Welcome back! Hopefully you’re all well rested and ready to take on these last few weeks of the semester. Personally, I went into spring break ready to get a head start on work to make this week easier to get through. Though that didn’t end up happening, I did listen to a lot of cool music. I spent a lot of time diving deep into classic new wave and synth-pop and listening endlessly to classic groups like The Buggles, Talking Heads, New Order and Killing Joke among many others.
While I scrolled through artists and songs under the new wave and post-punk categories on Last.fm, one song caught my eye in particular. Titled “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet,” this track piqued my interest as soon as I saw its artist — or lack thereof. The song had no artist attached to it, no name given to the singer, keyboardist, drummer, lyricist or any producer.
With a quick google search of the title, the song was apparently a cult classic among post-punk fans and lost media enthusiasts, spawning countless efforts to track down the song’s creators.
“The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” was first played on the German radio station “Norddeutscher Rundfunk,” or NDR, by a DJ known only as Darius S. The DJ recorded the song onto a cassette tape, along with other big new wave bands at the time. The song was introduced with the title “Blind the Wind,” which was a repeated line in the chorus. Darius didn’t know the artist of the song, and he came up with the title based on the song’s lyrics.
Decades later, Darius S. was still intrigued by the song’s origin, launching a website in 2004 titled “Unknown Pleasures” to lay out his search effort. Darius spread word of the song across the internet throughout the late 2000s. The track became an urban legend among musical historians on the internet without much widespread attention outside dense music communities.
With the creation of the subreddit r/TheMysteriousSong in 2019, awareness of the tune skyrocketed, coming to the attention of the lost media community, a group of people dedicated to finding obscure and unfindable media considered “lost.”
Up until this point, the complete song was lost, and only a small minute-and-a-half segment was widely available online. The full version wouldn’t be found until 2021 on an internet archive. Two versions of the song were uncovered: one sung fully in English, and one fully in German. The track had also been found in an archive on the German radio show “Musik Für Junge Leute,” in 1984, leading some to speculate whether the song had originally aired on NDR or this show, after the host of “Musik Für Junge Leute” claimed to have played the song originally.
Internet denizens sleuthed to no avail, exploring almost every detail of the song, only to find dead ends. Analyzing the songs found on the original cassette mixtape helped narrow the year to 1984, as the rest of the songs found on the tape were from around the same time. The lead synth heard on the track is thought to be a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which was very popular at the time. Further analysis of the tape’s frequency revealed that the song’s recording frequency matched that of NDR’s broadcast frequency — being around 15kHz, proving without a doubt that the song had first been aired on NDR.
In early 2021, an article from the German website Plattentests claimed the song belonged to the Austrian singer Christian Brandl and drummer Ronnie Urini. When prompted, Urini confirmed to be one of the song’s writers; however, this claim had ultimately been deemed dubious. Other musicians from the time chimed in, stating that the song’s singer sounded nothing like Brandl, and featured electronic drums in a very different style to Urini’s.
Since 2021, the trail has gone mostly cold. Analysis of the song’s spectrogram can only go so far, and there haven’t been any leads to solving this mystery in years. The search hasn’t slowed, however, and will likely continue until the true creators are identified. To this day, the song’s title and band name are unknown, but music historians and enthusiasts alike refuse to stop their search.