Wow. I got an email from synth player Logan Sky last weekend with weirdly stupendous news. Apparently the Most Mysterious Song On The Internet™ had finally been identified…after a stately seventeen year timespan! It was March 18, 2007 when a poster identifying as “Anton” posted to a German 80s music site with a mysterious one minute MP3 snippet of a song that they were at odds to identify. Then the internet sat back while the wheels of investigation slowly turned.

I first probably heard of this as much as five years later, Probably on the “Help Me Identify This” section of the New Wave Outpost Forum. I think that by that time the snippet of the song was embedded in a YouTube video. I don’t recall downloading a file in MP3 format. I listened to the song and it seemed like a German band, probably who had slipped between the cracks of a music career. Hence the long-standing mystery of it all. Had it been a song in any sort of record release, it would have been discovered much more swiftly. The song itself, was nothing to write home about. It had that West German, Post-Depeche Mode vibe to it. Sort of like the band Camouflage albeit less moody.

Soon afterward I thought to myself, that this was exactly the sort of material on the many “minimal synth” compilations that cite the magazine Flexipop yet having nothing to do with that magazine. They are filled to the brim with obscure, wannabe New Wave Synthpop of various stripes. But the thought of listening to the hundreds of such songs on those compilations just to find out what this might have been… did not strike me as a good return on investment for the time needed. So I let it slide and let the Most Mysterious Song On The Internet recede from my consciousness. Had it been as fascinating as a lost Associates trick would have been to me, I might have joined into the search.

But the mystery plugged along for many years. The original poster had received the tape, recorded from a West German radio station playing songs while their younger brother was taping songs form the airwaves. But alas, he had edited out the DJ announcing things so that’s why the song was such a mystery. In 2019 the song finally crested on the shores of Reddit with a newfound fervor. In July of 2019, Justin Whang posted a video on his YouTube channel that heated up the mystery more than a few a few notches. The search was becoming wider, yet still nothing was pinned down.

Eventually the song had its own Wikipedia page and got coverage in Rolling Stone magazine. The thought that anything on the internet could be unknown for over a decade is a pretty big pill to swallow. From the original poster to a dozen years later, hundreds [if not thousands] of minds were trying to crack this case.

Things got heated earlier this summer when someone was re4searching a new music festival in West Germany in the 80s called Hörfest. Radio station NDR [NordesdeutscherRundfunk] was having festivals of unsigned bands whose efforts were being broadcast as a pert of the proceedings. Leading to unsigned music being widely diffused on FM broadcast, perhaps only once. But the song had been duly recorded that single time and that was all that it took to let it seep into a larger world than anyone could have imagined in 1984.

In a ironic turn of events, NDR began releasing compilation LPs of the Hörfest bands in much the same way that many radio stations used to release compilations of unsigned bands. I’m sure we can all remember radio stations doing this in the 70s and 80s. The kicker here was the the effort came one year too late to perhaps shed any light on the Mystery Song from the year prior.

It finally split wide open last week when a a Reddit member researching Hörfest saw the story below. The group FEX were part of the 1984 Hörfest lineup, but the Reddit member [marjin1412] recognized one the people below as being part of a different band [Phret] who had played at Hörfest the year prior. Moreover, they knew how to contact Michael Hädrich and get the FEX story straight from the horse’s mouth. Hädrich confirmed that the band FEX [great name, by the way…] had been involved and he sent the Reddit member some recordings from the days of FEX and Phret and they finally heard the Mystery Song, which was actually called “Subways Of Your Mind.”

Hädrich, asked the Reddit member to hold their fire until they could contact the others who had been in FEX first. Since none of them had a clue that their old song had been the subject of intense search and scrutiny across the whole of the internet for seventeen years! When the musicians were all ready to meet the world, the story cracked wide open just eight days ago.

So now FEX will be earning those 15 minutes of fame [perhaps even more] now that they are 40 years older and wiser. They reunited to play the “song”Subways Of Your Mind” on German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord. There’s now a whole genre [“Lostwave”] of unidentified songs on the basis of the notoriety that this song engendered in the 17 year span of the mystery. And can a Netflix documentary be far behind?

It gets more interesting now that I can talk about an intriguing different mystery song which was sent to me during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene last month. A reader contacted me using the form on this site about a “mystery earworm” they needed help with and I warned him that if it was the famous “Most Mysterious Song On The Internet” I’d be of no help. He had not heard of this mystery, but instead sent me the following recording he made on piano of his memory of the melody. It doesn’t ring any bells with me, but maybe it’s time for a new Mystery Song to sweep through the internet.

The gent who posted this to me describes it thusly:

Have a listen and if anyone has come clues, then kindly post them to the comments.

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