The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

There’s something special about physical media. While I do prefer the ease, accessibility, and convenience of digital media, there’s a whole experience that younger generations missed out on. This isn’t about that whole argument people have where they say records sound better either, because that’s nonsense.

Digital media is scientifically superior, a fact (not an opinion) that was drilled into us from day one when I was a Music Engineering student. No, this is about mixtapes and other self-created compilations. Before streaming gave me the ability to listen to literally any song in the world at any moment in time for free, I would have to stand on high alert with the radio on in the background, waiting for that moment when a new song I liked would come on the radio so I could quickly hit the record button on my stereo.

With file sharing services and MP3s, this became a lot easier, but before iPods we still had to burn our own compilation CDs for portable music. Ironically, being tangible is what gives these items the intangible quality that a Spotify playlist lacks. Perhaps it’s the permanence of it.

You could rediscover a lost tape or CD from a decade prior, and rediscover forgotten songs all over again.

I recently discovered a bunch of burned CDs from when I was back in college. These were made by a friend for me as payment for tutoring him in computer programming; my school had upgraded their firewall to stop us from using file-sharing programs, but I needed to see the new episodes of Full Metal Alchemist as they were airing in Japan, damnit! What I had forgotten was the way he had labeled the discs, which I will absolutely not be writing here and I really, really wish he hadn’t. Still, at least I knew what they were.

Few people were great about labeling their tapes and CDs in any sort of accurate or meaningful way, and it was fascinating to find something without knowing what was on it. When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, we had to clean out and sell her house. There were a few rolls of unused insulation in the attic, which the new owners had requested we leave for them.

That was less work for me, so I was a big fan of their proposal. A few weeks later, after the new family had moved in, we got a call from the realtor. The family had found a reel of 16mm film in the attic between the rolls of insulation.

So a quick thing about my grandfather: he was a mechanical and electrical engineer who helped design and build the heat shields for Apollo 11. Because of this, when we retrieved the film from the realtor and read the label on the tin, we weren’t as surprised as you might expect when we read the words “AVCO Missile Systems Division. Print #2.”

Not surprised, but curious as Hell. Was it a secret government film that will get me killed for even mentioning it? A home movie of the debaucherous corporate after party from when we finally landed on the moon?

The first known recording of the turbo encabulator gag? Sadly, we haven’t been able to find a projector for it and are really hesitant to mail it off to be digitized, but once whatever is on there has been seen, it will no longer be a mystery.

Such is not the case for one mix tape out of Germany. So let us go back to everyone’s favourite birthplace for internet mysteries.

The Usenet Post

Ah, good ol’ Usenet! In 2006, a woman named Lydia uploaded a clip from a song to a German music newsgroup on Usenet, the full name of which I have omitted so Simon doesn’t try to pronounce it in his vaguely racist German accent. No one recognized the song, so naturally the first question was “where did you get this?”

Lydia had gotten the clip from her brother, Darius, who had just digitized his collection of cassette tapes containing songs he recorded off the radio as a teenager in the early 80’s. Some of the songs on the tapes simply had a question mark for the artist name, the song name, or both. He had his own website, a birthday present from Lydia, that he used to “spread awareness” of his playlist of identify the unidentified songs.

Considering Lydia ultimately took on the search herself, I’m guessing his website did not achieve its goal. Or perhaps it had, and all the other unidentified songs on his tapes had already been identified, as there were numerous; that part is honestly unclear, but it’s also unimportant as none of the other songs remain mysteries. Usenet did little to help, so she moved on to a number of websites to try to find answers, but still with no luck.

The trail went completely cold, and nothing about this song was ever spoken of again.

Okay, well obviously that last part’s a lie, especially because Simon has at least briefly mentioned it on TopTenz, but no one was going to hear anything about this song for at least a decade. Lydia and Darius would continue to passively try to find information with little luck, but as I said, Lydia had posted the song clip to several websites, including to a Canadian website called Spirit of Radio on March 18, 2007. While she had not uncovered any information on her own, little did Lydia know that all the posts she made had already changed everything.

And by everything, I mean it got one person’s attention. But that one person was going to obsessively fixate on this song like John Hinkley Jr. fixating on Jodie Foster.

