Vox’s posts tagged radio

Old Radio -Superman

nobody@vox.com(Simon) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:05:54 +0000

Today i decided i would listen to the afternoon play on radio 4 ....just like the old days... well the real player the BBC use doesn't seem to work on my computer so i couldn't listen to it.

listening to play's and books really chills me out and i really enjoy it, i listened to the last hanibal lector book ...i forget its name btu the audio book was read by the author, it was great .....the movie sucked in comparison!

anyway trying to Google to fix my BBC not working problem i was reminded about internet radio and thought there is probably a whole channel with nice plays and books on it so i looked around and i stumbled upon http://www.wizzard.tv/oldtimeradio
which has a whole host of old radio shows to listen , to you can even download them .....and on the list of old shows they have is most importantly is
http://superman.libsyn.com/

they have a load of the superman radio programs including the first one , they are great i started to listen to them ...faster than a speeding bullet :)
if you like the old radio shows or spoken word radio shows or radio drama you should definitely check them out

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BreakThru Radio Comes To The iPhone and iTouch

nobody@vox.com(prMac) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:42:25 +0000

BreakThru Radio Comes To The iPhone and iTouch

http://prmac.vox.com/library/post/bre...

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BreakThru Radio Comes To The iPhone and iTouch

nobody@vox.com(prMac) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:41:29 +0000

Indie-focused online music radio broadcaster, BreakThru Radio is using technology from TVersity to offer on-demand radio shows to iPhone and iTouch users. The news means the broadcaster's diverse range of channels covering the gamut, from reggae to rock. iPhone and iTouch users simply need to navigate to BreakThru Radio in Safari on their device. Once there they will be presented with a series of drop-down menus which allow them to choose the on-demand show they want to hear.

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Leona Lewis | from "bleeding in love" to "better in time"

nobody@vox.com(Iced Tea) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:52:31 +0000

I first saw Leona Lewis was at Olympic game's closing ceremony, and was impressed by her 'Mariah Carey & Celine Dion" voice (right, I'm 90s pop music follower). I've listened to "Bleeding love" all summer, and finally matched the song with the singer.

Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love

Then, radio started to play "Better in time" more, and my feeling identified with it. After all, love is experienced and expressed in an universal way. Don't you find love songs are specially written just for you when in love and out of love? Just randomness or a sign for ...?

Leona Lewis - Better In Time

To Leona Lewis, THE singer for 2008 in my eyes, and many others'

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Neck of the Woods..

nobody@vox.com(Ursus Polar) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:03:06 +0000

On my way through this neck of the woods today

Yes, there I am minding my own business and relaxing after a late lunch. 1.10pm it was(= 13:10 on the 24 hour clock). The radio is playing and a segment called The Best Song Ever Written features.. guy calls the station, talks to the host, yabba yabba and soon (if you're lucky) the guy intros the song. Today.. Henry Hall's (was it 1933..?) The Teddy Bear's Picnic.. Lyrics like: If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise..

Well, as it happened a rellie of mine did go down 'to the woods' today and yep did get a big surprise. A quelle surprise! Named tybear - banned from a new Blogger site. Someone - and yes the song chosen was nothing whatever to do with the guy requesting it except insofar as a warning, or an alerting, or a 'reporter's diary' entry as the journos in this neck of the woods are wont to heed. In the local rag.

Clever covering — what with the bear market clashing of cymbals and things today.. all around the place. Couldn't be better. For the guileless. In regard to this particular access to the wood pulp diary thereabouts. Oh yes indeed there's lots to listen for on the radio. The no-ads radio at anyrate.

But the action - the doing(banning) like this - tells one things about the sensitivities of those sad souls intolerent of your viewpoint. As tybear - forced into making some kind of explanation to the 'followers' at his already banned blogsite(only registered google users had access mind you) - created another blog. For which go read the ps bottom-lining his forthright response.

And as well as their sensitivities they also declare either a whoring for or preference about power and its uses...

Of which more later..

