The unchallenged existence of Numbers Stations is a symptom of the somnambulistic state that the worlds educated populations live in. Anything can be done to this population, and no one will notice or react in any way.
—Akin Fernandez

Sometime in 2002, I stumbled into Aquarius Records trolling for some new sounds, when I was immediately drawn to the image on the cover of something called The Conet Project. I didn’t even skim the review before clicking the first sample. I waited for the first track to load with no expectations.

Distant, warbled voices drowned by seven brief tones…interrupted by Swedish Rhapsody being played on an over-amped musicbox…repeat.. repeat…repeat…numbers read by what sounds like a young girl…the musicbox again…repeat…repeat…the girl, more numbers…

By the the time the shortwave distortion took over 2:45 minutes into the track, my attention had shifted toward a singular point of focus and remained there until all the tracks had played out. It’s difficult to describe it any other way. I tried to reassemble what i’d just heard.

Each recording was a like vignette, replete with it’s own signature nuance and voice, but there was something else going on here. Something more than Toshiya Tsunoda meets Kraftwerk. Something utterly captivating and altogether different.

Digging a little deeper I began to understand just what set it apart.

One night in December 1992, while navigating through shortwave radio transmissions, Irdial-Discs label owner Akin Fernandez stumbled upon the sound of something utterly mundane and profoundly mysterious. A man, his voice altered by the frequency of short wave and his own droning delivery, reading numbers. No station identification, no evidence of production. Simply a voice reading a numeric sequence woven in the eerie din of shortwave interference and noise. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the transmission came to a jarring end leaving Akin in silence and in the throws of instant obsession.

“If you were to come across that, in the middle of the night, by yourself, you would me more than scratching your head — you’d be saying what on earth have i just come across?”—AF (wp)

It was this question and the captivating strangeness of the transmissions themselves that kept him incessantly searching for more. From 1992 to 1997 Fernandez archived them in droves. The more he found the more varied and stranger they became. Many incorporated background noises, tones and music while others consisted only of inexplicable noises and other-worldly modulations. One broadcast even featured the voice of a child counting off sets of numbers.

His detailed log of frequency, duration, broadcast content and patterning served as local map of the phenomena he found himself in the depths of experiencing. The territory was something else entirely —elusive, strange and shrouded in mystery.

It would take years of research, conversations and hypotheses from the absurd (weather stations) to the curious (a global collective of performance artists) before Akin discovered a book that both confirmed his experience and underscored it’s mystery as being no mistake. The book, Intercepting Numbers Stations by Langley Piece not only detailed the purpose for the transmissions, it gave them a name: Numbers Stations.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.—(tcp)

In the years following that night in December, Akin amassed an extensive collection of Numbers Station recordings. Everything had fallen to the periphery of his myopic focus. Irdial stalled and he often spent weeks at a time at the receiver, without leaving his home. In Piece’s book, he’d found Churchill’s “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, the key to which opened up even more room for investigation. With a new-found direction for his hard research (interviews, locating and photographing stations), Fernandez’s obsession with the recording of Numbers Station transmissions found a new trajectory — compiling them.

In 1997, Irdial-Discs released The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, an important historical reference work for research into this hitherto unreported and unknown field of espionage. The CDs contain 150 recordings spanning the last twenty years; taken from the private archives of dedicated shortwave radio listeners from around the world.

The first pressing soon sold-out and thanks to the low-end jobs he took to sustain himself and his research, there seemed to be little chance of a re-release. That is, until Wilco sampled one of the tracks without permission on an album named after the sample itself, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Fernadez sued, and Wilco settled for $30,000 in legal expenses and royalties.

Legal/ethical discussions aside, Fernandez fervently defended his stance that money and recognition were never goals for his work. After using the settlement money to fund several re-issues of The Conet Project, Irdial became an Open Content label, going so far as to destroy all but 100 hard copies of each release in it’s catalog, and providing them free for download.

Controversy surrounding the Wilco lawsuit provided Fernandez with just enough media buzz to achieve his original artistic and political intent; to further publicize the existence of Numbers Stations and in doing so, get closer to pressuring governmental acknowledgment regarding their truth and purpose.

“Conet,” of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it’s in the Library of Congress, because it’s in the British Library and because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used for espionage.

“These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are,” the spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted by the release of “Conet.” “People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They’re not, shall we say, for public consumption.”—(wp)

The Conet Project is far from easy listening. In fact, while everyone I’ve ever played it for has been intrigued, the bulk of the responses are laced with a trace of something beyond the undeniable creepiness. More than a few people have asked me to turn it off within the first 30 seconds, as if the recordings relay a sense of the foreboding and the forbidden themselves, without any background history at all. A transparent fingerprint of their original purpose somehow relayed as an audial warning label, not for public consumption.

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official “end of the cold war”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.–(tcp)

Not too many sound projects can claim to simultaneously represent profound instances in the annals of experimental sound, incidental art, governmental secrecy, cold war/present-day espionage, creative obsession and conspiracy theory. The fact that one man’s attentiveness, curiosity and creativity spawned all of the above is a testament and an inspiration.

The Conet Project and it’s unfolding history remains as intriguing and relevant today as it ever did.

The Conet Project: Full Download (133.9MB, mp3.zip + 76pg.pdf)
Individual Downloads: Irdial / Archive.org
Reference: The Conet Project / Washington Post / Wikipedia / Aquarius
Media: Irdial / NPR / KUTV / Flickr

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