E-Mail This Article to a Friend Code makers The Conet Project and Christian Bök’s Eunoia BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

The contents of The Conet Project (Iridium), originally released in 1997, were never meant for a general audience — certainly not as music. This four-CD set, compiled in London over several years by label head A.O. Fernandez, excerpts broadcasts from upward of 100 "Numbers Stations," shortwave frequencies that transmit streams of apparently random spoken numbers or other words in various languages — English, Russian, Chinese. On 2000’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch), Wilco used a snatch of one track, which also supplied the album’s title, without Fernandez’s permission; the money Tweedy and company paid to avoid a legal hassle helped fund the rerelease. (This raises a side question: can you really claim intellectual-property rights over material you weren’t supposed to hear in the first place?)

It’s not quite accurate to say that nothing on these recordings resembles conventionally defined music. Aficionados nicknamed one station, thought to be English in origin, "The Derbyshire Poacher" after the calliope tune that begins each broadcast. Other stations use prerecorded military bands or piercing, tone-generator melodies to sign on and off. But it’s what’s in between that fascinates. With some chillingly urgent exceptions, the broadcasters’ voices are dispassionate and rhythmically lulling. On many tracks, the transmissions collide with interference from nearby frequencies, producing all manner of ambient effects. No wonder the release has caught the ear of the experimentally minded: it often sounds like a glitchy, distorted Fennesz remix of low-affect vocal passages from Philip Glass’s Einstein at the Beach.

It hardly takes an Alan Turing to realize that such broadcasts contain coded messages — but from (and to) whom? Governments are tightlipped about the stations’ existence. Anyone can tune them in, but only with the right equipment (at least, that’s the idea: several years ago, I encountered one on the AM band while driving through a deserted patch of Wyoming). The Conet Project makes compelling listening on quasi-musical grounds alone. But in an election year, with public officials often cloaking their aims and interests behind ostensibly forthright words, it’s also strangely comforting to hear a message you know ahead of time you’ll never decipher.

Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Coach House) isn’t quite as cryptic, but it also depends on favoring the sound of language over its sense. The disc’s label is actually a small literary press based in Vancouver, specializing in experimental poetry; on Eunoia, Bök reads his book-length prose poem of the same name, in which the vocabulary of each chapter is limited to words containing a single vowel. If that explanation is confusing, a single sentence from "Chapter O" should clarify: "Folks who long to prolong torpor do Zoloft or nod off on two drops of chloroform." Who’s the chapter’s dedicatee? Yoko Ono, of course.

From palindromes and anagrammatic poems to more recondite forms, there’s a long tradition of such work, much of it associated with the OuLiPo, an international research group dedicated to what is often called "the literature of constraint." Bök’s not a member of the group (yet), but he takes its ideas to unheard-of extremes, piling on extra rules about paragraph length, repetition, and subject matter. On the page, it’s a surprisingly coherent read, but the audio version is another experience entirely. His precise, slightly effete enunciation strains the listener’s ability to follow the story — "Chapter E" retells Homer’s Iliad — without being overwhelmed by the repetitive, strictly limited phonetic palette. Sometimes, the two fit together perfectly. In "Chapter U," the pornographic adventures of Ubu — named for Alfred Jarry’s Dada antihero — are underscored by the reading’s uninterrupted "uhh"s and "ooh"s: "Ubu pumps Lulu’s plump, upthrust rump."

Though some of its pleasures are simply those of a well-played word game, the work is more than bedside listening for the competitive Scrabble crowd. Techniques like Bök’s aim to disturb our everyday assumption that words are tools for "saying what you mean." Here, the author can’t say anything unless it can be expressed without breaking the rules. Even the book’s title, an obsolete but genuine English word, makes the point. Bök didn’t choose it because it means "beautiful thinking," but because it’s the shortest containing all five vowels. Eunoia is a useful reminder that the language we encounter every day — at work, in school, on the news — may be governed by less obvious constraints, and that, sometimes, a code is worth as much attention as what it’s used to transmit.