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A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)
- Cenk 7y agoIf you enjoyed this, you might also like Reply All’s recent episode: Reply All #158: The Case of the Missing Hit https://overcast.fm/+TKZKtgdaw https://overcast.fm/+TKZKtgdaw https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx/158-the-case-of-the-missing-hit https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx/158-the-case-...
- mrspeaker 7y agoHa, I posted that a minute after you. That episode is a fantastic musical story about finding a song that seemed to only exist in one persons mind. I don't know anything about that podcast in general, but this episode is delightful and has that same feeling as the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet! (Also, an "if you liked that, you might also like...": Finding Drago (https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/finding-drago/ https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/finding-drago/) is a short but excellent podcast series about searching for the author of a mysterious book about Ivan Drago from the move Rocky IV!)
- joegahona 7y agoI loved this episode and was really impressed with how much work went into it -- all the way down to recreating the song with a band from that guy's head.
- RyJones 7y agoAnd how it infected the band members to the point they couldn't get away from it. It's amazing how close the recreation was and how it compelled so many people
- RichieAHB 7y agoI woke up this morning with this song in my head after listening to it a week ago and then playing it to my wife yesterday. I wonder how many brain-hours that song has consumed already ...
- psalminen 7y agoI immediately thought of this. Such a cool story, and an interesting insight into the state of the music industry in the 90's.
- ngold 7y agoThe guy even got red carpet treatment and talked to the head of the record label. And still disappeared. Makes you wonder how many times that happens only to completely disappear.
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- userbinator 7y agoshe was still concerned about the legalities I thought uploading to YouTube and seeing who tries to claim the rights might be one way of identifying it, but then again, the flakiness of the automatic copyright identification system would probably make that pretty useless for even slightly obscure music.
- skocznymroczny 7y agoReminds me of the way at my workplace of identifying who does the machine under given IP or webservice belong to - the easiest way is to turn it off and see who comes to complain.
- Nextgrid 7y agoI'm still surprised YouTube doesn't leverage that feature to build a Shazam competitor. They'd actually have the edge there as they can directly link to the song on YouTube, thus pocketing the part of the ad revenue they keep (the rest goes to the copyright holder). They could also do that for videos (aka from a screenshot or image it would find you the video for it) as I'm suspecting they have a Content ID system for videos too (I've seen shows recorded from TV being mirrored and the picture slowly moving around, presumably to defeat such a system).
- gjmacd 7y agoArticle headline is really incorrect, should be "The Most Unremarkable Mysterious Song on the Internet." There's a reason why people didn't put their name on it.
- Vaslo 7y agoThis reminds me of the search for Q Lazzarus. She and her band are famous (or maybe some would say notorious) for writing the song played during Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill does his infamous "dance" in front of the camera. For decades, folks couldn't find any information on her and weren't even sure that she was still alive. Jonathan Demme, the director of Silence of the Lambs happened to be in her cab one night and she played some of her music and he really liked it. He put it into several of his films. It's someone's dream to be discovered like that - and then to fall almost faster back into obscurity? https://www.stereogum.com/2009727/mysterious-goodbye-horses-singer-q-lazzarus-breaks-her-silence-30-years-later/news/ https://www.stereogum.com/2009727/mysterious-goodbye-horses-...
- whatshisface 7y agoWhy wasn't she in the movie credits?
- tylersmith 7y agoI believe she is, as "Q Lazzarus". She did not continue performing or using that name so nobody knew who she actually was.
- joegahona 7y ago"Goodbye Horses" is such an interesting blend of styles and emotions. Parts of her singing sound influenced by The Smiths. The whole thing is in a major key yet manages to sound melancholy or even ominous. Maybe some of that is its association with "Silence of the Lambs" or the mystery around Q Lazzarus, but I've always enjoyed this song and it never gets old for me. There are many cover versions out there too.
