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Subways of Your Mind

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"Subways of Your Mind"
Song by FEX
Recordedc. 1983
Genre
Length2:55 (demo heard on radio)
3:54 (released version)
Songwriter(s)Ture Rückwardt

"Subways of Your Mind" is a 1983 song by the German new wave band FEX. The song is notable for being the subject of a 17-year-long internet search to identify the original artist, during which time it earned the nickname "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".[note 1]

The song was recorded from a West German Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) radio broadcast sometime during the mid-1980s, likely in or after 1984.[1] In 2019, it became the subject of a viral Internet phenomenon, with many users of sites such as Reddit and Discord collaborating to identify the song and recording artist.[1]

In November 2024, it was positively identified as "Subways of Your Mind" by the Kiel-based band FEX. Confirmation came with the release of a 1983 EP featuring the song, as well as a recording of a 1985 live performance.[2][3][4] However, the version of the song played on the radio has yet to be found.

Throughout the search, other unknown songs have been discovered. Users online have coined the term "lostwave" to describe songs of this nature.

Origin

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List of songs on paper, with one entry, labelled as "Blind the Wind", and a question mark indicating that the artist was unknown
List of songs on the BASF 4|1 tape that includes "Subways Of Your Mind" (mislabelled as "Blind the Wind") and a question mark indicating that the artist was unknown

A German teenager and DJ named Darius S. recorded the song from a radio program on the North German public radio station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) in the 1980s.[1][5] He recorded the song on a cassette tape and made a mixtape, which also included songs from XTC and The Cure. To get clean recordings of songs, Darius purposely removed dialogue from the radio hosts, which is likely why the exact airplay date and the title were unknown.[6]

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In 2004, Darius' older sister, Lydia H., bought him a website domain as a birthday present, which he used to raise awareness of the unidentified songs in his collection. He then digitized his radio recordings, saving the songs as .aiff and .m4a files, and uploaded them to his site, named Unknown Pleasures after the 1979 album of the same name by English rock band Joy Division.[7]

On March 18, 2007, Lydia began her online search for the song on a Usenet group, but later migrated to websites with song identification tools. She posted a 1:15 excerpt of the song to best-of-80s.de (a German forum devoted to eighties synth-pop) and to The Spirit of Radio (a fan site dedicated to Canadian radio station CFNY-FM).[1][5] The song slowly spread across the Internet, being uploaded to WatZatSong in 2009 and to YouTube in 2011. Spanish indie record label Dead Wax Records posted the excerpt of the song to their YouTube channel in 2017. This caught the attention of Gabriel Pelenson, a friend of Dead Wax owner Nicolás Zúñiga, who began searching for the song's origin in 2019.

Pelenson uploaded the excerpt of the song to his YouTube channel and many music-related Reddit communities, and eventually founded r/TheMysteriousSong.[8] Searchers made contact with individuals potentially pertinent to the search, such as NDR disc jockey Paul Baskerville, German performance rights organization GEMA, and YouTube channel "80zforever", which posts obscure music.[1] Baskerville agreed to play the song on his then-current radio show Nachtclub on July 21, 2019.[9] Although no new leads came of it, it did make Lydia and Darius aware of the new wave of investigation, and Lydia subsequently became involved with the Reddit community in August.[9]

Theories

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Searchers generally agreed that the singer has some sort of European accent, but the specific type was unclear.[5] Some users had theorized that the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which was released in late 1983, was used in the leads.[9] This was later confirmed by FEX's keyboardist Michael Hädrich.[10]

There had been some speculation that the song was recorded in 1984, since most of the other songs on the cassette tape were released around that time. Further evidence for this is that the Technics tape deck which Darius S. likely used to record the song was manufactured that year.[1]

Radio disc jockey Paul Baskerville, who does not remember playing the song,[5] suspected that it was a demo recording that was played once by an NDR presenter and then thrown away.[11]

One article from March 2021 claimed that the song was likely written and performed by Viennese singer Christian Brandl and drummer Ronnie Urini in 1983, with both German and English versions. The song would have been recorded in the studio of the late Fred Jakesch on Mariahilferstraße in Vienna. Alto saxophonist Heinz Hochrainer said he was present for a planned saxophone element, but that was never recorded. A preliminary mix of the song then would have made its way to NDR Radio in 1984. Urini confirmed the story and also provided an old typewritten version of the German lyrics as evidence. However, this theory has since been debunked. Robert Wolf, Brandl's musical colleague and the frontman of their band Chuzpe, said that he did not recognize Brandl's voice in the song and that the drums sounded more like an electronic drum machine than Urini.[12]

Identification

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On November 4, 2024, Reddit user u/marijn1412 claimed to have identified the song as "Subways of Your Mind" by the German group FEX. While researching bands who participated in Hörfest, an annual event highlighting lesser-known musical artists, the user contacted a FEX band member listed in an issue of the German newspaper Nordwest-Zeitung  [de]. According to the user, the band member confirmed that FEX was the creator of the song and planned to re-release it.[13][14] One member of FEX, Michael Hädrich, confirmed the story to German tabloid Tz,[15][16] while the band's lead singer, Ture Rückwardt, participated in an interview with the Kiel newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, further corroborating the story.[17] On November 7, 2024 three of the four original members of the band, Hädrich, Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann, performed an acoustic version of the song for the German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord in Kiel.[18]

Viral internet phenomenon

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On May 27, 2019, Australian music news website Tone Deaf wrote the earliest article focusing on the song, with author Tyler Jenke discussing the preliminary stages of the search for the track and noting that the search was similar to a 2013 search for a song which was ultimately identified as "On the Roof" by Swedish musician Johan Lindell.[19]

Between 2019 and 2021, American YouTuber Justin Whang posted five episodes of his series Tales from the Internet discussing the song and the progress of the search. His videos further galvanized Internet users to contribute to the effort to identify the song.[5][8]

