Heiko Maile + Julian Demarre launch video for ‘Number Stations’ – Stream now
Heiko Maile + Julian Demarre (Photo by Reiner Pfisterer)
In the early 1960s radio stations of unknown origin began broadcasting mysterious messages across Europe’s public frequencies. As the Cold War divided Berlin and Germany between East and West, these number stations became part of the era’s clandestine communications network, with Berlin as a focal point for the covert exchange of secret information.
Drawing from their teenage experiences of scanning radio frequencies, Maile and Demarre revisit the mystique surrounding these transmissions in “Number Stations”, with the original synthetic female voices reciting enigmatic sequences of numbers and letters.
“Digging through the original transmissions felt like time travel. It instantly brought back the harsh reality of the ’70s and ’80s,” says Heiko Maile, and Julian Demarre adds: “Those number stations weren’t just radio broadcasts; they were our soundtrack to a divided world.”
The accompanying music video for the title track, created by director Daniel Lwowski (Grönemeyer, Anne Clark, Mogwai), who also grew up in Germany during this time, employs a documentary-style approach to evoke the shadowy world of Cold War espionage.
Maile and Demarre explain it further: “‘Number Stations’ reflects on the transient nature of espionage technology from a bygone era and how it has evolved into today’s sophisticated surveillance and communication networks, while the global balance of power remains as precarious as ever. Neither the spying of that time, the attempt of two systems to out-manipulate each other, nor the brief pause afterwards have significantly altered the balance of terror in today’s world.”
“Number Stations” will be released on November 14th by Bureau B, and will be available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp. The track is taken from the recently release “Neostalgia” album.
This is not the first album or project focussing on the ‘number stations’. Sonologyst, a solo project of Italian sound artist Raffaele Pezzella, recently released the 2CD album “Sonic documentary” via the UK label Cold Spring which re-discovers the charm of shortwave transmissions, and more precisely the clandestine shortwave transmissions culled from a span of nearly four decades (1982-2021) via the so-called Number Stations.
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