AMV chronicles #083: Conet

One of the strangest AMVs ever made, the experience of watching “Conet” might feel even weirder today than it was to the eyes and ears of viewers who saw it upon its initial release in 2007. At least back then, memories of the recent analog past were still fresh in the minds of most people, who even if they’d embraced a completely digital lifestyle, could still remember a time when watching television meant picking up a fuzzy signal via a now-obsolete rooftop antenna or listening to music meant fine-tuning your car radio across static-ridden frequencies to your station of choice. These rituals are still with us in one form or another today, but for most people online in 2020, they’re regarded as dated and totally unrelateable relics of the past. Whether you first watched this AMV in 2007, 2020 or any time in between, its soundtrack retains a ghostly quality that’s genuinely unnerving to actually listen to in a vacuum; the potentially sinister ramifications of their transmission is difficult not to think about once you discover their actual origins and purpose. Not even the routine anxieties and dread of the 21st century, an existence marked by daily online interactions with spurious sockpuppets and complete non-entities, does much to dull their overall creepiness.

The Conet Project was an extensive compilation of recorded messages from these mysterious Numbers Stations from around the world. Released at the tail end of the analog era in 1997 as a CD box set, it was the first time most curious listeners had been exposed to these cryptic broadcasts from the Cold War and beyond. This proper release necessitated licensing of these recordings on behalf of Irdial Discs and copyright that bands like Stereolab might have skated under just a few years’ prior but less fortunate artists would not escape. Unsurprisingly, this AMV was flagged for copyright as soon as I uploaded it, which doesn’t seem to put its future in jeopardy, but as always, keep your fingers crossed. It never crossed my mind that anyone could actually record or obtain recordings of these broadcasts and then claim a legitimate “ownership” of them, while the identities of their original creators remain completely unknown. But even stranger things have happened! Had these recordings somehow escaped the popular consciousness for another decade or so, it’s easy to imagine them being appreciated, first and foremost in the modern day, as irreverent meme fodder rather than the historical curiosities or provocative material for sampling purposes that they were viewed as at the turn of the century. Depending on your perspective, “Conet” could be viewed as fulfilling all of those roles and more, although it’s doubtful that anyone involved in the multi-editor project had such lofty ambitions at the time.

Most of the collaborators on this MEP lean into the dark and cryptic overtones of the audio, setting most of the MEP into a groove that could best be described as experimental horror. Altered clips from Azumanga Daioh and less overtly-serious anime break the spell, adding some much-needed levity to the predominantly dark vibes at work. If there was a guiding hand at work signing off on these visual treatments, all evidence of it was fully scrubbed from the final product. The overall effect is unpredictable but never feels calculated or telegraphed. “Conet” bucks viewer expectations and refuses to oblige its audience’s desires to a degree that’s nearly unmatched.

As always, it’s tempting for me to examine this multi-editor project as an example of “pure” creativity and collaboration, especially in contrast to the faceless, assembly line-style approach that most MEPs in this hobby have followed over the entire last decade. Sure, “Conet” is unlike any MEP made in recent memory, but even going back to the mid-00’s, a time in this hobby that I idealize to a highly unrealistic degree, there was almost nothing else like it, and it stood out as a particularly experimental and weird concept back then just as much as it does today. It’s difficult to imagine the circumstances that could have lead to its creation, how anyone could have pitched such a freeform idea and made it sound appealing to ten other editors, who in turn would be so up to the task that almost a decade and a half later, it stands the test of time in an unlikely way that even the best AMVs from that period usually don’t. That it doesn’t conform to any of the fundamental rules of what makes a Good AMV, then or now, probably has a lot to do with that. “Conet” defies the preconceived idea of what an AMV is supposed to look or feel like. Conversely, the circumstances that have helped it age as well as it has will probably render it completely unapproachable to modern viewers, who are simply never going to sit through a sixteen minute-long video that’s not only slow-paced but rarely delivers anything resembling a traditionally emotional or sensory reward for sticking with it. If you take offense at this suggestion and consider yourself an exception to my generational stereotyping, then by all means, jump in and experience it for yourself.