(Phaysis)

During my downtime the past few nights, I’ve been listening to and reading up on a pair of phenomena that involve strange radio transmissions.

Have you ever heard of Numbers Stations? These are radio stations on the shortwave band whose only job is to transmit a random-sounding series of numbers either by voice, Morse code, or noises. It is theorized that they are used by governments to send coded messages to their operatives out in the field, yet no single government will admit to using them. A Ham listener can use signal triangulation to locate the transmitting antenna, but there’s no clear way of knowing who the station serves and what its message is.

The use of Numbers Stations is actually growing even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War (some would argue that the Cold War never actually ended). Even in this day and age of high-speed communications and strong encryption, the fact that clandestine activities still happen with this antiquated technology bears testament to the fact that this is probably the only truely anonymous form of communication.

Since the last few decades of last century, there’s been growing public awareness and concern regarding Numbers Stations, and various researchers, Ham operators, and writers have taken to the cause of documenting these stations, logging their existence, writing down the patterns of numbers, and making audio recordings for a wider distribution outside the amateur radio realm. One such collection was compiled by the Irdial netlabel of England on a 4-CD set called the “The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations“. Irdial has been kind enough to release this collection for public download at Archive.org. I suggest you read the Wikipedia article, grab the collection, and take a listen. It’s chilling, haunting, and a thrill to hear.

The next phenomenon, though not as clandestine, is still sharply related to the first. Mankind has been hearing strange noises ever since the first 20-mile telegraph line. Operators would hear clicks, pops, whistles and chirps coming out of their receiver sets in between all of the buzzer noises of the telegraph transmission. What they didn’t know at the time, and what we’ve discovered over the last century since the telegraph, is that they were hearing electromagnetic noises generated by the Earth. Every lightning strike, every Aurora Borealis, every solar particle, cosmic ray, burst of energy that strikes the Earth, emits a broad range of electromagnetic noise across the whole frequency spectrum, from DC current up to visible light.

But the electromagnetic frequencies clustered within our human range of hearing (called VLF, or Very Low Frequency) are the most interesting. With the right radio receiver — essentially a large antenna to pick up the noise, an amplifier, an audio filter, and an amp to power a speaker or headphones  — you can listen to these pops and whistles yourself. Researchers have been building these radios and studying the noises for decades, making years-worth of audio recordings. Irdial published a collection of recordings called “Electric Enigma: The VLF Recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy” (also found on Archive.org), gathered by McGreevy on his outings around the Northern hemisphere using equipment he built himself. I suggest you grab it too; the sounds are incredible.

These restore my faith that, even at my age, there still might be some wonder left in this world.

Three. One. Seven. Five. Nine.

Lyrics websites — those sites that appear on the first page of search engine results when you type a song name followed by “lyrics” — have proven themselves useful to me from time to time. Since my CD collection is locked away at home, when I need to look up the lyrics to Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By the Light” [Google], I can pick a site, any site (none of which I’ll link to here since they are so widespread, yet deceivingly similar),and I’ll see that Manfred is singing “Revved up like a deuce”. Rather handy.

My problem with these lyric sites is that they are essentially traps for personal information. Every one of these sites is set up to entice unknowing users into giving up their personal contact info. Every link suggesting you “download this as a ringtone”, “send this song to your phone”, “download this song”, “share this song with a friend”, “add to library”, is a trick to get the user to divulge their cellphone number, their email address, name, contact information of a friend, sometimes even the user’s secret login details on a social networking site. If it’s data, they want it for free.

I’m wary enough that I don’t provide them with any info, but not everyone is savvy enough to catch wise to the ruse. The promise of musical rewards in exchange for a verified bit of info is the bitwise equivalent of a Nigerian 419 scam, where the victim must put up something valuable first before the deal can go through. That deal never goes through. What happens, instead, is the victim’s contact info is collected, used and sold for unsolicited advertising. What you expect is a ringtone; what you get is marketing texts that won’t stop. What you expect is to share your favorite song with your best friend; what you get is you and your bestie dumped on by a mountain of spam.

