They Searched Through Hundreds of Bands to Solve an Online Mystery

The first advancement in years came in May, when a user on the buzzing Reddit community r/TheMysteriousSong found a reference to Hörfest, a contest for amateur bands the radio station held every year in Hamburg, Germany. “It was a very likely way to solve our riddle,” says Arne, a moderator of the subreddit who posts under the handle LordElend (Arne declined to give their last name, citing privacy concerns), “since this was a good explanation as to why an amateur band tape would have been aired on NDR, which usually had high standards.”

A search of local government archives turned up thousands of pages on Hörfest, but they wouldn’t be easy to comb through. “We realized that 800 bands, most obscure and not on Google, will need a larger group of researchers,” says Arne.

Soon, hundreds of people across multiple platforms were collaborating on extensive spreadsheets, listing band members, sounds, songs, and anything else they could find. One of these investigators, who posts using the handle marijn1412, found that a member of a band on the spreadsheets, Phret, had joined a different band called FEX. Getting in touch with the former members of FEX, they confirmed the song’s origin. They waited to announce the find publicly until the band was able to sign off and provide a clearer recording of the song.

“Subways of Your Mind” isn’t the only lost media mystery to be solved recently. In September, an image from a fabric pattern was traced back to its source. Back in June, another lostwave song known as “Everyone Knows That” was found after it had become a viral sound on TikTok. It may have been helped by a song from a popular YouTube video identified in November 2023.

These searches tend to be a lot less specific and focused than the Hörfest data, but no less organized or collaborative, since whether or not they can find the song, people are finding kindred spirits. “Lost media searches have shared community values,” says Chapdelaine, adding they’re “amplified by the dynamic of social media platforms. Platforms incentivize engagement. Lost media searches promote interactivity and participation.”

Which is why the story isn’t over, even if the so-called “final boss of lostwave” has fallen. Since other communities devoted to searches have since found what they were looking for, they’ve been folded into the larger lostwave and lost-media community. As Baskerville saw, it isn’t really about the song, it’s about the search, the sense of participating in a project that adds to cultural heritage—and, maybe, finding some songs so exclusive they haven’t been heard in decades.