Then For a Long Time, Nothing Happened…

Sometimes, progress takes time. Since we have a little bit of a 12 year lull before anything happens with this story, let’s talk about what made the song so mysterious in the first place. Obviously there’s the fact that no one knew who the band was or what the song was called, that’s a given, but there’s more than that.

The track listing for the cassette that Darius had typed back in the 80’s had the artist listed as a question mark, but the song titled as “Blind the Wind”. That would seem like a lead, but it was actually more of a question. The quality of the recording was not very good, so the lyrics were impossible to decipher with absolute certainty.

It sounded like the lyrics being sung at the opening of the song were “Like the Wind”, not blind, and all anyone could do was guess at the other lyrics. One of the things that made the lyrics hard to identify was that no one knew where the song was from either. It played on German radio, but was the band German?

Despite singing in English, they certainly didn’t sound American or British. No one even knew for sure what exact year the song was from.

The strangest thing of all is that no one recognized the song at all, despite it being a pretty good song. Even if it was a small indie band, they had friends and family, and given the quality of the song probably even some legitimate fans. Some friends of mine in high school rented studio time to produce an album that they got played on a local rock station at like 2 am on a Tuesday, and if a cassette of that broadcast suddenly surfaced I would absolutely recognize them.

The search hadn’t truly gone viral yet, but you know it’s going to, and this is Decoding the Unknown so you know it’s still unsolved. Unless the gimmick of the band was that they were all completely unlikeable orphans that absolutely did not want to be famous, the idea that none of them had a single relative, friend, or fan that have heard and identified this song is extraordinary.

A Viral Sensation

The first upload to YouTube of the clip from The Mysterious Song was in 2011, but it was largely ignored. In September of 2017 it would be uploaded again by Spanish record label Dead Wax Records in the hopes of identifying it, but this too failed to garner massive public attention. Gabriel da Silva Vieira claims to have begun his search for this song back in 2006, which would have been when Lydia first uploaded the song.

It is unclear why he waited so long to push his attempts into high gear if he had been fixated on the mystery for so long, but in April of 2019, Gabriel decided that enough was enough. He created an account on Reddit, and over the next four months he would post the story of the song 44 times across 25 different subreddits, as well as creating r/TheMysteriousSong. Gabriel was Hell bent on finding out the true origin of this song, and the hunt was finally starting to gain some attention, but it still needed that little extra push to get going.

While Gabriel was following some new leads, an Instagram user slid into the DMs of YouTuber Justin Whang, recommending the song as a topic for his “Tales from the Internet” series.

Whang’s video is when this search really started going viral, with his video receiving hundreds of thousands of views in the first few months. No disrespect, but it’s honestly a little hard to see why. The video is just him sitting in front of a camera and reading Reddit posts aloud. An entire YouTube series dedicated to just one guy sitting there reading what somebody else wrote?

It doesn’t really strike me as something that would catch on. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe! But Whang’s video got attention, and he had active fans. Fans that would annoy someone into finally responding to Gabriel.

You see, in the days leading up to Whang’s video, some new information had come to light. A Reddit user with a throwaway account had found more old posts in German music forums that contained more information about the song, and brought them to Gabriel’s attention. The recording was believed to be from the radio show “Musik für junge Leute”, or “Music for young people”. An interview had been found from one of the hosts who mentioned he would sometimes play tapes from underground Eastern rock bands, some of which were mailed to him from over the Berlin Wall.

Gabriel and others were sure they had found the DJ responsible for playing the song, British radio presenter Paul Baskerville. Gabriel messaged him on Facebook, but received no reply.

Then Whang’s video came out, and it included the info about Paul Baskerville. Suddenly, he was getting a lot of Facebook messages, so he decided to respond to Gabriel. Unsurprisingly, Baskerville did not remember the song.

If it was one of these underground cassettes, it’s a song he probably played once 37 years prior, you really think he’s gonna fucking remember that? He also mentioned that a lot of bands back then sounded the same, something that’s true in any era, but something that also makes it a lot harder to identify an unknown song with any level of certainty. The hand typed lists of songs that were played on the air from back then were long since destroyed, also not surprising, so it was going to be a rough go of it.

Paul did have an idea though, and it was so simple it just might work: he was going to play the song on the radio again and see if anyone called in recognizing it. On July 21, 2019, just 11 days after Whang’s original video, Baskerville played The Mysterious Song on his radio show “Nachtclub”. No one identified it, and callers said that he may have never played the song at all and it was all a hoax.

