The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

     And welcome to The Chronicles of Trevor, the only blog where the sun always shines.

    Today's post will cover a song from the 1980s, that has intrigued millions throughout the internet, and has become a staple of the lostwave genre. I'm talking about that one tune known to many as "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".

    It all starts back in 1984, when a young West German man named Darius S. recorded music off of his local radio stations (Hilversum Radio, Radio Bremen, NDR 1, and NDR 2) to put onto mixtapes. These mixtapes were often shared with his friends, who would borrow said tapes. On one of these tapes, a BASF-branded cassette tape labeled "4", contained a track on its 1st side (4|1). This track was titled "? ? ? - Blind the Wind" on its insert label.

Listen to the song below, as heard on the 4|1 mixtape!

    Darius would purposefully not record the DJ chatter, so that all songs play one after the other. This is one of the main reasons why the song is so hard to identify. Speaking of DJs, the one who was said to have recorded said track was Anglo-German DJ Paul Baskerville, who, at the time, hosted Musik für junge Leute (Music for Young People) on NDR's radio stations, which would often play underground musicians, in order to give them their 15 minutes of fame.

    Later in 2004, Darius's sister Lydia H., who was a lot more tech-savvy, gave him a website as a birthday gift. This website, named "Unknown Pleasures", after the Joy Division album, was home to many songs with unknown origins, including the mysterious song from '84, known here as "Check It In, Check It Out". 

In 2007, Lydia posted to multiple Usenet forums the full song, from the 4|1 tape, as a digital file, and posted a 1-minute snippet of said song (under the username bluuue) to spiritofradio.ca, a fan site of a Canadian radio station, that also had a dedicated music discovery forum, similar to the more modern WatZatSong. These first searches did gain traction, but not enough for worldwide attention.

Later on, 10 years after the original search, a Brazillian teenager named Gabriel da Silva Vieira heard of the mystery surrounding the song by talking to Nicolás Zúñiga of Dead Wax Records. This prompted several posts of the small snippet of the song to multiple music-related subreddits on the popular social media/news aggregator platform Reddit. These posts eventually led to the creation of a subreddit community focused on the song and its continued search, /r/TheMysteriousSong. This community later created a server on popular chat service Discord. 

These 2 powerhouses of internet sleuths have found various leads, such as a Greek synthpop band called Statues in Motion, led by Billy Knight and Alvin Dean. Those were their stage names. This has been the closest lead by far, considering Alvin Dean's vocals are of the same echoed, double-tracked style of the unknown vocalist. This band was formed in 1982, and only released 1 album, a self-titled album, which was delayed until early 1983. There were to be 5 other songs in said album, one of them being on a new re-issue of the album, for its 30th anniversary. The song was called "Pinky Complex".

My theory is that late 1983, when SIM disbanded, they each got 2 of the unperformed songs, and around August 1984, Alvin Dean (under a different name, or even his real name, Georgio Dalambiras), performed that song as one of them, either as a solo track, or in a new band. I say 1984, since the synth sound in the chorus is a preset sound (SYN-LEAD 5) from the instrument of the 80s, the Yamaha DX-7 FM synthesizer, introduced in late 1983. This synth was used in various songs, such as the crystal arpeggios and drums in the intro of U2's 1987 classic "With or Without You", and the tubular bells of the Top Gun theme. The DX-7's Tubular Bell preset was also used as the deep "BONG!" sound of Taco Bell.

But I digress. A user on Reddit also noticed an audio artifact of the song, the 10,000 hertz frequencies of the recording of the song are a noticeably faded line in Audacity waveforms of the song's 4|1 recording. This was a form of audio watermarking, where NDR would diminish the 10,000hz frequencies as a way of identifying themselves, and because NDR was part of the state-owned ARD, a group of broadcasters funded by a fee that all recievers must pay (known as a license fee, the BBC's TV stations are funded the same way). This was a way for detector vans and other forms of enforcing organizations to find out if a listener or viewer is a paying the yearly fee in order to receive broadcasts.

But I digress. All NDR broadcasts had this faded line, which proved the theory of said song being played on NDR to be correct!

Even throughout the search, there have been some trolls who claim to have made the song, like Randal Turner. Turner applied for a false copyright application with the US Patent and Trademark Office. He states that he was captured by the government for being an "MKUltra", whatever that means, and entered a contest to make an improvised song, which he made an ad-lib song about his capture, called "Subways of Your Mind". These are false, because how would the song find its way to NDR studios in Hamburg if it was true?! 

Later on, Lydia found a higher-quality recording on a tape called "Alles Mögliches" (All Songs). This recording was slightly lower-toned and had a fade-in, for some reason. This was an important find, since we got another recording.

Will this mystery ever be solved? I hope so.

That's it for today! Join me next time when I enter the subways of my mind.