Darius was a typical young music fan of the 1980s. He hit “record” on his tape deck when a song on the radio caught his fancy, took care to cut off the DJ’s announcements, and catalogued the mixtapes he made. He was from West Germany, but other kids doing exactly that could be found in any place where radio signals with rock and roll in them could be received.

On one tape made circa 1984 was a goth-tinged new wave track by a band whose name Darius couldn’t remember. On the J-card, he typed a question mark for the band’s name and gave it the title “Blind The Wind” based on his interpretation of the opening lyrics, sung in a low baritone not unlike that of Robbie Grey from Modern English. A high-pitched, resonant synthesizer added some atmosphere to the choruses and coda.

For about four decades, that’s virtually all that Darius — or almost anyone else in the world — knew about the song. Darius says he recorded it off Norddeustcher Rundfunk (NDR), a radio network based in Hamburg that often played punk and new wave. But with the DJ’s back-announcement missing and Darius apparently never hearing it again, its provenance became a mystery, and so it languished nameless on a cassette.

In 2004, Darius began uploading digital rips of his tape collection to his personal website (named Unknown Pleasures after Joy Division’s debut LP) in an effort to identify all the songs he originally couldn’t; “Blind The Wind,” though, remained unidentified. In 2007, his sister Lydia joined the search effort, posting clips on various websites and forums; still, no one recognized it. The track, and questions about its origin, bounced around the web for several more years. In 2019, it caught the attention of Brazilian teenager Gabriel Vieira; he posted about it on Reddit, and from there a dedicated community formed around what he called The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet.

A subreddit, r/TheMysteriousSong, was started, and popular YouTuber Justin Whang made a video about the search. Paul Baskerville, host of one of Darius’ favourite NDR programs Musik Für Junge Leute (Music For Young People), was contacted; he had no memory of the song, but he did play it on his current show to see if any listeners did. No dice.

A news story about the song alerted Darius and Lydia to the fact that the search was still ongoing, and Lydia joined the official community, taking on the Reddit handle u/bluuely. A few months later, much of the world was holed up in their homes avoiding a potentially deadly virus, with more time than ever to dedicate to the search.

Humans generally have a hard time when something that once might have been within their grasp becomes unobtainable: a person, a material possession, an experience, money, status, respect, or even a piece of knowledge. We don’t even have to have known about it beforehand to feel a sense of loss; the important part is that there’s something out there we can’t have. How tragic would it be if it were lost forever?

This sentiment is probably behind the explosive growth in recent years of an online subculture dedicated to cataloguing and finding “lost media” of all types: movies, TV shows, records, video games and more that are known about, but can’t be found, at least not in their entirety. They might exist in a warehouse or on a hard drive somewhere, or they may have been destroyed entirely for one reason or another. In the case of radio and TV before a certain time, recordings may never have been made in the first place, and all that remain are documentation and memories. In a time where almost everything is easily archived, this level of neglect and/or technological inadequacy can seem inconceivable.

Lost media searches predate the internet. The hunt for missing episodes of Doctor Who has been on since 1978; before then, the BBC had a habit of erasing master tapes so they could be reused and to free up storage space, and ninety-seven episodes are still unaccounted for as of this writing. The last known copy of the 1927 silent horror flick London After Midnight, directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, burned up in a fire at the MGM studio in 1965 along with many others; reviews were mixed, but it was a commercial success from two Hollywood legends that still managed to — as far as we can tell — blink out of existence. (It’s true that the silver nitrate film stock commonly used at the time had a tendency to catch fire, crumble, melt into goo or spontaneously combust, but that doesn’t make it fair).

Occasionally, though, things once thought lost are found. Some Doctor Who episodes have been located at yard sales and in the archives of overseas TV stations to which they were syndicated. In 1978, hundreds of film reels from the silent era, preserved by permafrost, were found under an abandoned hockey rink in the Yukon. In 2008, long-lost portions of German director Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent sci-fi epic Metropolis were eventually discovered — like many missing German things — hidden away in Argentina.

Sometimes though, the media itself is available but the knowledge of who made it and where it came from is what’s lost. Lost music — more specifically, music that no one can find any information about — has been dubbed “Lostwave.” Some are catchy songs played uncredited in the backgrounds of TV shows; some are misattributed mp3s downloaded from Limewire 20-plus years ago. Others, much like The Mysterious Song, were found on old audio cassettes and CD-Rs with little to no identifying info.