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Fun with Mark and Brian: Hooked on “Ebonics”!

nobody@vox.com(zinkognito) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:23:08 +0000

Hooked On Ebonics

My favorite Morning Radio show of all time was the Mark and Brian program broadcast out of Los Angeles during the 90’s. It was a show that really made you feel like they were your friends, and I spent many years glued to the show each morning! In fact, I’d wager I’d still be listening to it NOW, it it wasn’t for the fact that the powers that be decided to discontinue the broadcast around 1997 or so...

Anyway, during this time, the phenomenon of that wonderful learning program “Hooked on Phonics” was all the rage, and true to form, Mark and Brian seized the opportunity to poke fun at it in the funniest way- by creating a spoof home-shopping network commercial pitching an item called Hooked On EBONICS, the program that taught kids to speak perfect urban slang!

The idea was funny in itself, but the cherry on the top was the fact that they used real kids to speak the lines (I’m pretty sure one of the kids was Mark’s son Matthew, but I can’t be sure!), and to hear the kids struggle to read the crazy ghetto speak was just hilarious!!

Whenever Mark and Brian were on vacation, they’d broadcast “The Best of Mark and Brian”, and when I realized they were airing the episode with the Hooked on Ebonics Commercial, I scrambled to get a cassette in, and was able to preserve this comedic gem for all time!

Join us as we tune into Biff and Biff’s Home Shopping Network…

Hooked On Ebonics

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The Shampoo Chronicles

nobody@vox.com(michelle annese) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:30:08 +0000

Amazing! With all the information out there...books, cd's, countless and endless internet knowledge about anything, advice from friends, relatives, parents, partners, kids, neighbors, strangers, sharing a couch at a local coffee house, teachers, magazines, radio, TV, articles, memoirs, essays, the endangered newspaper, Bibles, Scrolls, Korans, teachings, stories, and the occasional fairy tale...it all comes down to three little words...

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Lather. Get out of life as much knowledge as you can from as many diverse and decadent ways you can. Lather your mind until it oozes out of you. Lather your heart until it oozes out of you. Lather your spirit until it oozes all over everyone else.

Rinse. A simple command. But for some, a hard command to follow. Rinse your life of all the junk that get in the way of true learning and living in the now, in the present moment. Then rinse yourself clean by sharing all of your knowledge with others. Let us learn from you. Empty your cup. You cannot learn more if you won't teach others what you know...so you can learn more.

Repeat. Do it all over again. Do it wiser, smarter, better!

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Concept for user testing

nobody@vox.com(damonstenhouse) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:20:01 +0000

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Concept for user testing

nobody@vox.com(radiomars) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:20:00 +0000

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Callando Ballando!!...

nobody@vox.com(odimusic) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:54:48 +0000

....is not the title of the next ODi song (although now you mention it...) but the name of the funniest T.V. program I've seen in a long time! So last week I was over in Roma for a few days at one of my best friend's wedding and whilst nursing a (very over indulged in red wine, white wine and any other coloured wine left on the table) sore head the next day I flicked on the telly and was engrossed by what I think may have been Italian karyoke (apologies to any Italian popstars on the show if this was not the case) and really badly mimed, even I noticed (I grew up thinking Top Of The Pops was live, ok)! For extra comedy factor the audience were also on stage singing (and miming) with the contestants who consisted of what looked like the singer's aunts, uncles, grannies and other various extended family members plus 2 extremely short-skirted cousins with cowboy hats and boots! I have no idea what was going on but it was the best cure for a sore head I've ever had, just brilliant! Has anyone else seen this or was I just having another Father Dougal moment??

Right, so whats going on back in the real world then? Well the Eps been selling nicely, thanks to everyone whose downloaded it, bought it, burnt it (naughty naughty, but ok, so long as you promise to come to a gig the next time) or sat on it. Cheers! If you dont know what the hec Im on about then check out the front page again and press a few buttons on the new frustratingly annoying player, you'll eventually get to it! Needless to say, but Im going to anyway, you can get it at the following gigs at bargain prices and even more so if you're good at haggling at which Im not (my haggling skills were taught to me at a very young age from watching 'The Life Of Brian' so you'll probably end up getting one for free).

