This is the blog of a one Ben Wilson, a Louisville, Kentucky native who enjoys baseball, beer, music, bikes, things that fly and good food. By day he pushes pixels and makes the Internet happen for a local advertising agency. His wife, Kelly is an Ironman, and his baby Amelia is the cutest thing ever.

Dec20

Wilco, CONET, etc.

So, I was reading through The Onion’s href=”http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3745/bonusfeature1_3745.html”>Best Albums of 2001 today, and I came upon a
mention of the unreleased Wilco album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, which they noted borrowed
from the CONET Project, which was started by uber-indie label href=”http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial”>irdial.

So, what is the CONET Project, you ask? It’s an encyclopedic
collection of recordings of shortwave href=”http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/”>number stations. Number stations? Yes, these are uber-secret shortwave
transmitting stations that broadcast people speaking numbers in a pattern that are assumed to be highly-highly encrypted
message (they have NEVER been broken).

Anyway, these are all VERY creepy, as you could imagine people reading off lists of numbers coming crackling through the ether
would probably be! Well, irdial has a very open publishing policy, and i managed to get all of their recordings, all four
discs, in mp3 from a mirror. I also yanked their 80-page booklet that went along
with it, that is VERY informative, and if you want to know more about number stations, I suggest read it.

disc 1
disc 2
disc 3

disc 4

CONET project booklet [pdf]