Since late 2023, enthusiasts generally agree that we’ve been in “The Golden Age Of Lostwave” due to the sheer volume of important discoveries made. The kickoff was the discovery of Paula Toledo’s “How Long,” previously heard only in a TV movie, a Canadian teen drama series about tennis, and the menus of Russian bootleg DVDs. It was found in a rather obvious way in retrospect: someone thought to search for songs called “How Long” in the database of SOCAN, Canada’s equivalent to ASCAP or BMI.

Other searches were trickier. In 2021, someone in Spain uploaded a murky 17-second clip of an ’80s pop song to the website WatZatSong, explaining that they had recorded it off the TV in 1999 but couldn’t remember anything about it. An online sub-subculture quickly formed, mainly on Reddit, and countless sleuths dedicated their free time to finding out who made what they called “Everyone Knows That.” Three years later, someone figured out that the song was by Christopher and Philip Booth, British-Canadian twins who were members of the band Sweeney Todd before they were replaced by Bryan Adams and moved to Los Angeles. They had licensed “Ulterior Motives” (the song’s real name) to a 1986 porno film, and it turned out this was where the original poster had recorded it from. The Booths embraced the newfound interest in their music, and soon put out a brand new recording of the song, free of any tape hiss or moans of pleasure.

These weren’t the only Lostwave cases cracked in 2024, but as it turned out, they were mercifully easy to solve compared to the community’s white whale.

Just from the audio, a few more clues about The Mysterious Song were identified by savvy listeners. Firstly, the synthesizer had the unmistakable sound of a certain preset on the Yamaha DX7; it would have been impossible to make any earlier keyboard sound exactly like that (especially by chance), so the song could not have been recorded before May of 1983 when the DX7 was first sold. Secondly, though the lyrics were in English, The Mysterious Singer seemed to have a continental European accent; exactly where from, however, couldn’t be determined for sure. Thirdly and more subtly, all sound frequencies at around 10kHz “dipped” (were measurably quieter) throughout the recording; this was a distinct feature of NDR broadcasts in the 1980s, so Darius wasn’t misremembering the station.

While this narrowed things down a little, “obscure European new wave band active in the summer of ‘83 or later and played at least once on NDR” still described hundreds and hundreds of groups at the very least. Undeterred, the team moved forward.

r/TheMysteriousSong followed numerous false leads, and some outright hoaxes temporarily strung investigators along. In 2019, an Austrian musician named Ronnie “Rocket” Urini claimed he had written and recorded the song with the late Christian Landl, his bandmate in Underground Corpses. It turned out, though, that Urini had a longstanding reputation as a serial teller of tall tales, and another former bandmate of Landl’s testified that it could not have been him.

For a time, the team focused on Statues In Motion, a Greek synthpop band that broke up in late 1983 after they recorded their only album; some thought the voice of frontman Alvin Dean — real name Giorgos Dalambrias — was identical to that of The Mysterious Singer. Former keyboardist Billy Knight (Vasilis Paleokostas) was contacted; at first he said he didn’t know the song, then he said it was a Statues In Motion outtake, and then he claimed he recorded it in 1982, a year before the DX7 came out, with a completely different kind of synthesizer. When he was pressed on this, Billy suddenly turned hostile, and it eventually became clear to most that he was full of shit. The search, as always, went on.

These days, most people are used to being able to instantly stream almost any piece of media they’d ever want to watch or hear, or Google virtually any piece of information to win disputes over matters of fact. (This was the original purpose of The Guinness Book Of World Records: a reference work intended to settle arguments about superlative trivia). My wife and I can verbally command a device in our kitchen to — among other things — play virtually any song on Spotify, stream almost any radio station in the world on TuneIn, or confirm whether a water chestnut is actually a chestnut. (It isn’t). And though my wife would prefer I don’t, I can turn the TV to the Roku Channel and watch a continuous 24/7 stream of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show I had to watch in 10-minute low-res chunks on YouTube in high school. In this age of abundance, it can be maddening when something we want to hear or know about can’t be found on a streaming service or the Internet generally. (Do you mean to tell me, Spotify, that if I want to hear Samhain I have to torrent or actually buy their albums like this is the freakin’ Flintstones?!)

I asked r/TheMysteriousSong moderator u/LordElend why he thought the search for The Mysterious Song captivated so many. “For the community,” he said, “I think the song offered a window in a time of their parents possibly… I guess in the age of the internet a lot of people couldn’t believe something that was on the radio could actually be lost. Even though plenty of things disappeared online, like linkrot, the paradigm is ‘The internet never forgets.’ A lot of people also had questions about the idea of taping from the radio and how and why this was done. In the age of Spotify inaccessible media seems thrilling, I guess.”