While all of this was going on, another reddit user caught wind up the investigation from a post in r/Germany. He had been a part of the original search back in 2007, and had something very special that the world hadn’t yet heard. When Lydia originally posted the clip of the song, she didn’t want to upload the entire song because she was afraid of violating copyright law.

She wasn’t afraid enough to look up that fact that she shouldn’t be posting 80 seconds of a song either, but afraid enough not to do the whole thing. One of the members of the Usenet forum had managed to convince her to upload the entire song so he could download it, so she posted it briefly, then deleted it after he had his copy. Now that he was aware of the search, the user uploaded the full version of the song to the internet; this was the copy that Baskerville played on the radio.

Due Diligence

This investigation was really ramping up. The original DJ was on board, or at the very least humouring the internet crazies, finally people had access to the entire song, and it was getting more and more attention. It seemed like it would only be a matter of time for someone to come forward, but they didn’t. No one real, anyway.

There were plenty of hoaxes and fakes, because of course there were, but no solid information. So when all else fails, when the combined efforts of the citizenry just isn’t enough to solve a problem, who can the people count on to save them in their time of need? That’s right, it’s everyone’s favourite two words: government bureaucracy.

Perhaps GEMA could save the day. The German name is extremely long and I’ve already given Heir Whistler a chance to use his German accent this episode, so I’ll just say that the name translates to the “Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights”. In theory, every song played on the radio is supposed to be catalogued, tracked, and archived by this organization.

It’s possible that they really were, too, but unfortunately the digital archive has been proven to be incomplete, and so it did not yield any results. Similarly, another Reddit user was able to obtain a complete list of every song Baskerville played on “music for young people” from 1982 to 1984. The Mysterious Song was nowhere to be found on this list, which is believed to be complete.

It took 7 months to check that list, and now the records of three other shows that Darius listened to and recording songs from are being checked, but that process began a year ago and still has yet to yield any results.

What Do We Know?

There’s a lot of mystery surrounding this song, so what do we actually know about it? We know that the synthesizer used in the song was a Yamaha DX7, which is actually a pretty big deal. The DX7 was released in 1983, so knowing both that fact and the other songs on the cassette, such as Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” and Ray Parker Jr.’s immortal punk rock anthem “Ghostbusters”, we can determine the song was played and almost definitely produced in 1984.

This tells us more than just the year though, because the DX7 is no joke. In 1983 it cost $2000, which is about $5600 today. In case you’re out of touch with reality, that’s fucking expensive.

This was not just some kids screwing around in a garage with instruments they bought at a thrift store. Or actually, maybe it was. The synth is barely used in the song at all, despite being an extremely capable and versatile piece of equipment, and the sparse instances of it being used are simple presets.

Anyone who had the money to purchase this machine themselves would reasonably have taken a little time to figure out how to actually use it before recording their demo tape. What this information actually points to is that whoever the band was, they recorded this track at a studio that owned a DX7. This definitely helps narrow the search a bit.

We also know with absolute certainty that the song did play on the German station NDR, even if wasn’t on Baskerville’s show. In December of 2020, a spectrogram analysis of the song shows a constant line at 10 KHz (kilohertz). Darius admittedly recorded songs from more than one radio station, so this discovery was important because every song recorded off NDR, and only those songs, have this 10 KHz line.

This line is present on other recordings from NDR, not just the ones from Darius, and a forum post from 2003, before this search even began, discusses this and the technical reasons behind it. These details all seem minor, but with each new detail the intersection in the middle of our Venn diagram keeps getting smaller and smaller.

One of the more recent leads is a single from 1984 by a German band called The Cave. I do personally see some similarities, but as Baskerville said, a lot of bands from back then sounded the same. Still, people are taking the lead seriously, and they immediately contact Volker Bublitz, the producer for the album.

To start, if he was involved in The Mysterious Song, he has no memory of it. That’s not a surprise, and doesn’t say much, because he had no memory of The Cave at first either. He eventually said he faintly remembered it as a weekend production by an independent band on a low budget.

Again, this is almost 40 years later, and it sounds like he did a lot of that type of production, so I’m not sure what level of detail people expect. One of the owners of the comic book store where I worked was in a band, and his band recorded their album at the same studio on the same day that Godsmack recorded their first demo. I’m willing to bet that the producer only remembers one of those recording sessions.