- tosser0001 7y agoWhen I was a teenager in Massachusetts in 1982 I bought the album "Tragic Figures" by a band called Savage Republic on a lark, based solely on the hand-printed album cover. It turned out to be very strange post-punk industrial music. I almost fell out of my chair at the movie theater watching "Silence of the Lambs" when the song "Real Men" from that album came on.
- zimpenfish 7y agoHonestly wouldn't surprise me if it eventually turned out to be part of a long-term ARG for Half Life 3 or something.
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- zzzeek 7y agoThere are millions of demo tapes and CDs from endless ad-hoc bands that were never known, I have myself at least a dozen catchy songs that get in my head from bands I've played in and some I can't even remember who they were, others are on dusty old demo CDs and tapes from 1993 in my basement. The "catchy song that can't be traced" is more than just one song in Rolling Stone, for me it's a whole world of music that existed for only a few months somewhere decades ago that lives only in my mind.
- chasing 7y agoYeah, I think anyone even tangentially connected to a music scene feels this. Especially if you hung around something like college radio stations where people (like me) would sometimes just bring in a burned CD, it'd get tossed into some DJ's show, and then handed back and never really noted or catalogued.
- EvanAnderson 7y agoI've played stuff from Song Fight[1] in the car, or been signing along at my desk and been asked about the songs. There's so much good, "catchy" stuff out there if you take the time to look. At least w/ Song Fight I can usually trace down the original artist. I have the same thing w/ old tunes from MOD files. I have a couple melodies I whistle that I know came from MODs I downloaded and listened to 25 - 30 years ago but I have absolutely no idea which ones they are. I still have most of that stuff (the benefits of kicking your data onto new media every few years), but slogging thru all of it just to find a few bars of melody just seems like a chore. I also thought that, if I ever chose to do that, I should record my current interpretations of the melodies to see how they changed over the years vs. how the original actually sounded. [1] http://songfight.org/ http://songfight.org/
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoAgreed. It sounds like a demo tape to me. Probably from a short-lived band that never made it big. It's actually fairly good, but IMHO it sounds familiar because it's derivative of lots of things that were happening at the time. Which you might expect from a novice band.
- elldoubleyew 7y agoThis looks like hoax to me.
- rozab 7y agoMe too. It reminds me of the small ARG MGMT did around their song 'Little Dark Age', where they made various retro renditions and allowed them to surface on the internet, implying theirs was a cover of an older, forgotten song.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoI disagree. it sounds like a real, OK sounding single or demo from some unknown band in the mid 80s. The fascination with it now is the odd part.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoTo be clear, I expect that there were lots of local bands in the mid 80s playing decent-but-generic songs like this to appreciative local audiences. Most of them are lost to the mists of time. This one is not. Others here have said the same in comments: "There are millions of songs like this that are lost in obscurity. "There are millions of demo tapes and CDs from endless ad-hoc bands that were never known" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22637580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22637580
- 8bitsrule 7y agoProduction, instruments, vocal ..sounds like eastern Europe/Russia region.
- rwmj 7y ago(Obviously it isn't them, but ...) it sounded like Laibach to me, so yes Eastern European.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> it sounded like Laibach to me What? how does this https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=70&v=zPGf4liO-KQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=70&v=zPGf4liO-KQ Sound like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glu9wA4HjE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glu9wA4HjE0 to you? The guitar in the first sounds more this: https://youtu.be/_guOyN2wmkM?t=78 https://youtu.be/_guOyN2wmkM?t=78 Or, IDK influenced by Foreigner and those kind of bands.
- jerrysievert 7y agoto be fair, Laibach of that era (1984/1985) alternates between sounding like Coil (State) and random new wave music (1st Generation TV), but is still usually dominated by Milan Fras' vocal style. so, I guess it's possible?
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoThe "mysterious song" has a more of a generic "alternative guitar band" sound to me, which Laibach never were. Something about the riffs makes me want to say "Foreigner" (or that school of 80s US hard rock) which again, is a genre that Laibach never imitated (although they might just have parodied).
