A belated happy New Year and welcome to 2022. It’s not quite a New Year’s resolution, but I want to return to regular blogging here at Radio Survivor, at least covering interesting radio stories of note, along with other radiophonic observations. With the Super Bowl coming in just under three weeks you can look forward […]
We’re happy to return to the second part of our interview with radio scholar and radio artist Magz Hall. In the first part of the interview, Hall detailed the many ways in which we can understand radio, in both a contemporary and historical context, through the lens of radio art. She introduced us to a […]
Ever since I first tuned in a staticky sequence of numbers in Spanish on the shortwave radio I got for Christmas as a kid, I’ve been fascinated by numbers stations which are thought to broadcast coded messages to spies and other clandestine agents. An upcoming art exhibition uses the structure of numbers stations to interrogate […]
I recently learned of a series of YouTube videos that show a German machine that is alleged to be the voice behind Soviet cold war numbers stations. The videos, uploaded four years ago, show something that looks like a piece of electronic lab equipment that emits a sampled or synthesized voice rattling off a programmed […]
Recently I’ve been following with interest the wide range of hands-on radio activities being lead by Radio Arts out of the United Kingdom. Radio Arts, “an independent artists’ group founded in 2001 by lecturer, producer and artist Magz Hall and artist, producer and musician Jim Backhouse,” works “to promote radio as a site for creative […]
Anyone who has spent some quality time scanning the shortwave radio bands has likely come upon what are known as numbers stations. To the uninitiated the stations air what the name describes, someone reading of a sequence of numbers. They can be in any language, but most commonly are in English, Spanish or Russian. They […]
Numbers stations have been part of radio lore for decades. If you’ve ever listened to much shortwave radio at some point you would have come across an unidentified station broadcasting only a person reading off numbers, like an endless lotto feed: “21 99 36….” Sometimes this is in English, and often in Spanish or other […]
