Disquiet

4 5 97 02 04

If you tune your radio between stations and come across someone reading numbers like these, it’s likely because you’ve stumbled upon a numbers station, a lo-tech and enticingly antiquated means of transmitting encoded information.

The numbers up top contain basic information about numbers stations. The popular comprehension of numbers stations is largely founded on *The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations*, a collection that initially consisted of four and, later, five compact discs. The set was released by the label Irdial-Discs in 1997. In 2002, the band Wilco used some of the sounds in a track, “Poor Places,” off its *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* album. That album’s title is itself sourced from a phrase uttered on the *Conet* album. (Wilco later, in 2004, settled a suit about this unauthorized use.)

In a series of haunting pieces of subsumed numbers recitation, the England-based musician and sound artist Norah Lorway threads a needle. She maintains enough of the source audio that it is recognizable if not always comprehensible, yet buries it in enough sonic detritus that the result gives listeners the experience of having, on their own, come upon the numbers. At times, the numbers are kept entirely from sonic view, the voices giving way to harsh static, and to sudden noises that might be heard as air raid sirens or the clash of machine guns. The voices themselves are at times warped, rendered anxious, as if the utterances contain not just coded factual information but also raw emotional content.

This is a set of two of Lorway’s pieces. According to the brief accompanying note, there is also a third:

More from Lorway, who is based in Birmingham, England, at [norahlorway.com](http://norahlorway.com/), [academia.edu](https://bham.academia.edu/NorahLorway), [twitter.com/norahlo](https://twitter.com/norahlo), and [norahlorway.bandcamp.com](http://norahlorway.bandcamp.com/).

*(Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation.)*

The album *Northern Gulfs* by Yair Elazar Glotman comes and goes in rich swells. The music — entirely free of vocals, and essentially of melodies for that matter — is built less from notes than from images. These are sounds, of course, but each sound is so specific, so distinct from each other, that they individually have the quality of images. They’re memorable less for their sonic content than for their narrative content, the place they hold in memory, the stories they propose. On the track “High Tide,” for example, the constituent sounds include the sawing of wood, the creaking of a rope and a slat pier, some high-pitched ring tones, insectoid percussion that could be a cigarette lighter failing to make good on its sole responsibility, and an underlying bass tone with a somber cast. There are six *Northern Gulfs* tracks in all, each with its own collection of images. Some are more tonal, others more entranced with sourced field recordings, like the scatter of pebbles and echoed bell on “Low Tide” or the ratcheted gears in “Home Port.” Each of these elements, whether tonal or sourced, is entirely self-defined. Each may individually have been processed — stretched, given texture, looped mechanically, hushed — but they never seem to merge in any given track. They are like semi-opaque cards in a deck being constantly shuffled. “Khaypudyr Bay,” named for a spot in the brittle cold of northwest Russia, features a delicate counterpoint of clipped signals, buried deep in a warm, gray hum. Much of the record retains that muted malevolence, but it reaches an extreme on “Kara Sea,” named for the Siberian waters, which feels truly tortured, its elements including backward masked bits that suggest regret, as well as harsh winds and a haunting organ.

The album is streaming in full at [glacialmovements.bandcamp.com](http://glacialmovements.bandcamp.com/album/northern-gulfs). It was released in April 2014 by [glacialmovements.com](http://www.glacialmovements.com/music-news/northern-gulfs). Yair Elazar Glotman is based in Berlin, Germany.