Album Notes

The Moscow Coup Attempt is the music and film endeavor of Los Angeles based producer, composer, and covert operative of disenchantment, Derek Whitacre.

The 2005 album "The Failure of Shortwave Radio" was the first release from TMCA. The album is a stream of unconscious interpretation of failures in communication of not just nations, but persons. A grand scale assessment of individuals.
The artistic base of influence for the album lies in "Numbers Stations” and their influence on world politics, the cold war, espionage, and musical themes. Many of the motives of "The Failure..." are derived from the musical interludes of these Numbers Stations. "The Failure of Shortwave Radio" attempts to capture the creepy and mysterious essence of Numbers Stations as a broader outlook on humanity and breakdowns in communication wrapped up in the music. What appears on the surface to be an ambient electronic adventure turns into the soundtrack of a film. The purpose is to wrap the listener in an environment that is comfortable, yet unnerving... like a good suspense-thriller.


**A brief lesson about Numbers Stations:
Numbers Stations, also known as Spy Numbers Stations, are mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts of unknown, and unacknowledged origin. They can be found on random shortwave radio frequencies around the world, at any time of the day. Most stations consist of some kind of monophonic musical call sign, followed by sampled voices (often female) reciting repeated number sequences for an hour, or sometimes days. Some use alpha numerics ("Yankee, Hotel, Bravo"), some use languages other than English. But all remain a mystery. It is suspected that these stations have a role in international espionage, and are used to communicate instructions to spies in the field. They started to appear in the early years of the Cold War, and can still be heard today.

© Capitalist Records 2005