3 Oct 2008	Electric Avenue (supporting Owen Brady) Waterford
4 Oct 2008	The Sugar Club (Supporting Owen Brady) Dublin
7 Oct 2008	Halo (E-mail me for guest-list passes) London
11 Oct 2008	House Concerts York (www.houseconcertsyork.co.uk)

If for some reason you cant make it to any of the above then there's a few other things that you can do which would make our life a little bit easier and our bums a little less sore from sitting on them all day! Hmm maybe too much information there!

Mission 1: Fancy a trip to Prague? If you click on this link it'll take you to a little competition we entered to go on tour in Prague, and you can come too whayhay!
http://www.overplay.com/PragueTour.asp

Mission 2: Say hello to Tom Robinson: This guy seems to be turning into the new John Peel and is giving us newbies a chance for their fans (that's you by the way) to get in touch with him and put forward a track or two i.e. A SUPERMAN!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/tom_robinsons_introducing/recommend.shtml

Mission 3: Make a cuppa and have a listen to the new track 'Real To Me'!

Real To Me - Live on ELFM

ODi

Easy peasy this one more of a way to say thanks for all your hard work and if you're really feeling it then you can download it here http://www.elfm.co.uk/2008/05/odi/ (we would have put it up for free download on the new player but we dont know how to!) and if you're still in the mood for procrastination try this!

www.rosspatzeltradioshow.mypodcast.com
www.musicworldradio.com
http://www.live365.com/stations/unheardmusic
www.runningfrog.com/frogcast
http://www.myspace.com/nipodcast

Ok thats enough dossing for now get back to work before your boss catches you, oh, whats that, oh, ok, you are the boss, well then go and make another cuppa and I'll have one too with a chocolate hob nob, thanks very much!

Odi xxxxx

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Talk radio - republican?

nobody@vox.com(Chez Michelle) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:42:56 +0000

There are some talk shows I like to listen to in the car, like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Howie Carr, etc. (okay, maybe even a little Art Bell oldies too). I'm suddenly not liking them so much anymore. All they (except Art Bell) seem to spew is republican propaganda lately. Is it just me? What happened to these guys? Where did their common sense go?

I'm not talking which side of the fence they're on. I'm talking about hosting a good, interesting radio show. Sorry guys, but I don't tune in so that you can beat me over the head with why republicans are right and democrats are wrong. I really don't care about your opinion. However, I do care about how ridiculous your opinion sounds.

Take Glenn Beck, for example. I used to think he was an intelligent and funny talk-show host. I even watched his TV show once in a while. Until he started promoting how wonderful Sarah Palin is because she had a disabled baby, like she is the only woman in the world to have a child with a disability? Maybe I should run for President.. I have TWO disabled children. No, then again, I'm overqualified. Except I can't see Russia from my house. That could be a disadvantage.

My radio talk show list has dwindled down to ... Coast to Coast AM. That's it. Anyone have any suggestions?

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a bit of Recomen 09.26.2008

nobody@vox.com(kikinini) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:47:04 +0000

A question from listener,
Once V6 members were asked if they are able to be in other Johnny's group for limited time, which group would it be?
And Ken kun and Okada kun said,"ARASHI"
Aiba chan, if you can change groups, which group would you like to join?

Eh~! Which one?

How about V6?

I wonder what it's like?
"Hi, I'm Aiba of V6".....No good.
I feel weird......Age differences.
But you shouldn't mind in a group.
So I will say "Morning! Sakamoto kun! like this? (Laugh)
Wow, it's so much fun to just imagine it!!
"I'm Aiba of TOKIO!"
"I'm Aiba of Tacky & Tsubasa!"
I don't get it any more......

But in that case, you must take Tsubasa kun off.

"Tacky & Aiba" desu??

How about KAT-TUN's A for Aiba?

I'm KAT-TUN's A, Aiba desu.
I'm Aiba of Hey!Say!JUMP
No. I'm not from Heisei era.
But I still think ARASHI is the only one for me!
Though they are all attractive......, but ARASHI is the Best!!!!!

