A German pop song dubbed “the most mysterious song on the internet” has finally been identified after 17 years of searching by an army of online enthusiasts, several media outlets reported.
The song was eventually recognized as “Subways of Your Mind”, by the group FEX, a little-known German outfit from the 1980s.
And this, thanks to a user of the social network Reddit who found one of the former members of the group, Der Spiegel and other German media reported this week.
The mystery began in 2007, when a German brother and sister digitized and posted online a track that the former had originally recorded on cassette, from the radio, more than 20 years earlier.
Music admirers who are fans of “lostwave”, the search for the origins of songs that have fallen into oblivion, then try to identify the piece in different ways, for example by trying to determine the instruments or the accent of the singer.
Initial attempts to identify the song, classified by many as belonging to the “new wave” genre, were largely unsuccessful.
In 2019, the Reddit platform rebroadcast the song which unleashed enthusiasts, and was quickly nicknamed “the most mysterious song on the internet”.
The dedicated Reddit forum attracts tens of thousands of Internet users, with German media in turn taking an interest in this hunt.
This week, a user, “marijn1412”, explained that he had reached the goal by speaking with one of the former members of FEX, who revealed to him the name of the much sought-after title.
The sleuth found Michael Haedrich, now 68, while searching for groups that had participated in a concert organized by a public broadcaster in northern Germany in the 1980s.
Michael Haedrich told Spiegel that he was never aware of the online “hunt” and that the group was “absolutely shocked” by the late recognition.