Personally, I hope my friends and family are wise to this, but that is seldom the case. And that scares me.

My final complaint about the lyrics sites is that they are predatory money-mills for their owners. They’ve figured out the formula for maximizing ad revenue and minimizing cost per click by publishing these sites in bulk. Each site has its own domain name and templates, but they’re run on the same servers by the same companies. There are centralized databases of song lyrics behind whole groups of them; the same content is served by all of a group’s sites. There are companies whose only product is an interface to return lyrics for plugging into a webpage. The lyrics now mean nothing; they are bait. They are just a draw to expose users to a page full of advertisements. Each time an ad is served and presented to a user, that’s pennies in the bank. Draw enough users, and the site owner is raking in good income. Run enough websites, each as disposable as the one before it, and you are guaranteed a heavy income for almost nothing.

Honestly, I can’t begrudge anyone their ability to make money. We all have to survive. It’s just that I see it as a cheap move, and part of me is pissed that I’ve never been able to drop my morals low enough to try this kind of income stream. Slime molds grow on any surface. I don’t see an end to this kind of business model any time soon; the model of using a shedload of cheap, disposable gateway sites to lead the user (and their wallets) to a pyramidding series of websites has been around since the early days of Internet porn, and exists in some parts in the spamming world. As long as it’s cheap enough to flood the market with worthless content on cheap websites, each referencing the other in order to bump up their PageRank on the search engines, while raking in the cash while serving advertising, then this kind of model will persist.

It appears I’m developing a gear fetish. Been feeling the itch to make music again, and my recent acquisition of music equipment is apparently spurring that. It started years ago with a MIDI controller and a softsynth. Then, two years ago, a microphone, an audio interface and a drum machine. Then, in the past year, a mixer, a sound module, and a PC I built for audio work. That got me going for a while.

And then my latest conquests: a 1984-vintage analog synth and a 1992-vintage sampler. When I count those with my 1987-vintage non-MIDI keyboard (from high school) and my 1991 sound module, it becomes clear to me that most of my equipment was not made in this century. Meaning I can truly, without studio fakery, create the Vintage sound.

For the first time in a while, I have sonic and artistic freedom. I have outboard gear that I can tweak and explore. I’m not spending hours getting frustrated with software synths. You turn it on, turn it up, and play; it’s really exciting. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible, and that freaks me out. Every time I punch buttons, I should be pressing “Record”. I started doing that, calling the recordings “Noodle Sessions”, since they essentially are that. But I need to do more. Real songs, complete songs.

And that’s the problem. It’s a Thing now. I need to record. I need to make new music. Glass Door has been rather dormant this past decade, and that’s a travesty. My friend Jared demands new music, and I’d rather like to oblige him. I’d love to get the project flowing again. But I’m having difficulty.

I think one of my problems with creativity is getting it going. It’s that standing friction. Getting it rolling reduces the problem down to rolling friction, which offers much, much less resistance. Having a friend, a cohort, a fellow musician working alongside would really help. It makes sense that some of the best electronic bands are composed of two guys; one bounces ideas off of the other, and the productivity flows.

But the nexus of my creativity problem, though, stems from the source of creativity itself. From which well does creativity flow, and how does it flow? Should it flow out freely of its own accord, like an artesian well, or do you have to draw it out yourself? How do you dip your bucket to draw it out? Once it’s out, should the water pool like a lake, or flow against its constraints like a stream?

Do you punch buttons and play melodies and overlay them until you feel like you’re done, and hope for the best? That seems rather random and subject to the environment surrounding the moment of creation. Do you wait until a good idea forms, and then try muddling your way through it until you get a shadowy facsimile of what you intended? I’m between these extremes, and like the hungry mule equally between two identical stacks of hay, my creativity is dying of starvation due to the indecision.

I can only hope that I make some motion soon before the current urge to create eats itself and dies.

Apparently, the Texas Relays are in town, meaning downtown is supposed to be fucked up with traffic, cruising, and young adults hooping it up after competitions. Whoopty-shit. Hope I can park somewhere near the venue when I go see VNV Nation tomorrow night. Don’t care if I gotta pay ten bucks to do it.