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Cold Play

nobody@vox.com(accgian) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:20:49 +0000

Già mi piaceva... poi lo sentita tipo 5 volte ieri in radio su 5 stazioni differenti ... non me la sono più tolta dalla testa...
Mi piace moltissimo, e per la gioia di Ilaria (che se non sbaglio terrebbe i Cold Play sul comodino :D ) li metto anche qui!

Cold Play - Viva la vida!

Buona giornata... Gian

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DGW Episode 661

nobody@vox.com(InsideDGW) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:54:24 +0000

Cordzilla

Stretch Rope

Link: Lehigh Group

Cordzilla

The latest addition to Lehigh Group's SecureLine range of products, Cordzilla is a "stretch rope" and features a bungee cord encased in a polypropylene rope. The steel hooks at both ends are vinyl coated to prevent scratching, while the security clip is made of anodised aluminium to prevent rusting. Two sliding plastic sleeves protect the surface of our possessions round which the Cordzilla needs to wrap itself. Rated at a safe working load of 400 pounds, Cordzilla is the Godzilla of bungee ropes. Available in 3, 4 and 5 feet models. The 5 feet model, e.g. can stretch to 9 feet. On sale at Wal-Mart.

Dick suggests Leo and Dane make a show of jumping off the roof with the Cordzilla. The Chatroom suggests jumping into a dung tank. With piranhas, Dick adds.

Leo at NAB Radio Show

Leo at the NAB Radio Show
Leo was in Austin, Texas last week attending the NAB Radio Show, giving a speech entitled "Radio's Survival Plan in the Digital Space", and attending a panel called "60 Digital Ideas in 60 Minutes", and generally talking about the future of radio. "Is there any?" asks Dick. "No," answers Leo, and that's what he told the NAB broadcasters - that is, if they don't start doing a blog, making a video log, twittering and creating a Facebook profile for themselves, i.e. doing what Leo's doing. You can get a summary of what's been happening at the NAB Radio show at Jacobs Media's blog. You can watch Leo's speech at mms://wme.jacobsmedia.com/jacobsmedia.com/summit13_leolaporte.wmv, or get to the link via Jocobs Media's website.

Offering a Ride
Marilyn and Daryl Holmquist from San Francisco, who last wrote about the creator of Rice-A-Roni in Episode 440, write in again. Leo was talking about buying a Prius in Episode 652, but Daryl can easily top that, with the Tesler which he has ordered, due to arrive in May or June next year, when he can take Dick for a ride.

Tesler

The Smart Car
But Leo is more taken with the idea of getting The Smart Car, which has arrived in the US. Tiny and cute, just under 9 feet long, and only $99 to reserve.

The Smart Car

Listen to Episode 661
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

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tune into

nobody@vox.com(emmaforman) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:21:59 +0000

to Celtic music radio on the 20th sept

Tune it as there should be two of my tunes played- one at 2:30 and one at 3:30 on Sat 20th Sept.
www.celticmusicradio.net

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DGW Episode 658

nobody@vox.com(InsideDGW) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:35:10 +0000

WebcamMax

Webcam Special Effects Software

Link: WebcamMax

WebcamMax

Recommended to Dick by Andy Wombwell of stickam.tv, WebcamMax is a piece of software for Windows to add special effects to your webcam video chat, including special background of your choice, bubble effect, hats and glasses to your video image. You can also do a split screen or picture-in-picture with an additional movie, video clip or picture.

For Mac users, Leo suggests CamTwist.

Andy of Stickam is still trying to persuade Dick to do a show on Stickam (see Episode 600). It may well be called Giz TV. All Dick is waiting for is a new computer to replace his Atari. Then he can wipe TWiT off the face of the internet with the help of WebcamMax.

Off to NAB
Tomorrow Leo will be at the National Associatin of Broadcasters Convention in Austin, Texas. He's going to tell them that radio is history, and podcasting is the future.

