Thursday, January 10, 2013

Curtis Hasselbring - Number Stations ( cuneiform 2013)


"A number station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words, but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are transmitted in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used. It is widely assumed that the broadcasts are used to send covert messages to spies." – Wikipedia

Intrigued and inspired by the mystery and fascination of these mysterious broadcasts, trombonist/composer Curtis Hasselbring leads an all-star septet which features these major players: Mary Halvorson (guitar), Trevor Dunn (bass), Matt Moran (vibes and marimba) and Chris Speed (tenor sax and clarinet), both of The Claudia Quintet, and dual drummers Ches Smith and Satoshi Takeishi.
cuneiform