THE CONET NUMBERS PROJECT

I grabbed a couple volumes of this mysterious box set via Egg City Radio this morning, and it's sure starting my weekend off on the right note. A sprawling collection of anonymous shortwave radio broadcasts consisting of coded messages meant for agents of espionage ... droning voices recite strings of numbers and unrelated words in various languages, the inscrutable directives floating in a haze of white noise or bookended by snippets of electro-generated melody. I find it all to be quite beautiful, these broadcasts possess a certain lurch and lilt that soothes me, although I understand that most folks will hue closer to Egg City's assesment of them as "genuinely unnerving."

Fans of Wilco will remember them using a sample from this collection on the title track of their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, an action that earned them a lawsuit ... here's a good
Washington Post article on The Conet Numbers Project that addresses that sticky copyright issue, plus the whole story on the man responsible for capturing and cataloging these tracks.

Download The Conet Project for free courtesy of Irdial-Discs. Or you can buy it if you prefer ... they have t-shirts too.