Wednesday, November 02, 2005

A Fascinating Article

I just finished reading Da Capo's Best Music Writing of 2005, and one of the articles has stuck with me. It begins by profiling a man who spends an obsessive amount of time monitoring short wave radio signals. He finds many "numbers" broadcasts in which a person, in languages such as English, German and Czech, will begin reading seemingly random numbers, then disappear.

This begins a quest to solve a mystery. The mystery deepens when he cannot find anybody to even acknowledge that these broadcasts exist. He eventually gets a (really cool) answer to his question. As I was reading the article, I kept wondering, "what does this have to do with music?"

He began recording these broadcasts, and he compiled a huge CD compilation, complete with an exhaustive set of liner notes.

The CD is released, it sells modestly to avant-garde record collectors...then, a serendipitous moment occurs.

The article, in its entirety, is online. Read it here.

1 comment:

LDahl said...

This was a very interesting article, for a number of different reasons. Thanks for posting.