[PS015] VA – Number Stations

[PS015] Number Stations by Various Artists
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Release Summary
| PS015 Various Artists – Number Stations | Curated by Jon Sykes for PublicSpaces Lab |
| Total Running Time 01:12:53 | 16 Tracks | Available in mp3 320 or FLAC (zip format) |
| Individual mp3 files also available here | Cover Art by Rita Monteiro @ PublicSpaces Lab |

Release Details

This is a compilation album based around the theme of Numbers Stations samples.

Number Stations if you are unfamiliar are shortwave radio stations that broadcast strange and cryptic content, often ordered or seemingly random series of numbers repeated over and over again. Other stations played weird music, and other still just repeated tones over an over. They were all the rage back in the Coldwar era and are often thought to have been spying agencies means of communication.

Probably the most famous Number Station sample is from the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, partly due to the album being named after it but maybe more so because it lead to complex legal wrangles over who “owned” the recording, eventually settled out of court.

The most authoritative collection of Numbers Stations recordings is the Conet Project by Irdial Records, who make available the entire collection under their Free Music Philosophy. There are also plenty of other places online to find other samples that can be used in recordings as samples.

The challenge was issued to an international assortment of artists, with genres ranging from Ambient, to Dub Step to Interpretive. This compilation of tracks is the result. We hope you enjoy.

Curated by Jon Sykes for PublicSpaces Lab
Release Art by Rita Monteiro @ PublicSpaces Lab
Cover Photo by Slightly North via Flickr under a CC License by-nc-sa
Mastering and encoding by Jordi @ PublicSpaces Lab

Artists Information

01 | % | Pronounced owner/operator, % generates adaptive sound-patterns through an iterative, experimental process. | Website

02 | Fixate | Fixate is a solo musical project of Steve Young of Reading, Pennsylvania. He has been working in various electronic music projects in the local area for almost 10 years. For Fixate, he has borrowed from many different musical styles, including trip-hop, EBM, IDM and Industrial to form his current sound. Fixate has recently released “Hues, Vol. 1″, the first in a series of 5-song EPs exploring color and sound. It is available as a free or “name your own price” download on the Fixate Bandcamp page. Steve is currently working on a follow up that might be a full length, instead of starting the next Hues project right away. Live shows are also in the pipeline for the local and surrounding areas | Website

03 | Catigator | Catigator is Alec Johnson. Alec Johnson has been writing, recording, and performing music since the age of 12. Starting with old-time country gospel and evolving/devolving through bluegrass, punk rock, new wave, idm, country swing, house, electronic, folk, ambient, and not necessarily in that order, traveling from Iowa to Wisconsin, Nebraska to Minneapolis, Texas to British Columbia, landing for now in a place that escapes classification, Indiana, U.S.A. Alec currently designs parks and produces music for film, radio, dance performance, and life.| Website

04 | Weather Balloons | Weather Balloons got his amateur radio license at age twelve. He spent many late nights listening in to shortwave transmissions that had bounced along the ionosphere from the other side of the world to his home in New Mexico. The messages made him dream about spies. Years later, he found himself standing in a dense winter fog at midnight at a railway station in eastern Ukraine, waiting for a train bringing people and money. He now lives in Brooklyn under the name of Dave Barber and makes improvised music on his monome. | Website

05 | Cassiel | Nick Rothwell is a composer, performer, software architect, programmer and sound designer. As a media programmer and software engineer he has built performance systems for projects with Ballett Frankfurt, Vienna Volksoper and Braunarts, and has worked at STEIM (Amsterdam), CAMAC (Paris) and ZKM (Karlsruhe). As a composer he has created soundtracks for choreographers Aydin Teker (Istanbul) and Richard Siegal (Laban Centre), and has performed with Laurie Booth (Dance Umbrella, New Territories), and at the Different Skies Festival (Arcosanti, Arizona), the ICA, and the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. Recent projects include performance systems for Quartet (with director Margie Medlin), interactive video for Troop at the Southbank (with choreographer Jane Turner), surround sound for the media gallery at The Public, interactive installations for Sonic Arts Network and TECHNE (Istanbul), a planetarium gig in Colorado, and a Portable Choreographic Artefact in collaboration with Ricochet Dance Productions. He also teaches media software and writes regularly for music technology magazines. He designed and implemented the ‘shado’ sprite rendering library for the monome, and is building two unrelated laser-sensing environments for sound art installation and dance performance. He is currently working on choreographic software agents for Wayne McGregor | Random Dance at Sadler’s Wells, and on audiovisual performance projects with body>data>space (London, Prague, Dresden) and Eddie Ladd (Cardiff).| Website

06 | Galapagoose | Based in Melbourne, Australia, galapagoose is the audio~visual artist moniker of Trent Gill. Using custom programmed software, and open hardware, galapagoose explores rhythm, texture and vibration of sound and light. While often traveling into ambient and jazz influenced harmony, the music always remains soulful and danceable. Drawing on influences far and wide from the hip-hop beats scene to 80′s New York underground, galapagoose’s sound is most commonly likened to the spacey beats of Flying Lotus, sharp edits of Prefuse73, or Fourtet’s melancholic melodies. Perpetually hard to pin down though, the sounds never stay the same for too long, always discovering new techniques and styles to pursue. Operating openly, new works of audio and video are constantly uploaded to his website. | Website

07 | Einpuls | Einpuls is a composer / musician currently living in Luxembourg. In addition to writing songs and releasing them on kyanbayani.com he is also composing music for film. | Website

08 | Oicho | David Harrow is a 80s electro pioneer, writer, producer and recording artist that produces under may aliases. OICHO is his a project with a moody throbbing dubstep infused with a california bounce. Drum ‘n’ bass fusionary David Harrow (birth name) these days aka James Hardway works most often with cool jazz textures, though he is largely immune to the purist poses of many jungle producers. Harrow has worked with an impressive cast of British producers, from Genesis P-Orridge to Adrian Sherwood and Jah Wobble to Andrew Weatherall. During the early ’80s he lived in Germany and acted in films before getting into the Berlin music scene. Harrow also appeared with Jah Wobble on the continent, but relocated to London by 1986, where he was swept up by the acid-house phenomenon.