In 2019, someone claimed the song signature on the music identification app Shazam, which for a brief time returned the nickname "antwon01" as the artist.[7] In addition, a number of covers and remixed versions of the song have been created,[7] including a cover by American band Mephisto Walz titled "Like the Wind" and released on their 2020 album All These Winding Roads.[20]

Personnel

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  • Ture Rückwardt - Vocals, guitar[4]
  • Norbert Ziermann - Bass[4]
  • Michael Hädrich - Keyboards[4]
  • Hans Sievers - Drums[4]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Also known as "Like the Wind", "The Sun Will Never Shine", "Blind the Wind", "Check It In, Check It Out", "Take It In, Take It Out", and "Summer Blues" after lines in fan-interpreted lyrics. Sometimes referred to as "The Mysterious Song". Often acronymed as LTW, TMMS, TMS and TMMSOTI.

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f Browne, David (24 September 2019). "The Unsolved Case of the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
  2. ^ Blistein, Jon (5 November 2024). "Case Closed: One of the internet's biggest musical mysteries has likely been solved". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 6 November 2024. A "lost" New Wave track stumping listeners for over 15 years was identified as "Subways of Your Mind" by the German band FEX
  3. ^ Davis, Wes (5 November 2024). "Reddit sleuths track down the band behind the internet's most mysterious song". The Verge. Retrieved 6 November 2024. Now we know that the song is called "Subways Of the Mind" by a band named FEX. Here's a recording provided by Michael Hädrich, a 68-year-old former band member.
  4. ^ a b c d e Böhm, Markus; Kleinz, Torsten (5 November 2024). "Netzrätsel nach Jahren gelöst: Hinter dem »geheimnisvollsten Lied des Internets« steckt eine deutsche Band" [Internet mystery solved after years: A German band was behind the "most mysterious song on the Internet".]. Der Spiegel (in German). Retrieved 6 November 2024. Es ist ein historischer Tag. Nicht etwa wegen der US-Wahl. Sondern, weil etwas anderes geschehen ist, das sich für einige Menschen offenbar ähnlich weltbewegend anfühlt: Das Geheimnis um den »most mysterious Song on the Internet«, und damit eines der bekanntesten Netzrätsel überhaupt, ist gelüftet worden. Nach 17 Jahren. [It's a historic day. Not because of the US election. But because something else happened that apparently felt equally earth-shattering to some people: The secret of the "most mysterious song on the Internet," and thus one of the most famous online mysteries of all time, has been revealed. After 17 years.]
  5. ^ a b c d e Jones, Alexandra Mae (18 November 2019). "Help solve a decades-long mystery: What is the name of this mysterious 80s song?". CTV News. Archived from the original on 24 May 2023. Retrieved 24 May 2023.
  6. ^ Reeve, Tanja (30 May 2020). "Die Jagd nach dem Most Mysterious Song on the Internet". Braunschweiger Zeitung (in German). Archived from the original on 3 July 2020. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  7. ^ a b c "The Most Mysterious Song – Wie die Suche nach dem geheimnisvollen Song aus den 80ern begann". Spontis (in German). 10 September 2019. Retrieved 7 November 2024.
  8. ^ a b "This Mysterious Three-Minute Song Has The Internet Baffled". 2 Ocean's Vibe News. 29 July 2021. Archived from the original on 26 December 2021. Retrieved 25 December 2021.
  9. ^ a b c "Como el viento. La historia de la canción más misteriosa de internet". Multimedios (in Spanish). 3 May 2021. Archived from the original on 1 June 2023. Retrieved 1 June 2023.
  10. ^ Böhm, Markus; Kleinz, Torsten (5 November 2024). "Hinter dem »geheimnisvollsten Lied des Internets« steckt eine deutsche Band". Spiegel. Retrieved 8 November 2024.
  11. ^ "Hamburg Journal: Der geheimnisvolle Song aus dem NDR Archiv". ARD Mediathek (in German). Archived from the original on 15 November 2020. Retrieved 9 December 2020.
  12. ^ "Plattentests.de exklusiv: Rätsel um The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet gelöst?". Plattentests.de (in German). 26 March 2021. Retrieved 2 December 2023.
  13. ^ Fraisse, Corentin (4 November 2024). "La 'chanson la plus mystérieuse d'Internet' a été trouvée !". Tsugi (in French). Retrieved 4 November 2024.
  14. ^ Gault, Matthew (4 November 2024). "'The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet' Has Finally Been Identified". 404 Media. Retrieved 4 November 2024.
  15. ^ Blistein, Jon (5 November 2024). "One of the Internet's Biggest Musical Mysteries Has Likely Been Solved". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 5 November 2024.
  16. ^ "Millionen rätselten: Globale Suche führt ausgerechnet zu Münchner – der zeigt sich „komplett überwältigt"" [Millions were puzzled: Global search leads to, of all people, Munich – appears to be “completely overwhelmed”]. tz (in German). 6 November 2024. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
  17. ^ Metschies, Ulrich (6 November 2024). "Gelöst: Von wem ist „The most mysterious song on the Internet" wirklich?". www.kn-online.de (in German). Retrieved 7 November 2024.
  18. ^ "'The Most Mysterious Song' von Kieler Band im Radio". www.ndr.de (in German). 7 November 2024. Retrieved 7 November 2024.
  19. ^ Jenke, Tyler (27 May 2019). "Can you help some internet sleuths identify a mysterious song?". Tone Deaf. Archived from the original on 31 May 2023. Retrieved 1 June 2023.
  20. ^ "Mephisto Walz : «All These Winding Roads»". No BS: Just Rock & Roll! (in French). 12 September 2020. Retrieved 6 November 2024.
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