Never heard of The Conet Project? Well, it is a rather fascinating 4-CD compilation of 150 recordings of “numbers stations” put out by Irdial-Discs in 1997 and which is unfortunately long out of print. The package includes an 80-page booklet containing a history of “numbers stations” and detailed notes on the recordings, from which I’ve drawn the following description:

For more than 30 years the shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “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.…

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

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.

The sampler below gives a glimpse of the uncanny and atmospheric beauty of the collection, and will hopefully inspire you to visit the site for a more thorough listen.

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The Swedish Rhapsody

“This station operates on a rigid and complicated schedule, in both voice (AM and SSB) and Morse modes (M5). It does not operate on Fridays. The operating agency is unknown. R 06/09/93”

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Phonetic Alphabet – NATO

“The E10 setup has been on the air from the mid-1970s, and can be heard 24 hours a day on a large number of frequencies. The Israeli Mossad have been named as the organization responsible for this huge network, by magazine writers and authors. R 1994”

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English Man

“Russian Intelligence. R 12/03/92 ”

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Tyrolean Music Station

“Vintage Numbers Station, recorded 1971. […] Two examples of some of the songs transmitted, the first bar of ‘The Internationale,’ voice sample, message with farewell, and final song. Total weirdness in full effect. See enigma list, and the forthcoming Enigma book. ”

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Composed in 1956, Radio Music is Cage’s second work for radio, the first being Imaginary Landscape No. 4 from 1951, which I spoke of in an earlier post. Like the latter piece, Radio Music was composed using chance operations and is inherently indeterminate, given the nature of the radio (the piece is scored for a variable ensemble of from one to eight radios). Unlike Imaginary Landscape No. 4, however, Radio Music was not transcribed using conventional musical notation and thus doesn’t require music reading skills to perform. Rather, the score contains columns of numbers indicating radio frequencies occasionally separated by horizontal rules, which indicate silences. The piece is divided into four parts, which can also be separated by silences if the performers so choose. The duration of the frequencies like that of the silences is left to their discretion, but a introductory note stipulates that a performance should not exceed 6 minutes.

Guy de Bièvre has made some interesting comments about contemporary performances of Radio Music, which are problematized by the changes, technological and otherwise, that the medium has undergone since the time the piece was created. “Looking at the score now, 50 years later,” he says, “raises a number of questions. The radio landscape has changed enormously since 1956. The radios themselves have changed, they sound different.” (JCAR) He elaborates:

The sounds were very different content and quality wise. Especially today with digital radio and analog radio presets on the one hand and internet radio on the other. Some people will never hear static or a station fading again.

Hence the challenge to transcribe Radio Music for internet broadcasts. This raises some immediate questions:

– how do we interpret the original wavelengths?
– what about the absence of static, or the impossibility to tune in between 2 stations?
– what about the latency due to switching between radio stations? (RM)

Such questions in no way take away from the conceptual and philosophical issues raised by this and Cage’s other works for the radio, rather, they have to do with the mechanics of performance and of course how the piece will sound. Given the nature of these changes, Bièvre claims that it is not possible to give a historically accurate performance of the work, in other words to make Radio Music sound as it did at the time it was composed.

That’s true of course, but it also serves to convey one of the central lessons that Cage sought to teach through his work, one that he himself learned in the late ’40s when he heard another pianist perform The Perilous Night, one of his compositions for the prepared piano. “His preparation of the piano was so poor,” Cage later wrote, “that I wished at the time that I had never written the music.” A later, more successful performance of the same piece by a different pianist brought Cage to the realization that, though he may try, he could not control how his music would sound when performed by others. This lead to the understanding that he did not “own” it, that once published and out in the world his music would have a life – and sound – of its own, and that, should he continue to compose, he would have to accept and live with that. As Cage himself explained:

When I first placed objects between piano strings, it was with the desire to possess sounds (to be able to repeat them). But, as the music left my home and went from piano to piano and from pianist to pianist, it became clear that not only two pianists essentially different from one another, but two pianos are not the same either. Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion.

The prepared piano, impressions I had from the work of artist friends, study of Zen Buddhism, ramblings in fields and forests looking for mushrooms, all led me to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be.