- jerrysievert 7y ago> which Laibach never were again I point to their 1984/1985 work, which had undertones of sisters of mercy in a couple of their songs. generally not their signature work, but somewhat close in some cases. > Something about the riffs makes me want to say "Foreigner" personally I was more thinking something like xymox or sisters, without the haunting vocals of either (it actually reminded me most of a local band from the late 80's and early 90's, but definitely not them). but I guess we hear what we want from it :)
- jmmcd 7y agoMy "white whale of the internet" is a 4-track EP from mid-1990s by a band called The Mark Kramer Band (not that Mark Kramer) with track titles Dust Bowl Rain and Wild Prairie Dog. It sounded like a bluesier Jeff Buckley, I think. I had a copied tape, so no pictures or other info, and of course it's long gone. If you Google it you'll see my previous pleas on other fora.
- mrspeaker 7y agoThen you should definitely listen to that podcast that Cenk linked to... it will be very infuriatingly relatable!
- saati 7y agoMine is a dancehall song that had the mp3 tags: Nicky Nicole Davis - Road Block, I lost it in a disk crash and I can't find anything about it on the internet.
- bob818 7y agoMine is an "I wanna be adored" cover that I heard on a college radio station. Took me awhile to find it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhYUPgOnEFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhYUPgOnEFo
- all2 7y agoMine is an odd, backwater website hosting a few tracks of surrealist noise (music) by someone/some-people called "The Waxwing Slain". I found it when I was 13 or 14 while I was trawling the backwaters of the internet. I downloaded all the tracks and listened. It was odd, surreal, satisfying to listen to. Eerie, even. I've lost the HDD those mp3s were on. And the website has disappeared into the dusts of time.
- quickthrowman 7y agoI bet googling the band name just gives results for Pale Fire by Nabokov these days.
- egypturnash 7y ago
- yumashka 7y agoThe simplest way: make video, insert this song, post to youtube, see where DMCA claim come from :)
- twic 7y agoMy much smaller version of this relates to the Italo-Disco classic 'Comanchero' by Moon Ray (Raggio di Luna in Italian). Here's the song, with its distinctive 1984 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_pLleIU41A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_pLleIU41A And here is a painstaking shot-for-shot remake of the video (but the original audio - this is not a cover, just a fan video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89LuYwBckr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89LuYwBckr4 Who made this? Why?
- smohnot 7y agoIf you like this, you might like "Searching For Sugar Man" a documentary where 2 guys in South Africa search for this legendary musician from the US who was rumored to be dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man
- jacobush 7y agoAnd now the director of that movie is actually dead :-(
- StavrosK 7y agoSome people and I have similarly been looking for a classical piece that appears in the movie Brewster's Millions for about ten years now: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/4nvuyp/tomt_5_years_standing_string_quartet_song_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/4nvuyp/tomt_...
- nidhalbt 7y agoThe easiest way to get the answer to a question on the internet is to post the wrong answer. Simply record the song with your band and claim it's yours. If nobody comes up to claim it, then the original authors died, and couldn't make it to the final recording. You would have to look for bands whose members died together at the same time.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoIMHO: probably a demo from a short-lived band that never made it big. It's not bad, but not that striking and original either. It sounds familiar because it's derivative of lots of things that were happening at the time. This is common, many good bands take a while to find their own voice, so in the early demos you hear echos of the bands and songs that influenced them.
