A few months ago, The A.V. Club posted about Nothing, a surprisingly disturbing supercut of empty establishing shots from Seinfeld, strung together by artist LJ Freeza to create a portrait of an empty and haunted New York. Of course, as with any pumping, feel-good dance hit, a remix of Nothing was inevitable. Thus, we now have Radio, a video by production group Certain Pictures, which replaces Nothing’s soundtrack with audio from The Conet Project, a collection of bizarre recordings of broadcasts by mysterious shortwave radio transmitters—commonly known as numbers stations—that many believe are related to global espionage.
Radio from certain pictures on Vimeo.
It’s a toss-up as to which of the two videos is more disturbing. Part of Nothing’s brilliance was its sound design, which slowly eased off Seinfeld’s distinctive soundtrack to leave behind a lonely, silent world. Radio, with its robotic monotones and discordantly light music, wrecks that subtle build-up by pushing the original’s apocalyptic subtext to the forefront. Still, it’s hard to argue against the video’s last minute or so, in which shots of empty apartments and unattended phones are paired with cacophonous church bells. It creates both a rising sense of panic, and the bizarre impression that the cast of Seinfeld has been taken up in the Christian Rapture, presumably by a god with a high tolerance for circular conversations and observational comedy.