Misplaced media searches predate the web. The hunt for lacking episodes of Physician Who has been on since 1978; earlier than then, the BBC had a behavior of erasing grasp tapes so that they might be reused and to liberate space for storing, and ninety-seven episodes are nonetheless unaccounted for as of this writing. The final identified copy of the 1927 silent horror flick London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, burned up in a hearth on the MGM studio in 1965 together with many others; evaluations have been combined, nevertheless it was a business success from two Hollywood legends that also managed to — so far as we are able to inform — blink out of existence. (It’s true that the silver nitrate movie inventory generally used on the time had a bent to catch fireplace, crumble, soften into goo or spontaneously combust, however that doesn’t make it truthful).
Sometimes, although, issues as soon as thought misplaced are discovered. Some Physician Who episodes have been positioned at yard gross sales and within the archives of abroad TV stations to which they have been syndicated. In 1978, tons of of movie reels from the silent period, preserved by permafrost, have been discovered beneath an deserted hockey rink within the Yukon. In 2008, long-lost parts of German director Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent sci-fi epic Metropolis have been finally found — like many lacking German issues — hidden away in Argentina.
Generally although, the media itself is accessible however the data of who made it and the place it got here from is what’s misplaced. Misplaced music — extra particularly, music that nobody can discover any details about — has been dubbed “Lostwave.” Some are catchy songs performed uncredited within the backgrounds of TV reveals; some are misattributed mp3s downloaded from Limewire 20-plus years in the past. Others, very similar to The Mysterious Music, have been discovered on previous audio cassettes and CD-Rs with little to no figuring out information.
Since late 2023, lovers usually agree that we’ve been in “The Golden Age Of Lostwave” because of the sheer quantity of vital discoveries made. The kickoff was the invention of Paula Toledo’s “How Lengthy,” beforehand heard solely in a TV film, a Canadian teen drama sequence about tennis, and the menus of Russian bootleg DVDs. It was present in a somewhat apparent means on reflection: somebody thought to seek for songs known as “How Lengthy” within the database of SOCAN, Canada’s equal to ASCAP or BMI.
Different searches have been trickier. In 2021, somebody in Spain uploaded a murky 17-second clip of an ’80s pop tune to the web site WatZatSong, explaining that that they had recorded it off the TV in 1999 however couldn’t keep in mind something about it. A web based sub-subculture rapidly shaped, primarily on Reddit, and numerous sleuths devoted their free time to discovering out who made what they known as “Everybody Is aware of That.” Three years later, somebody found out that the tune was by Christopher and Philip Sales space, British-Canadian twins who have been members of the band Sweeney Todd earlier than they have been changed by Bryan Adams and moved to Los Angeles. That they had licensed “Ulterior Motives” (the tune’s actual identify) to a 1986 porno movie, and it turned out this was the place the unique poster had recorded it from. The Cubicles embraced the newfound curiosity of their music, and shortly put out a model new recording of the tune, freed from any tape hiss or moans of enjoyment.
These weren’t the one Lostwave circumstances cracked in 2024, however because it turned out, they have been mercifully simple to resolve in comparison with the group’s white whale.
Simply from the audio, a couple of extra clues about The Mysterious Music have been recognized by savvy listeners. Firstly, the synthesizer had the unmistakable sound of a sure preset on the Yamaha DX7; it might have been unimaginable to make any earlier keyboard sound precisely like that (particularly by likelihood), so the tune couldn’t have been recorded earlier than Could of 1983 when the DX7 was first offered. Secondly, although the lyrics have been in English, The Mysterious Singer appeared to have a continental European accent; precisely the place from, nevertheless, couldn’t be decided for certain. Thirdly and extra subtly, all sound frequencies at round 10kHz “dipped” (have been measurably quieter) all through the recording; this was a definite characteristic of NDR broadcasts within the Nineteen Eighties, so Darius wasn’t misremembering the station.
Whereas this narrowed issues down a little bit, “obscure European new wave band energetic in the summertime of ‘83 or later and performed at the least as soon as on NDR” nonetheless described tons of and tons of of teams on the very least. Undeterred, the workforce moved ahead.
r/TheMysteriousSong adopted quite a few false leads, and a few outright hoaxes quickly strung investigators alongside. In 2019, an Austrian musician named Ronnie “Rocket” Urini claimed he had written and recorded the tune with the late Christian Landl, his bandmate in Underground Corpses. It turned out, although, that Urini had a longstanding repute as a serial teller of tall tales, and one other former bandmate of Landl’s testified that it couldn’t have been him.
For a time, the workforce targeted on Statues In Movement, a Greek synthpop band that broke up in late 1983 after they recorded their solely album; some thought the voice of frontman Alvin Dean — actual identify Giorgos Dalambrias — was equivalent to that of The Mysterious Singer. Former keyboardist Billy Knight (Vasilis Paleokostas) was contacted; at first he stated he didn’t know the tune, then he stated it was a Statues In Movement outtake, after which he claimed he recorded it in 1982, a 12 months earlier than the DX7 got here out, with a totally completely different sort of synthesizer. When he was pressed on this, Billy instantly turned hostile, and it will definitely turned clear to most that he was filled with shit. The search, as all the time, went on.