“Had the song been rubbish or boring,” he added, “I think I’d [have] lost interest immediately. Like a good mystery the search seemed intriguing to me because it seemed solvable. Such a good production must have left traces… But on the same hand it seemed to evade every attempt.”

In 2024, a search of NDR’s logs from the mid-1980s — provided by the network itself — turned up nothing that jumped out, but it was noticed that numerous songs were listed as being by “Amateurband”; these were apparently unsigned bands that NDR didn’t bother writing down the names of. It was hypothesized that The Mysterious Band may have competed in NDR’s annual battle-of-the-bands Hörfest (meaning, roughly, “The Listen Festival”) in the mid-1980s, and that they were one of the Amateurbands. As much documentation as possible was obtained, and researchers went about trying to contact the members of groups that hadn’t already been looked into. Since hundreds of acts submitted their music for Hörfest consideration each year; the team assigned different ones to different investigators for the sake of efficiency.

That fall, moderator u/marijn1412 was researching 1983 Hörfest contestants Phret when he found an old newspaper article about a band that shared a member with them, keyboardist Michael Hädrich; this group was called FEX (pronounced as one word, like “fecks”), and they’d been based in the German city of Kiel, not far from Hamburg. The name is reportedly derived from a southern German slang word with a similar meaning to the Japanese term otaku or the English word “nerd”: someone who is especially enthusiastic — perhaps even obsessive — about a certain subject or pursuit.

Sensing a potential lead, marijn1412 found and messaged Hädrich on Oct. 21, nonchalantly expressing interest in hearing his old music. On Nov. 2 Hädrich sent digital rips of tracks by both bands, including a FEX song called “Subways Of Your Mind”; the title was immediately recognizable as the last four words of The Mysterious Song’s chorus. It was an alternate take — the sustained notes in the synth solo didn’t resonate in quite the same way, and the track didn’t fade out at the end — but this was clearly The Song.

marijn1412 told Hädrich — who’s still a musician and has a studio in Munich, in addition to a Yamaha DX7iiD — that this was a famous lost song that the world had been seeking the source of for years; Hädrich had been completely unaware. He asked marijn1412 to wait to announce the news until he’d contacted his former bandmates and finally registered “Subways Of Your Mind” with GEMA (Germany’s ASCAP).

Within a week, three out of the four members of FEX at the time of their 1985 disbandment — Hädrich, Rückwardt, and bassist Norbert Ziermann — were performing an acoustic version of The Formerly Mysterious Song live at NDR’s studios; it was the first time they’d played together in 39 years. Initially harder to trace, drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers finally made contact with the rest after reading about the discovery in his morning newspaper. Sometime later, it emerged that Ziermann had replaced another bassist named Jörg Lemcke (who is now active on r/TheMysteriousSong), and that the original lead singer was Ture Rückwardt’s wife Ilona before she became pregnant. A 2010 article about German composer and studio musician Dirk Reichardt indicates that he, too, played keyboards for the band at some point.

“Subways Of Your Mind” is the first of three songs on a tape that was sold as concert merch by FEX; the two other tracks demonstrate the versatility of the group within their chosen new wave style. “Heart In Danger” has a repetitious, singalong chorus and is far more synth-driven than “Subways”; one can easily imagine it on the 1985 British charts alongside Simple Minds or Tears For Fears. “Talking Hands” has an intensity and herky-jerky quality not unlike the band whose name you initially thought you read at the beginning of this sentence, and a new wave enthusiast could be forgiven for assuming it’s a Wall Of Voodoo outtake, right down to Rückwardt’s vocal delivery.

One Redditor later realized he possessed a fourth song by FEX, “Jenny,” released on a German compilation album he’d bought in his own effort to find The Mysterious Band; it’s a skillfully composed love song with a keyboard riff and arrangement comparable to that of the Cars’ 1984 hit “You Might Think.” In late November, the official FEX YouTube channel premiered yet another new-old song, “Goldrush”: a calmer, dreamier number that sounds like something the Doors might have done if Jim Morrison had lived to see the ’80s and Ray Manzarek had traded in his electric organ for a digital synth.