During the late ’80s and early ’90s Harrow teamed-up with Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound System, working on studio projects by the likes of African Head Charge, the Barmy Army, the Strange Parcels, Gary Clail, Dub Syndicate and Little Annie. As a pivotal keyboardsman and programmer he also took to the road with On-U Sound’s 1990-91 “Pay It All Back” live show, some performances from which now grace several albums for posterity. Around this time Harrow and Sherwood provided a remix of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence”, while Harrow also managed to find the time to get involved with the burgeoning electronic community, working as a producer with Psychic TV and many others.

After ranging into jungle/drum’n'bass during 1995, he debuted his James Hardway guise with an impressive 1996 LP, “Deeper, Wider, Smoother, Shit”. Hardway displayed a talent for writing songs also, with a credit for Billie Ray Martin’s 1996 club hit “Your Loving Arms”. After the release of his second, 1997′s “Welcome To The Neon Lounge”, Hardway earned an American contract through Shadow. For the recording of 2001′s “Moors + Christians”, he assembled a virtual studio band by gathering recordings together from a journey to Cuba and Jamaica. Hardway’s recordings as Technova have also appeared on Andrew Weatherall’s Emissions Audio Output records. | Website

09 | Martin Backes – Obfuzzcation | Martin Backes, born in 1977 in Germany | Studies in Art, Design, Psychology, Communication, Electrical Engineering, Anthropology and Ecology in relation to Sound and Media at the University of Arts in Berlin | 2009 Master Program Sound Installation with Christina Kubisch | Besides his experimental media art and installation work, he is
working as a composer, sound director, audiovisual consultant, audio engineer, music producer, noisican and DJ | Lectureship since 2009 at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin for “Sound Communication and Design”. | Website | Myspace | Twitter

10 | Static | Pascal Savy is an electronic music composer who works and lives in London (UK). He started experimenting with sequencers and synthesisers in the late nineties influenced by Detroit techno, recording his output on tapes and mini-discs. After a long maturation period, he simplified his setup and decided to work exclusively on a computer. At the same time,
his sound began to evolve towards more ambient territories and broken-beats. His compositions often involve dense atmospheres and hidden, distant or floating melodies. He also likes to incorporate field recordings he makes, either in their raw form or processed beyond recognition. Recently he developed a strong interest in granular synthesis techniques and microsound compositions, which led him to incorporate granular textures in his ambient work and further to create tracks just made of processed granular streams. Since November 2009, his music is featured on internet radio diaxiom.com. | Website

11 | LongHead | Originally from Nottingham, England, Pat Cannon makes music of all genres, from orchestral to punk. Having listened to dubstep for the past 4 years he finally decided to get off his arse and make some, using the alias LongHead. Currently studying music just north of London, Pat Cannon is open for collaborations of any sort and can be reached via his website | Website

12 | Atciv | Starting at age of 13 Sebastian taught himself to write and create music, what began as teenage rebellion and a way of pushing his dad’s buttons quickly grew into a love affair with knobs, buttons, gadgets and the sounds he could derive from them. With a gift for making music from the most unexpected devices, Sebastian has taken cues from a vast group of musicians, ranging from David Bowie and Brian Eno, to Trent Reznor, Map Map, Brian Crabtree, Andrea Bocelli, Aphex Twin and Amália Rodrigues. Raised in Colombia, and full of passion, Sebastian’s music has always reflected this while also serving as a release for his thoughts and emotions. The result is unique ambient/experimental Electronica. Known as atciv on some of his more recent projects, and
currently based in Portsmouth, NH, Sebastian is continually crafting new sounds that continue to be equal parts passion, ingenuity, and the synthesis of his own thoughts. He is always looking for creative input from other artists | Website | Twitter

13 | Sam SquareWave | A long time resident of the North American Southwest, Sam started creating his own sounds some time around 1998. He was marched off to piano lessons as a child and marched in the school band as a youth. Through the last 10 years he has played in bands, created music for theater, and engineered and produced music for friends and strangers. | Website

14 | I am Genko | “what i’ve tried to do here is capture the essence of the samples, their linearity mostly, and also tried to keep the tempo a bit off, i don’t know why, but since day one i thought things would evolve a bit more organically if the was no quantization and if they had a general disregard for tempo… but without resorting to a total chaos… just sort of a controlled chaos.” | Website

15 | Maersk | MAERSK is Steve Burtenshaw based in Norwich, UK. Creating a downtempo musical blend of both acoustic and electronic sounds, using found objects and old instruments along with monome hardware and max/msp software. | Website

16 | Made By Robot | Under the pseudonym Made by Robot, Jon Sykes started out DJ’ing funk and lounge music in London in the mid 90’s. 10 years later, he reincarnated the name for his new electronically slanted, ambient, minimalist techno music. Using a variety of self created interface devices, centered around his trusty Monome, he creates soundscapes and emotions with his music. Jon is also the curator of this compilation. | Website | Twitter