Important to the story, however, is that Volker said that his studio definitely owned a DX7, and that if he produced The Mysterious Song, it may even have been him playing it. It would definitely explain the sparse nature of the synth part.

The final major update came in November of 2021 when Lydia found another cassette with The Mysterious Song on it and uploaded it to Youtube. She said she thought about keeping it to herself because of how suspicious it would seem for one person to have two recordings of a song that no one else had ever heard of, but this tape was much higher quality so she felt it was worth releasing. Her reasoning for having it is that it was likely on a mix tape her brother had made for her, copied from his own cassettes.

It appears to be the exact same recording based on a very distinct lip smack at the end of the song when the DJ is about to begin talking again, so this does make sense. Her tape was higher quality because it sat in a box and was never listened to. This also makes sense, as my siblings frequently don’t give a shit about things that excite me, and vice versa.

Still, this recording was much clearer, to the point that people are finally able to start coming to a consensus on what the lyrics to the song actually are.

Wrap Up

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet is most certainly that. There have been similar stories to this one, but many of them are solved and no search has been going on nearly this long. With all the hard facts being discovered, and how active the community still is, it is likely that this mystery will be solved. My prediction is that we’ll finally know the real story about this song sometime during the second half of 2023, and that the band members all have successful white collar jobs now and don’t really care about this.

But what do you think? Will the song ever be identified? If so, will it reignite the musical careers of this band? It would be a heartwarming story if that happened, but I find that possibility more than a little unlikely.

If any of you are interested in joining the effort to identify this song and be a part of history, you can head over to the Mysterious Song subreddit and find the link to their Discord. And if any of you have a guess as to what I’ll discover on the hidden 16mm reel found in my grandparents attic, be sure to let me know. Who knows, if anyone guesses correctly maybe I’ll give them an NFT of the film for their efforts.

Bonus Fact

While obviously not a punk rock anthem as previously stated in this script, “Ghostbusters” was more than the theme song to a comedy movie, it was a hugely successful hit in its own right. Two months after the film released in 1984, “Ghostbusters” climbed all the way to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts and stayed there for 3 weeks. That means that Ray Parker Jr. has more number 1 hits than Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, James Brown, KISS, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Metallica, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, The Clash, and Van Morrison combined.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most mysterious song on the internet?

The most mysterious song on the internet is a track from a mix tape out of Germany, uploaded by Lydia in 2006 to a German music newsgroup on Usenet. The song’s artist and title are unknown.

How did Lydia obtain the mysterious song?

Lydia obtained the clip of the song from her brother, Darius, who had digitized his collection of cassette tapes containing songs he recorded off the radio as a teenager in the early 80s.

What was the initial reaction to the mysterious song on Usenet?

No one recognized the song on Usenet, leading to the question ‘where did you get this?’ Lydia had gotten the clip from her brother, Darius, who had digitized his collection of cassette tapes.

What was the significance of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer in the mysterious song?

The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer used in the song was a significant clue. Released in 1983, it cost $2000 at the time, indicating that the band likely recorded the track at a studio that owned the equipment.

What role did Paul Baskerville play in the search for the mysterious song?

Paul Baskerville, a British radio presenter, was believed to have played the song on his radio show ‘Musik für junge Leute.’ He was contacted by Gabriel da Silva Vieira but did not remember the song. He later played the song on his radio show ‘Nachtclub’ to see if anyone would recognize it.

What was the outcome of Paul Baskerville playing the mysterious song on his radio show?

When Paul Baskerville played the mysterious song on his radio show ‘Nachtclub,’ no one identified it. Callers even suggested that he might have never played the song at all and that it could be a hoax.

What was the significance of the spectrogram analysis of the mysterious song?

A spectrogram analysis of the song in December 2020 showed a constant line at 10 KHz, indicating that the song was played on the German station NDR. This detail helped narrow down the search for the song’s origin.

What was the latest update on the mysterious song as of November 2021?

In November 2021, Lydia found another cassette with the mysterious song on it and uploaded it to YouTube. This recording was of higher quality and allowed people to start coming to a consensus on the song’s lyrics.

What is the current status of the search for the mysterious song?

The search for the mysterious song is still ongoing. The community remains active, and new leads are being pursued. It is predicted that the mystery might be solved sometime during the second half of 2023.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
• Hero image source by Nesnad / openverse, by.