Looking under the Desk
While Leo looks under his desk for his TTTT gadgets, Dick looks under his desk for his notes. Unlike Leo, Dick comes prepared.

Say Nay to the Naysayers
John Cleig who wrote in Episode 464, writes again, this time to support Dick and Leo on commercials on the show. He also asks listeners to click on The Animal Rescue Site to generate food and care for stray or unwanted animals.

The End of the World
Dick and Leo haven't stopped the show. Nor has the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland generated a giant Black Hole yet.

No More Fruit Baskets for Dick
The pineapple gift baskets from Hawaii have stopped. Dane Golden is back on the mainland, and telling everyone, "Hang loose, bra".

Listen to Episode 658
Go to TWiT
The Giz Wiz Home Page

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That's my boy!

nobody@vox.com(Emu with a Clue) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:58:32 +0000

MGMT - Electric Feel

I was out shopping for school clothes with my 5yo son yesterday. This song came on the tv screen in the store and my son yelled out "Look mum! It's Electrical Feel!". How cool is he? When he was little, he also latched onto the Go Betweens' "Hammer the hammer" as "his song" (I think because he also liked to hammer things). A little better than some of his other retro favourites which include the following:

Wham! - wake me up before you go go

Black Lace - Agadoo

My husband and I have only recently started listening to modern music again in the last 5 years since the launch of the fabulous Sydney community radio station FBI. Before that we could only envy Melbournians their 3RRR.

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The Shortwave And the Calling

nobody@vox.com(Xtine) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 03:35:04 +0000

For Akin Fernandez, Cryptic Messages Became Music To His Ears
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004

In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio. It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over his life.

Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe, caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man, reading out numbers.

No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he hears.

"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four. Zero nine zero one four."

Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male, others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.

At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's the comedic payoff?

Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did. Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every other sound on the planet.

What's with the numbers?

Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years, and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle with the acclaimed band Wilco.

Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.

That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning, jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave his house for a week.

"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."

The Secret Sounds

A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was 15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real. More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.

Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his ears.

The radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes. This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a melee: performers against the audience.

"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another level of beauty to the music."

One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."

"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."

Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality, if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound life-and-death urgent.

While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry looked like this:

Sept 6 '93

Freq Time Signal

6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice

Station starts with beeps, then

GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count

From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!

And message!! [expletive] Hell!!

There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.

"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could be for anything. There's nothing like it."

To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial Discs, which by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the stations were no joke.

"They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a person with a poisoned umbrella."

Mission: Indecipherable

Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail (traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you do?

One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly cockamamie.

"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message," says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen, which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."

The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use -- some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and transcribed a message sent via shortwave.

For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable, or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed. British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.

"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they keeping."

If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he was going through and he comes up empty.

Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.

"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it. But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine might understand what he's talking about."

At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How did he do it?

"The Conet Project," he says.

The Leading Edge of Rock

In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project." (Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.") Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography -- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.

This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies, modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that he'd rather not discuss.

"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."

That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No. 386.

"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's more than that."

Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely forbidden: Maybethe government doesn't want you to hear this. And your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the "chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What could be more frightening than "chatter"?

"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find something that delivers the frisson of the margins.

Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that rock-and-roll has been dead for years.

"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the production. These people are copying their fathers' record collections.

"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."

So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?

Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the noise:

"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."

It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music critics -- and it sold decently, too.

At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted corner of the musical canvas.

It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.

"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake?

On the Record

Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop, and in 2002 Fernandez sued.

For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and discovers that he's all alone.

Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court, saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June. The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000 to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.

Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez didn't do that.

"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of guy who goes on vacation," he says.

How about a new car?

"Absolutely not," he says.

Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store has already sold 120 more copies.

"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."

To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."

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Messages to Spies Are Coded but Not Hidden

nobody@vox.com(Xtine) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:06:35 +0000

Over Shortwave, Anyone Can Listen
By James Gordon Meek
New York Daily News
Friday, December 29, 2006

It turns out that anybody can tune in to the world's top spy agencies talking to operatives. All you need is a cheap shortwave-radio receiver, the kind available at any drugstore.

