Dark Side of the Band

No..... Not the "Rolling Stones" kind of band....

This One. ----->

(Excerpted from Wired Magazine by Jason Walsh)

Shortwave radio bands, ignored by commercial broadcasters because of their low fidelity, have long been home to government activity -- whether for national broadcasts such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio France International, or propaganda broadcasts from the likes of Radio Havana or the U.S.-backed Radio Free Iraq.

Meanwhile, for the last 30 years an altogether more curious kind of international station has been noted on the airwaves.

Across the world, high-powered transmitters with global reach are broadcasting seemingly meaningless strings of numbers or letters, along with a lot of buzzing and beeping noises.

Some have speculated that the signals from these "numbers stations" are operated by drug cartels. However, it's more likely they're run by intelligence agencies, as tacitly acknowledged by the British government, and accidentally by the Cubans.

As shortwave is abandoned by public broadcasters in favor of satellite and the internet, these curious stations continue to broadcast, seemingly unaffected by the end of the Cold War or the development of new technologies. But even listening to the signals is illegal in some countries.

A subculture of obsessive listeners has built up around the stations, despite the fact that they have little hope of ever decoding the signals.

Such is the curiosity value of these oddball transmissions that they have had an impact on popular culture and have been featured in the movie Vanilla Sky and music by Wilco, Porcupine Tree and Stereolab. A U.K.-based label, Irdial Discs, released a four-CD recording of various stations, an odd soundtrack approaching conceptual art.

No government has ever acknowledged a numbers station, but the British Department of Trade and Industry told London's Daily Telegraph in 1997 that there was no mystery and that the stations were not "intended for public consumption."

....more of this story here and another story here.

This is an audio glimpse into the Cold War and the surreal.