If you’re deeply familiar with Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (as one should be), you know that at the end of “Poor Places,” amid the noise and the feedback, there is a stately female voice repeating the title of the album: Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. What you may not know is that this is a sample from something called a shortwave numbers station. Shortwave numbers stations have been a favorite topic among conspiracy theorists for decades now; they emit mysterious broadcasts of series of numbers, letters, or phrases. The traditional story is that they are used by governments to communicate to spies (and a story in the Daily Telegraph in 1998 confirms this. A spokesman for the U.K.’s Department of Trade and Industry is quoted as saying, “They’re not, shall we say, for public consumption”). The important part, though, is that they are broadcasts of unknown origin and unknowable content, issuing forth, waiting to be interpreted. Wilco was in a legal battle concerning their use of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sample, and their side of the argument hinged on the fact of the audio’s mysteriousness: who can own a sample that has no fixed origin or creator?
Wilco was being sued by Irdial-Discs, who released The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations in 1997. This album is the result of years of laborious study by label head Akin Fernandez, who spent long hours tracking these stations and keeping a log of his findings. It consists of 150 recordings of shortwave numbers stations with track titles such as “Three Note Oddity” and “Czech Lady.” Originally a labor of love for Fernandez, these recordings have gained a cult following in the 15 years since their release. Fernandez’s legal win over Wilco financed a second pressing of the record in 2004, and although the vinyl is currently out of print again, the publicity that the case created for the project expanded its audience considerably. It is now available online through the Internet Archive.
Listening to the record, one can tell why it has an appeal for a certain kind of found-sound fetishist. Though the recordings seemingly come from all over the world (they are spoken in English, Spanish, Czech, Russian, German, and Chinese, among other languages, but their points of origin are impossible to guess), they share a lo-fi fuzz and an incessant repetition of words and tones that instill a sense of fascinated dread. They accumulate a bit too much dread in the listener after their five-hour running time is up, but in short sessions these shortwave recordings provide a worthwhile glimpse into a paranoiac world.
