /the conet project (mp3s)
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