how thousands of Internet users investigated for nearly twenty years to find the origin of a song

It's a little excerpt of a song like there are billions of others on the internet. It's also one of the web's oldest mysteries, which has obsessed thousands of people over the past twenty years – and which may have finally been solved. Internet users think they have discovered the origin of the “most mysterious song on the internet”. Code name? “Like the wind”. Or “Blind the wind”. Or even “TMS”, for “The Mysterious Song”. And many more, depending on what you understand of the lyrics.

At the origin of this mystery, there is the musical extract below (one minute and fifteen seconds), in the familiar new wave style and its procession of synths. In 2007, an Internet user published it on two forums, under the pseudonyms “Anton Riedel” and “bluuue”, to try to find the title.

When was it recorded? On which radio? In which program? This is where the difficulties begin. The initial publication, which dates from March 18, 2007, only mentions a recording “between 1982 and 1984 on a German radio station” and this call for help on the site spiritofradio.ca attracted little attention for years, despite a few curious people who sometimes came across the extract.

It must be said that the challenge is significant. Typing the lyrics into Google gives no results, and you still have to be sure to understand what the singer is saying, which is a challenge from the first sentence: “Blind the wind” ? “Like the wind” ? “Locked away” ? In 2017, the broadcast of the extract on the YouTube channel of the Spanish independent label Dead Wax Records was not more successful, reports the specialist site 404 Media. And the mystery remains.

We had to wait until 2019 for two spotlights to make this hunt a viral phenomenon. First, the excerpt was posted on several Reddit groups by Gabriel Pelenson, a friend of the owner of Dead Wax Records. He even created a dedicated discussion group (“subreddit”) on the platform in June 2019, obviously named r/TheMysteriousSong, which today has nearly 60,000 members.

The second came the following month with a video from YouTuber Justin Whang, who summarized the state of knowledge and theories of the time to several hundred thousand curious people. The investigation is relaunched and numerous avenues are explored on the subreddit and the Discord server dedicated to the song.

Who published the initial extract? What is the origin of this accent that we can distinguish in the singer's voice? What Music from the period resembles it? Can we find the precise year the song was recorded, for example by identifying sounds specific to certain synthesizer models? All these questions are explored seriously by budding investigators, who sometimes devote several hours a day to them, motivated by their curiosity, the emulation of a group engaged in a common game and the possibility of creating a piece of history. 'Internet.

But many artists, labels or companies that could represent a track are dead, unreachable or know nothing about the song. Internet users then contacted Paul Baskerville, a British DJ who worked for German public radio NDR at the time the song was broadcast on the airwaves. He agrees to rebroadcast this extract on the air in July 2019, but he has no memory of it. And the other DJ who could have played the song on the NDR is dead, as he explained to the magazine Rolling Stone.

The initiative brings at least one result: the Internet user behind the affair came forward in August. Behind “Anton Riedel” and “bluuue” is a German woman named Lydia, whose brother Darius recorded the song. She specifies that he thinks he recorded it in 1984, probably in his favorite program, “Musik für junge Leute” (“Music for young people”) on NDR 1. But it is impossible to be certain, because his cassettes bring together often songs recorded at different times.

Lydia initially faces skepticism from certain members of the subreddit, who are wary of hoaxes and other “trolls” who regularly attempt to claim authorship of “The Mysterious Song”. But Lydia quickly begins to actively participate in the research. She also briefly published the complete version of “TMS”, which she quickly withdrew for fear of copyright issues (but which circulated nonetheless).

But despite the hours devoted to these investigations, all leads dry up. And the hoaxes are multiplying. “As the leads dried up and the theories were proven false, with the trolling, harassment and hoaxes getting bigger and bigger, people naturally lost interest,” explains one of the co-founders of the dedicated Discord server on Reddit, to the point that the latter was closed.

“There was a lot of harassment from trolls…, the search intensity dropped and all that remained was unbearable attempts at trolling by the weirdest losers imaginable.”

One of the co-founders of the Discord server dedicated to researching “TMS”

on Reddit

Despite everything, new videos periodically revive interest, such as those from Justin Whang, NAETE, Chill Fuel, or the French VZION or Feldup. And finally, it was at the beginning of November 2024 that everything changed.

Since this summer, research has focused on the Hörfest track, an annual event organized by NDR radio in Hamburg, during which it highlights little-known musicians (and who could therefore have disappeared from circulation without a trace). What follows is a new collective effort to compile documents, the names of groups that participated, their members and their music…

Until one of the investigators (under the pseudonym “marijn1412”) hit the jackpot on Monday November 4. By searching for information about these groups in the newspaper archives Northwest Newspaperhe recognizes a member of one of the groups passed by Hörfest. “The article was about a band called FEX, from Kiel, who had won a talent competition in Bremen in September 1984 and whose music was described as rock with influences of wave and pop”he explains on Reddit.

“I managed to contact him and asked him if he still had any old songs from these bands. He then sent me some of the songs he had made with FEX and Phret… and there you have it one of them is called 'Subways of Your Mind'.”

“Subways of Your Mind” is one of the recurring phrases of the chorus. The version provided by the musician is slightly different, but most investigators agree on one thing: the endless search is over.

The member of the contacted group, Michael Hädrich, “knew nothing about the phenomenon” what had become of their song and did not even know that this version of Subways of Your Mind had been broadcast on the radio, according to an interview with the German tabloid TZ. Informed by marijn1412 ahead of the revelations, the members of the group contacted each other again. They registered the rights to their song and must meet again on Thursday November 7 to replay it live on NDR 1 radio. They are even trying to prepare a question-and-answer session during the weekend, if we are to believe the message published Tuesday by Michael's daughter Hadrich on Reddit.

“We are already planning to re-record the song (…) and produce a music video!”

Michael Hädrich

to the German tabloid “TZ”

One question remains: why so much interest in a song recorded more than a year ago? 40 years old? “I think it's not the song itself that interests me, but rather understanding why it is so mysterious and why no one can find anything about itadmitted Gabriel Pelenson to Rolling Stone in 2019. It’s just surreal.” For Nicolás Zúñiga, owner of the Dead Wax Records label, “Besides the fact that the song itself is so catchy, it's precisely the fact that people can't locate it in four seconds that makes it interesting”.

And for these amateur detectives “lost wave” (the “lost music”) and independent and confidential media in general, fruitful investigations continued this year. In May, one of the internet's other most popular mystery songs (Everyone Knows That) was found, and the person in the image known as “Celebrity Number Six” was identified in September. But fans of unsolved mysteries on the web can rest assured: there are still many challenges to overcome.