Today, most individuals are used to having the ability to immediately stream nearly any piece of media they’d ever need to watch or hear, or Google just about any piece of knowledge to win disputes over issues of reality. (This was the unique goal of The Guinness Ebook Of World Data: a reference work supposed to settle arguments about superlative trivia). My spouse and I can verbally command a tool in our kitchen to — amongst different issues — play just about any tune on Spotify, stream nearly any radio station on the planet on TuneIn, or affirm whether or not a water chestnut is definitely a chestnut. (It isn’t). And although my spouse would favor I don’t, I can flip the TV to the Roku Channel and watch a steady 24/7 stream of Thriller Science Theater 3000, a present I needed to watch in 10-minute low-res chunks on YouTube in highschool. On this age of abundance, it may be maddening when one thing we need to hear or learn about can’t be discovered on a streaming service or the Web usually. (Do you imply to inform me, Spotify, that if I need to hear Samhain I’ve to torrent or really purchase their albums like that is the freakin’ Flintstones?!)
I requested r/TheMysteriousSong moderator u/LordElend why he thought the seek for The Mysterious Music captivated so many. “For the group,” he stated, “I believe the tune supplied a window in a time of their mother and father presumably… I suppose within the age of the web lots of people couldn’t imagine one thing that was on the radio may really be misplaced. Although loads of issues disappeared on-line, like linkrot, the paradigm is ‘The web by no means forgets.’ Lots of people additionally had questions concerning the thought of taping from the radio and the way and why this was finished. Within the age of Spotify inaccessible media appears thrilling, I suppose.”
“Had the tune been garbage or boring,” he added, “I believe I’d [have] misplaced curiosity instantly. Like thriller the search appeared intriguing to me as a result of it appeared solvable. Such manufacturing will need to have left traces… However on the identical hand it appeared to evade each try.”
In 2024, a search of NDR’s logs from the mid-Nineteen Eighties — supplied by the community itself — turned up nothing that jumped out, nevertheless it was seen that quite a few songs have been listed as being by “Amateurband”; these have been apparently unsigned bands that NDR didn’t trouble writing down the names of. It was hypothesized that The Mysterious Band could have competed in NDR’s annual battle-of-the-bands Hörfest (that means, roughly, “The Hear Pageant”) within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, and that they have been one of many Amateurbands. As a lot documentation as attainable was obtained, and researchers went about making an attempt to contact the members of teams that hadn’t already been appeared into. Since tons of of acts submitted their music for Hörfest consideration every year; the workforce assigned completely different ones to completely different investigators for the sake of effectivity.
That fall, moderator u/marijn1412 was researching 1983 Hörfest contestants Phret when he discovered an previous newspaper article a few band that shared a member with them, keyboardist Michael Hädrich; this group was known as FEX (pronounced as one phrase, like “fecks”), they usually’d been based mostly within the German metropolis of Kiel, not removed from Hamburg. The identify is reportedly derived from a southern German slang phrase with the same that means to the Japanese time period otaku or the English phrase “nerd”: somebody who is particularly enthusiastic — maybe even obsessive — a few sure topic or pursuit.
Sensing a possible lead, marijn1412 discovered and messaged Hädrich on Oct. 21, nonchalantly expressing curiosity in listening to his previous music. On Nov. 2 Hädrich despatched digital rips of tracks by each bands, together with a FEX tune known as “Subways Of Your Thoughts”; the title was instantly recognizable because the final 4 phrases of The Mysterious Music’s refrain. It was an alternate take — the sustained notes within the synth solo didn’t resonate in fairly the identical means, and the monitor didn’t fade out on the finish — however this was clearly The Music.
marijn1412 instructed Hädrich — who’s nonetheless a musician and has a studio in Munich, along with a Yamaha DX7iiD — that this was a well-known misplaced tune that the world had been looking for the supply of for years; Hädrich had been utterly unaware. He requested marijn1412 to attend to announce the information till he’d contacted his former bandmates and at last registered “Subways Of Your Thoughts” with GEMA (Germany’s ASCAP).
Inside every week, three out of the 4 members of FEX on the time of their 1985 disbandment — Hädrich, Rückwardt, and bassist Norbert Ziermann — have been performing an acoustic model of The Previously Mysterious Music stay at NDR’s studios; it was the primary time they’d performed collectively in 39 years. Initially more durable to hint, drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers lastly made contact with the remainder after studying concerning the discovery in his morning newspaper. Someday later, it emerged that Ziermann had changed one other bassist named Jörg Lemcke (who’s now energetic on r/TheMysteriousSong), and that the unique lead singer was Ture Rückwardt’s spouse Ilona earlier than she turned pregnant. A 2010 article about German composer and studio musician Dirk Reichardt signifies that he, too, performed keyboards for the band in some unspecified time in the future.
“Subways Of Your Thoughts” is the primary of three songs on a tape that was offered as live performance merch by FEX; the 2 different tracks show the flexibility of the group inside their chosen new wave model. “Coronary heart In Hazard” has a repetitious, singalong refrain and is way extra synth-driven than “Subways”; one can simply think about it on the 1985 British charts alongside Easy Minds or Tears For Fears. “Speaking Arms” has an depth and herky-jerky high quality not in contrast to the band whose identify you initially thought you learn initially of this sentence, and a brand new wave fanatic might be forgiven for assuming it’s a Wall Of Voodoo outtake, proper right down to Rückwardt’s vocal supply.