Looking forward to the show. It’ll be a welcome reprieve from the long workdays, even though I’m taking my work home this weekend. It’s a rare thing that I can work from remote, but now I have the need. Fuck my life.

I was noticing that my blog didn’t have any spam in the queue waiting for deletion. “Hmm, maybe they’ve forgotten about my blog” or “Hmm, maybe that botnet got taken down.” No, the answer is more basic: it’s been over 14 days since my last blog post, past the open comments timeout. Sorry about that, comerades. My bad. Spam away.

Remember that short story I was talking about writing, “Lost Carrier”? Yeah, well something weird happened: I finished it. Really finished it. Compiled the first draft and grabbed a cadre of volunteers to copyedit for me and give me notes on what could use some more work. Sent out the draft to the first of the four volunteers three weeks ago. The last delivery was a week ago. So here’s what’s funny about that: I’ve heard nothing by way of feedback. I’m in an information vacuum. Maybe there’s a curse on the story that causes the reader to go deaf-mute.

Realistically, it’s a short time ago that I submitted the draft to my readers. I sincerely appreciate their free help, and I wouldn’t wish to rush their response for fear of getting poor feedback, but I’m anxious to hear something, anything on how I can make the story better. Y’know? I hope for closure on the feedback loop.

So my weeklong experiment with putting my entire music collection on nonstop shuffle has given me a few lasting lessons about the value of proper segues. BOB-FM ain’t got shit on the number of trainwrecks-per-hour I’m pushing.

I’m trying this as a way to load my Last.fm profile with a more general idea of what my music tastes actually are. My profile, as it stood before this week, reflected my tastes only since opening the account, which means the Top Artists list is heavily loaded with albums I’ve picked up in the past 4 months. There’s more to me than VNV Nation and Project Pitchfork, I swear! It just seems like I’m cheating the scrobbler since I’m feeding it a ton of stuff that’s not as relevant as it used to be, since I don’t really listen to much of it anymore. But I justify it because my collection is a reflection of myself through the past 20 years. Last.fm should be ecstatic that I’m trying to give them a better picture of my consumption; that’s me in rare form.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

• I have 49 days, 22 hours, and 58 minutes of music; that’s 14689 tracks (not as much as some people, you braggarts). So there’s no way I’m playing random shuffle for a month and a half. Just no way without losing my damn mind.
• Rhythmbox’s shuffle algorithm isn’t random enough. I’ve noticed it playing a few tracks from the same artist loosely clustered together. It appears the random selections are localized for a while before moving along.
• I have a lot of stuff I’ve either never listened to or have spun only once or twice since acquiring. Like A-Set, Galloping Coroners, Pandit Pran Nath, Velocity Girl, and a bunch of tracks grabbed from a few of the streams I frequent. And I’ve completely forgotten I had a Luscious Jackson album, which I was into back in ’97. So, some of the stuff I get either doesn’t compete with other albums from an acquisition, or gets forgotten under the sands of time. It’s usually otherwise good stuff, but something else I pick up at that time is just a little better. Attention Deficit: as it is with pop radio, so it is with personal playlists.
• I have an unholy amount of tracks that are longer than an sixty minutes. These are mostly DJ sets and mixes. Got some chillout mixes from Digitally-Imported, a few drum-and-bass mixes, and a tonne of DJ Testosterone electro mixes. But there are a few tracks that are one solid song; Goldie’s “Mother” and Brian Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon” push the hour mark. Possibly even the original “War of the Worlds” broadcast. So these are a joy when they pop up on the playlist since they transition within themselves for over an hour without jarring my sensibilities.
• Speaking of segues: Under no circumstances should you follow Stabbing Westward with Genesis. You just don’t. And for the love of Satan, you never, ever come down from Slayer’s “Cast Down” with Sarah McLachlan’s cover of “Ol’ 55″. Both are great seperately, but put them together and be prepared to forfeit your soul.