On National Public Radio I head a intersting story about something called "The Conet Project".
It seems this gentleman from London recorded various voices, musical tones and other oddities off the air, and then complied the collection onto a set of CDs.
Being one always intersted in the "spooky" side of goverment, I had to order a copy for myself.
Its pretty cool listening, good background music, but you have to be a radio fan to appreciate it, don't bother playing it for the YL unless she is a Cold War fan.
You don't have to order the CD as you can download and listen to many of the audio clips from the
www.archive.org site. See
www.archive.org/details/ird05973 Bruce W1UJR
From the website:
What are these messages? Well, no one has ever come forward to prove that these stations are linked to spy networks, but almost everyone who has ever studied the signals believes that they are. But why would a spy network like the CIA or the KGB or Israel's Mossad or Osama BinLaden's Al-Qaeda--with all their money and resources--bother transmitting messages through something like shortwave radio, a cheap technology that would allow anyone in the world to listen in?
Knowing that the tracks on The Conet Project are actual messages sent from a government or group to a spy, and knowing that those messages might contain orders that, at one time, probably instructed that spy to go kill someone or dig up dirt on a politician or just stay where they are, makes for a rather enticing listen, to say the least. But the meaning behind these messages will remain a mystery because there is just no way to ever come across a one-time pad key (they are destroyed after use), and though it is fun to speculate about these sounds, that speculation gets tiring after a while for all but the most die-hard listeners.
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.