And so my work since the early ’fifties has been increasingly indeterminate. (HTPCBP)

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• John Cage database: “Radio Music”
• Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (internal link)

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Written in 1951, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is scored for twelve radios. Two performers “play” each radio, one dialing the frequency, the other changing the volume and tone. The work is notated conventionally, i.e. with notes expressing duration placed on a five-line staff, and was composed using chance operations (in this case coin tosses), as was Cage’s Music of Changes, written at the same time. Though their compositional methods were identical, the two works differ in one fundamental respect: given the nature of the instruments they employ – the piano in the former case and the radio in the latter – Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is indeterminate whereas Music of Changes is not.

The indeterminacy stems from the fact that radios produce sounds that vary according to frequency, time of day, and geographic location. It follows that those sounds cannot be determined in advance, and thus that each performance of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 will be different in ways that cannot be predicted. According to Cage himself, the experience of indeterminacy was the motivation for the piece:

When I wrote the Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios, it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpredictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins. Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself. (quoted in CCJC, 57)

The “leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself” that Cage refers to here was to become one of his guiding principles, the goal being to eliminate individual will, preference, and desires, in a word, to give up control. The Western musical tradition, with its emphasis on originality and individuality, not to mention the regimented, hierarchical nature of the orchestra, indeed of diatonic harmony itself, had become suspect to Cage. Throughout his career he sought ways around these impediments, as he saw them, and at the time he clearly hoped that composing for the radio via chance operations would allow him to bypass them, as he explained in the concluding lines to an article detailing the compositional procedure of Imaginary Landscape No. 4:

It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and “traditions” of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration. (CDPC, 59)

In the mid- to late-1950s Cage would write three more works for radio, namely Speech (1955), Radio Music (1956), and Music Walk (1958), before abandoning the instrument, though he did later compose for television, audio tape, records, and other electronic sound sources.

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• John Cage Database: “Imaginary Landscape No. 4”
• John Cage Links

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The following sampler from ShortWaveMusic is intended to fire your imagination. If it catches your ear as well I recommend that you visit the site and work your way through the archive; you won’t be disappointed. The truly smitten may also wish to download the catalog of more than 100 recordings that had appeared on the blog between 2005–’08, and will find instructions on how to do so here. Now, on to the sounds…

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Dark Radio

“[This is] a short layer piece incorporating what sounds like three or four radio sources. I’m pretty sure this is just a brief recording of one of my all-night sleep installations.”

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SWM09.04: आकाशवाणी

“I would have remained a music-illiterate myself, had I not been in bed one monsoon with asthma, and listened to the radio to fill the hours. Around 2 a.m., I chanced upon some haunting music being played on the General Overseas Service of All India Radio. While the rest of India slept I listened, and was converted…” – Ramachandra Guha

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SWM09.00: Qrv Qrv Qrv de ShortWaveMusic

“Station: Unidentified XMTR Test Sequence
Frequency: 11885 kHz
Transmitter: Unknown
Rec Date: Wed 09-Sep-2009 : 0406 UTC”

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SWM09.08: Modernizing Khan Asparuh

“This piece is an example of ‘arranged folklore’ attributed to the Upper Thracian region of Southern Bulgaria, most likely performed by Donka Koleva, a Bulgarian-born and trained singer now living in New York.”

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Duelling XMTRs! #3

“…a collision of modern Eastern electronics and Qu’ranic recitation which sounds so natural to our world-fusion-softened ears that it hardly registers as an accident of propagation at all. You could probably even dance to it …”

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KJES (“King Jesus Eternal Savior”)

“…in certain fluke moments of peculiar propagation and signal chaos, KJES [“one of the weirder evangelical shortwave stations”] occasionally crosses the line from lip-biting strangeness to an inexplicable burlap-dress beauty.”

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If you are as captivated by the beauty of these disembodied sounds as I am, you might consider purchasing a copy of At the Tone, Weiskopf’s “ ‘Little History’ of NIST Radio Stations WWV and WWVH” (you’ll find a teaser for it here). Be sure to keep an ear out for his forthcoming Historical Longwave CD Project, too. In the meanwhile, you can enjoy his first “catalog mix,” 833-45: Howth St PART/SEQ (Pananorama Mix), a sound collage incorporating “shortwave elements, Qur’an recitation, and music,” which you can read about and download here.

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