WIRED magazine ran an article in their October 2011 issue about the actual UVB-76 shortwave radio station in Russia. The piece by Peter Savodnik talks about its bizarre influence on musicians and mentions X-Ray Press.
A fact checker from WIRED contacted us to see if we actually sampled the buzzing of the radio station on the album since the opening and closing tracks sound remarkably similar (listen to it here). We assumed we wrote ourselves out of the article being that the short answer was “no”, but we’re happy just to get a small mention. Here’s the full story on how UVB-76 entered the picture, as e-mailed to the magazine:
“Everybody, This is Everyone” was written, completed, and a common set starter in our live show for about a two years prior to the completion of the album. When we began conceptualizing musical themes and motifs for the full-length, the introductory “buzzes” to that tune quickly emerged as something to play around with because of how unending they sounded, almost in looming way.
We initially envisioned it as a broken traffic light (which was the working title of the song for a while). A red light that just flickers on and off at night, not really knowing whether to stop or go. That song, and its album-ending counterpoint both feature that constant ring.
The name of the album was decided after it had been mastered even (we were very indecisive about it). We eventually named the album “UVB-76″ more to compliment the “we’ll never figure this out” lyrical themes of the album. Our drummer stumbled upon the Russian radio transmitter online one day and it just seemed to fit the tone of it all. Cryptic and mysterious but very in-your-face and hard to ignore.
When I did some further research on how the buzzes sounded in real life I was floored. We some how managed to nearly recreate the exact intervals of the radio station. It was a strange and eerie coincidence and we ran with it. A lot of reviewers have assumed that we deliberately copied the “buzzing”, but it was very fortuitous. Just goes to show how mysterious UVB-76 really is.