- kkotak 7y agoExactly! I don't see why the obsession amongst all the people who are trying to trace it down. There are millions of songs like this that are lost in obscurity. In other news, I have a cool looking pebble that no one knows which beach it came from. Off to starting a subreddit about it so people have something to do with their time :)
- davidpfarrell 7y agoI actually have my own personal Mystery Tune which I'm been trying to find the owner of for years. I'm offering a cash reward for help identifying the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK8l0pkyiy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK8l0pkyiy0 Its posted SoundCloud too: https://soundcloud.com/davidpfarrell/cool-unknown-techno https://soundcloud.com/davidpfarrell/cool-unknown-techno
- rzzzt 7y agoThis sounds like either a demo song from Arturia's Storm Music Studio, or it was (possibly) made using it; one of the built-in instruments for bass lines (Arsenic) uses a similar saw waveform. Take a peek at one of the demos from version 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixSHQrNtLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ixSHQrNtLw
- davidpfarrell 7y agoHey thanks for the lead, and for having a listen of the track !
- aitait 7y agoIt sounds like music for a computer game from the 80ies, early 90ies the latest.
- davidpfarrell 7y agoYeah, being a child of 80's video games is probably why I like it (and techno in general). Thanks for having a listen !
- djmips 7y agoDid you make this track and are trying to make it popular?
- davidpfarrell 7y agoLOL Why, do you like it? I want to hope that if I were, I might have also created another track or two in the last 12-15 years :) Playing the long game on a single track is definitely risky :) Thanks for having a listen tho !
- davidpfarrell 7y agoGrowing up, an impossible to find tune was "I'm old enough to rock and roll" from Iron Eagle. I used to hit up the internet a couple times a year trying to find the track. Finally, Rainy created an official release: http://www.raineyonline.com/id17.html http://www.raineyonline.com/id17.html
- exogen 7y agoThe subreddit dedicated to this song maintains a spreadsheet of possible leads and sound-alikes. Personally, the first thing that came to mind when I heard the vocals was Type O Negative. Sounds a lot like Peter Steele, but I'm sure a lot of vocalists at the time were going for that style.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> I'm sure a lot of vocalists at the time were going for that style. Well, that's the thing. It's not identifiably any band that I have heard before, but it's generically like a lot of them. What's the point of listing all the influences of this band that didn't make it to the big time? It sounds familiar because it's derivative of lots of things that were happening at the time. New bands take a while to find their own voice, so in the early demos you hear the bands and songs that influenced them. Some (maybe most) never make it past that. I can picture it as a band played gigs for a year around their home town, made a demo or two, one of which got played on local radio and there it is. It's not in any way uncommon.
- wgx 7y agoBack in the 1990s, I made music on my computer. My friend was a DJ on a late night show and he’d play one of my tracks one night a week, just because he could. If anyone recorded those broadcasts they’d have no way of finding out who made that music. This could be a result of a similar situation I imagine.
- tokamak-teapot 7y agoFor twenty years I kept daydreaming the melodies and ‘feel’ of a couple of songs I’d heard at the ends of a cassette tape that had another album (by a different band) taped over the rest. I probably heard about 40 seconds of 2 different songs. I couldn’t remember any lyrics, and couldn’t remember the melodies well enough to play on an instrument - just the basic way they ‘felt’. Eventually I heard one of them again and ... well, SoundHound or Shazam existed by then and saved the day. I’d been hearing part of Big Empty and also the hidden track from the Stone Temple Pilots’ album Purple. I understand the need to know!
- zw123456 7y agoProbably Satoshi Nakamoto :)
- omnibrain 7y agoThat reminds me of all the obscure stuff DJ Shadow incorporated into his Boiler Room set, especially for me the song starting at 25:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ArSb3lCc28&t=1552s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ArSb3lCc28&t=1552s - you can understand the whole text very well but google yields nothing.
- andyjohnson0 7y agoFascinating. In this time when everything is seemingly discoverable online, these odd mysteries that seeking have no link seem vaguely disconcerting. But the pre-internet world was mostly like that. We just didn't know it then. It reminded me of the search for "The Footage" in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition.
- nineteen999 7y agoI don't know how/why it's listed there, but it is listed now on Shazam as "Like the Wind" by Antwon01 on Shazam.