Tune it to 6855 or 8010 kHz.

On the hour, you might hear a girlish voice repeating strings of numbers monotonously in Spanish. "Nueve, uno, nueve, tres, cinco-cinco, cuatro, cinco, tres, dos . . .," went one seemingly harmless message heard last month on a Grundig radio.

It was the Cuban Intelligence Directorate or Russian FSB broadcasting coded instructions from Havana to spies inside the United States.

Turn the dial up to 11545 kHz, and you might hear a few notes of an obscure English folk song, "Lincolnshire Poacher," followed by a voice repeating strings of numbers. That's believed to be British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, broadcasting from Cyprus.

On 6840 kHz, you may hear a voice reading groups of letters. That's a station nicknamed "E10," thought to be Israel's Mossad intelligence.

Chris Smolinski runs SpyNumbers.com and the "Spooks" e-mail list, where "number stations" hobbyists log hundreds of shortwave messages transmitted every month. "It's like a puzzle. They're mystery stations," explained Smolinski, who has tracked the spy broadcasts for 30 years.

While hobbyists guess at the meaning of each cryptic message or which spy service sent it, it's no mystery to intelligence officials, who confirmed the purpose is espionage.

The signals are too strong to be made by amateurs and are often on licensed frequencies. The State Department once complained to the Israeli Embassy in Washington that "E10" was blocking a U.S. broadcast, a source said.

"I can't imagine who else would waste the time in front of a microphone reading numbers" but a spy, said James Bamford, who has written about intelligence. Bamford calls number stations "simple but effective" spycraft.

"It's extremely effective," agreed a senior intelligence official. "If you have a one-time pad, the code can't be broken, and you can send out dummy broadcasts as much as you want to confuse your enemy."

A "one-time pad" is the key to unlocking coded shortwave messages that the CIA calls "one-way voice link."

It is low-risk because it's known only to the sender and the recipient and used just once before being destroyed, said retired CIA officer Tony Mendez.

Mendez said he would often imprint the code on microfilm or even a cigarette paper. Once inside the target country, a CIA operative could make a shortwave receiver out of simple materials. "The voices are not real people," he added. "They're computer-generated."

A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment.

One-time pads and coded radio began in World War I, said Thomas Boghardt, a historian at the International Spy Museum. Little has changed since, judging by recent espionage cases involving shortwave radios, including that of a man detained in Canada last month and accused of being a Russian spy.

In Miami last week, Carlos and Elsa Alvarez pleaded guilty to lesser charges after the United States accused them of spying for Cuba. A prosecutor alleged in a court hearing this summer that they received shortwave "messages in five-digit groupings." An FBI interview transcript shows Alvarez admitted going into his bathroom "on Fridays to listen at 11" for messages aimed at the couple, code-named "David" and "Deborah."

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Numbers Stations

nobody@vox.com(Xtine) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:10:20 +0000

Click pic

Aren't numbers stations a trip?
I wonder what on Earth they are.

Is it spy spook-talk? Telecom comp'nies testin' new stuff? Aliens? Seditious Esquimaux? fundaMENTAList xians spouting bib-lee passages? Eastern Yuropistanis? Rootin' tootin' vladimir putin carryin' on an old Russistani trad? Rosicrucian mail-order lesson numbers? Bilderberg? Illuminati? A bingo game?

Numbers station @ wikipedia
Lincolnshire Poacher @ wikipedia
The Conet Project @ wikipedia
NPR: Lost and Found Sound - Numbers Stations
NPR: The Conet Project
simonmason.karoo.net
simonmason.karoo.net/page30
simonmason.karoo.net/page32
simonmason.karoo.net/page34
simonmason.karoo.net/page35
simonmason.karoo.net/page36
simonmason.karoo.net/page36
Ian Rowan
mikeandsniffy.co.uk
dxing.com/numbers
spynumbers.com
spynumbers.com numbers stations database
spynumbers.com/YosemiteSam
home.luna.nl/~ary
Code-cracking contests
espionage-is-in-the-air
wired.com

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