UBLF's Chilldown Period: The Chilldown Period - Episode Twelve

Greetings fellow agents and operatives! It is that time of the month for our regular transmission and I hope you enjoy the message which I have sent you this time.

I take it you have received your One Time Pad so you can decipher what is being said.

With that out in the open, I'm going to take some time and let you know who has made this transmission possible.

First and foremost: Made by Robot and the Public Spaces Lab. They've been amazing to work with and you'll get to read the true transcript of the conversation between MbR and myself a little later on.

Second: Irdial Discs! Without their samples I could not have added that hint of reality to this show. Still geeking over those mp3s from the Conet Project.

Thirdly: Cracked.com, the ENIGMA 2000 newsletter and other websites where I've found interesting information.

Fourthly: Pure_tone - I tried to use the information you gave me!

Fifthly: the artists in the episode! Go and get their music... good stuff!!

Last, but not least: the ambienteer! as always!!

Ooooops - almost forgot: Thanks to my lovely wife, lady ten10, for lending her voice to this podcast.

Update - the english man's sample I used is actually his null message. Also, during Outputmessage's song, Resurface, there is a glitch... my apologies to everyone for that.

My Q and A with Made by Robot:

UBLF: Why did you decide to do a project centered around Number Stations?

MbR: I've always had an interest in obscure radio stations recordings for as long as I can remember, some of my earliest memories were of playing with those small transistor radios that have a speaker and a dial and that's about it. Listening it at night to the obscure areas of the frequencies (since at that age I wasn't so interested in the musical or spoken portions). I'd spend hours listening to 1 side of the police radios (which in England you used to be able to pick up with a regular radio), or weather stations (the shipping forecast was a great example), or just finding bands that had strange beeping going on. As a child those random noises evoke such huge imagination, they must come from somewhere, your mind goes wild.

I've always been a fan of the Irdial, Conet Project work. I think they're really the ones that made "Numbers Stations" become, for want of a better word, mainstream.

Whilst working on my last album, Penguins. I used a number of samples I'd found on a couple of radio ham sites, as well as some of my own recordings (I have some of my own shortwave equipment for finding samples). This sparked an idea that it would be interesting to get a diverse group of electronic musicians together and with everyone using these strange samples see what came out. So I contacted a bunch of people I knew, a fair number came from the Monome community, but probably 50% from outside their, and I dropped Public Spaces a line to see if they were interested, and it all went from there.

The thing I'm most happy with on the project is that the range of the music is pretty diverse, dub to ambient, interpretive to moody idm, all from the same source that has a certain sound. So all the tracks are very different, yet they all sound the same. I love that.

UBLF: What is it about mysterious things such as Number Stations, the Cosmos, and cute kittens* that inspires people and their art?

MbR: as mentioned above, I think Numbers Stations have a great potential to make people imagine. They aren't random they're there for a reason, yet their purpose is somewhat unknown. That allows the listener to opportunity to listen and apply their own back story, their own reasons, and I think that's why they have such a strange draw on people.

*yes, that was apart of the question. Cats and kittens live and exist in their own world.

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Now, the number codes:

The Conet Project - tcp d4 32 the buzzer irdial - Irdial Discs

ambienteer - Konets