"These stations, they shout at you. They draw attention to themselves. They say "look at me! Listen to me!" I'm not the sort of person who can just sit down, come across something like number stations, which are completely counter-intuitive, and let it slide by." - Akim Fernandez
I've had a fascination with number stations for quite a while now, but tonight I decided to really dive into them and see what they're all about. It's the kind of thing that is fascinating and exhilarating to research, but the more you do it the more crazy you start to feel. It's as if I can feel my mind actually slipping away as I listen to these recordings. I get tense and feel like someone might be sneaking up on me. It's a fantastic feeling.
This effect that these recordings can have on people is created by a lot of different things in my opinion. Most obvious is just how bizarre they are. The background of these number stations is shrouded in mystery and speculation and this also creates some of the paranoid fascination, but I think it's how they actually sound that creates the effect on the listener.
This is my favourite one that I've listened to so far. It has all the elements that make an interesting to listen to numbers station. Bizarre, creepy music, numbers read mechanically and even evidence of the tape the recording is being played from having stretched over time. It gives me chills. Achtung!
The background noise inherent to listening to these things on short-wave radio and not knowing what is background noise or interference and what is part of some hidden coded message. The mechanically human voice reading out these numbers, repeating themselves very obviously giving that just "slightly off" feeling from something that doesn't sound quite right. Then there are the ones that actually have music as part of them such as the Lincolnshire Poacher or the Swedish Rhapsody. These can be the most creepy of all with their jaunty tunes repeated over and over before a disembodied voice reads out seemingly random numbers. They all create this bizarre, impenetrable world and an uncomfortable atmosphere. I love it and it terrifies me at the same time.
The band Wilco used elements from "The Conet Project" in their songs on the album "yankee hotel foxtrot" to great effect.
I listened to a great documentary from the Radio 4 archives called "Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher". It spoke with the people obsessively tuning into these frequencies, discovering and recording the number stations and also some people with slightly privileged knowledge that might know something about their origins and purpose. The documentary itself was inconclusive on what they were, but the general consensus seemed to be that the stations were for sending coded messages to people "in the field". Spies and such. The most interesting thing is that no one really knows.
It was a well produced documentary that used the sounds of these number stations in the backgrounds of conversations and often snippets of them could be heard in between bits of dialogue. I thought it was a pretty great effect and the part where they did a live recording of someone obsessed with number stations actually finding a new one that he hadn't heard before was extremely exciting.
The short-wave radio weirdness doesn't stop at number stations either. There are many odd transmission coming out of places like Russia. A particularly fascinating one is UVB-76 which features a short monotonous buzz-tone repeating at a rate of 25 times per minute 24 hours a day. It has been observed doing this since 1982. And what's more incredible is that a few times (only a handful of times) there has been voices heard on the station. These include a woman reading out numbers and names in Russian much like on a numbers station and overheard conversations in the background since these monotonous tones are actually broadcast using a microphone. The whole thing is crazy!
I think the main reason I like number stations so much is because it is so difficult for anything to scare me or creep me out these days. I enjoy the tension and atmosphere of horror films and the like, but they don't really scare me. They rarely get under my skin. Stuff like this, though, does and I love it. I see a lot of potential there. If I could find some way to create the feeling of unease I get from listening to these number stations through my own recordings and sound designs I would be very happy with myself. It's quite an ambition of mine.
Also just the concept of number stations is pretty rad.
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