Though in a celebratory mood, the wider Lostwave community remains on the hunt for more unattributed tracks; something else must now take up the mantle of The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet. One candidate, nicknamed “C.I.A.“, is another new wave song, also apparently made circa 1984, and is presumed to be Canadian in origin. Another, “Fly Away,” is a city pop song allegedly found on an unlabelled cassette bought in Tokyo’s Akihabara neighbourhood in the mid-1990s. The most mysterious of them all, though, might be “Light The Lanterns,” a folk-rock song found in a drawer on a cassette labeled only “DEMO – LISTEN TODAY” and likely recorded in 1985 or so. (To me, it sounds a bit like 10,000 Maniacs).

Perusing r/Lostwave, one comes away with the impression that the search process itself has become a hobby for many. It could be that some are in it for the thrill of it, or as a way of solving mysteries from the comfort of one’s own home, no flashlights or abandoned theme parks required. Others may simply want to find new things to listen to, or to show off how much they know about music in comment threads. Others still may just be in it for the glory, dreaming of a day when they’re listed alongside u/marijn1412 as the official demystifier of a long-forgotten song.

The music industry at all levels can be fickle, abusive, political and deceptively non-meritocratic, with some generational talents languishing in obscurity for many years. Unsurprisingly, then, some artists and promoters exploit people’s love of a good mystery in order to call attention to their music.

In 1965, when the Winnipeg rock group Chad Allan And The Expressions released a cover of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” as a single, the record company replaced the band’s name with the words Guess Who? in an effort to pique the curiosity of consumers and DJs; apparently, it worked. The single reached #1 on the Canadian charts, and the band changed their name to what most people were now calling them; the Guess Who went on to be one of the most notable Canadian bands of the classic rock era.

In other cases, a sense of mystery and secrecy remains part of the act long-term. San Francisco-based experimental outfit the Residents have been performing and releasing uniquely bizarre music anonymously since 1971, most iconically disguising themselves with face-covering eyeball masks paired with tuxedos and top hats; in recent years, though, it has become widely accepted that the main creative core of the group is the duo of Homer Flynn and the late Hardy Fox. More recently, alt-country star Orville Peck performs with a fringed mask over everything but his eyes and spent the first couple years of his career concealing his real name; it was not a particularly well-kept secret, though, and he was quickly recognized by fans as Daniel Pitout, former drummer of Vancouver punk groups Nü Sensae and Eating Out. In a 2019 New York Times profile, he was quoted as saying “I don’t avoid questions about my life because I am trying to be obtuse… I use it as something to enhance the artistry of what I do.”

Active deception and fraud, though, is another matter. At a time in which thousands of strangers might devote portions of their lives to finding out who wrote a song they heard for 15 seconds in a sitcom, some internet denizens have succumbed to the temptation to create fake Lostwave in order to generate interest in one’s own music, prank people, or simply get attention. Currently, the wiki Lostwave’s Finest has 35 entries classified as hoaxes; some are AI-generated, and others are just existing tracks posted to WatZatSong by users that already knew what they were. One particular user calling himself Niski is known to have made numerous fake postings before coming clean and disappearing from the Lostwave community.

In the past few years there have been numerous instances of, in the words of LordElend, “grifters posting [The Mysterious Song] on YouTube and Spotify with false information to make a quick buck.” Until recently, Spotify hosted an upload of the original track credited to Alvin Dean and Statues In Motion, and the service still hosts another upload (labeled “AI Remastered”) credited to a band called Blind The Wind and composer “Anton Ridel”; a slightly misspelled reference to the original pseudonym Darius’ sister Lydia used when she started her search.

Yet another artist, A Man Named Jonz, released a version this past June that uses an artificially isolated vocal track from the original version but updates the instrumentation and slightly changes the vocal melody and cadence. John Patrick Jones is credited as the songwriter, and most of the numerous other singles he’s uploaded — which include “The Biden Crime Family” and “Beetle Juice Is Back” — feature seemingly AI-generated cover art and audio.

The reunited FEX are making of the most of the newfound interest in their music. “Subways Of Your Mind” has been digitized from the original tape and remastered for an officially licensed streaming release, and a 1985 live version recorded at the Roxi Paderborn was added a couple of weeks ago. A 7″ vinyl single with “Heart In Danger” as the B-side is available to order from Berlin-based record label Outer Edge and will ship later this month. “We can’t say how touched we are by all of your positive feedback,” the band posted on their new Facebook. Naturally, as the journey unfolds, you can find Hädrich on Reddit too.