Lostwave: The Comforting Warble of Songs with No Names

Picture this: It’s the mid-80s, somewhere in the north of Germany, and a guy named René is listening to the radio. NDR, a public broadcaster based in Hamburg, plays a lot of new wave. René hears a song, thinks "Hey, this sounds kind of cool", and puts an audio cassette into his tape deck to record it. By the time he pushes record, the song is almost over.

For the young among us, this was just what you did back in the day. You’d record a song you like, hoping to hear it again, and maybe that time around, you’d catch its title and its artist's name.

But René never heard the song on the radio again.

In the late 1990s, he digitized the recording and burned it onto a CD. He sent the CDs to many German music journalists, but no journalist could identify the song.

In 2002, René uploaded a snippet of the song to his website. In 2003, somebody posted the snippet on a forum. By March 2003, the song received considerable attention, and in 2007, it ended up on YouTube. But no one knew what the song was.

It was dubbed Stay (The Second Time Around), because, well, that seemed to be the chorus. Many songs called The Second Time Around were suggested, but none were a match. Many slightly obscure artists, from Aldo Nova to White & Torch were surveyed, but none of them seemed to have made it.

This story had all the hallmarks of a classic lostwave story. But the song wasn't considered lostwave at the time, because the term hadn't yet been invented.

What is Lostwave?

Lostwave is a term coined around 2019 to describe unidentified songs. Usually, lostwave comes from unlabeled audio tapes - but it can stem from a variety of media, even hard drives and phones. Sometimes, a lostwave song is a mislabeled demo. Sometimes, it was recorded from the radio or found in a thrift store. Usually, such a song would be made somewhere between the 1980s and the early 2000s. It would sound familiar, but no one could prove where it came from, and it had no known artist, title, or origin.

What also makes lostwave lostwave is the community around it: these songs are tracked and investigated by dedicated online communities through forums, YouTube comments, Discord and Reddit, through crowdsourced detective work, or day I say, internet sleuthing.

Is Lostwave Just Lost Media?

No. Lost media is usually a known piece of media that got lost, so you’re looking for it because you're searching for something specific. Think of the old Doctor Who episodes that the BBC has taped over: with lost media, we know that it existed and we know what it was, it's just nowhere to be found.

Is Lostwave Just Found Media, Then?

Technically. But the answer is still no. Found media usually refers to stuff with identified origins. If you find a tape, know what's on it, and digitize it to share it with the world, that's found media.

Lostwave, however, is characterized by the absence or corruption of metadata.

The Song that Created Lostwave

Picture this: It’s the mid-80s, somewhere in the north of Germany, and a guy, this time named Darius, is listening to the radio. NDR, a public broadcaster based in Hamburg, plays a lot of new wave. Darius hears a song, thinks "Hey, this sounds kind of cool", and puts an audio cassette into his tape deck to record it.

In this story, the guy records the entire song but never catches the artist or the title. As he’s only 14 at the time and doesn’t speak English well, he thinks that the first line of the song is “Blind the Wind”, which, well, isn’t the worst guess.

In 2004, Darius’s sister Lydia gifted him a website. It was called Unknown Pleasures, like the Depeche Mode song. Darius used it to post all of his unidentified songs. And he had quite a few! Some of them were so obscure that they were only identified years later by contacting the DJs who had played them.

The search for Blind the Wind didn't go anywhere, so Lydia posted it on a Canadian forum. Nobody knew it.

In 2019, a Brazilian teenager posted the song on Reddit, and the search went viral. Lostwave was born. Tens of thousands of people were now looking for the origin of the song, which had, by this time, become known as Like the Wind, since that sounded more plausible.

Science, Sleuthing, and Dead-Ends

Darius recalled of recording the song from the radio in the summer of 1984.

The synthesizer heard on the song was identified as a Yamaha DX7, launched in Japan in May 1983. which means it had probably hit Europe late that year. That meant the song had to be made in late '83 or '84.

NDR provided the playlists for the shows Darius listened to, but the song wasn't there. Maybe it wasn’t actually aired on NDR? This possibility was proven false by the frequency analysis of Darius's tapes. NDR's broadcasts had a distinctive dip around 10,000 hertz, present in no other recordings. That was probably an artifact of their audio processing or their transmission chain. Think of it this way: at 10 kHz, the sound is quieter, and you can see that in every recording. And since audio tapes wobble, there were attempts to figure out the broadcasting date by looking at the offset of the 10k line.

Meanwhile, boomers were asked, record stores were dug through, Discogs was perused, and many emails were sent. Rolling Stone wrote about the search. Paul Baskerville, the DJ who was considered to be the one who has most likely played the song on his show, said he didn't remember it, and that the song was actually crap.

The recording of the song ended with a DJ's lip smack, so then the community tried to figure out which DJ that was based on the lip smack alone.

Some of the contacted bands started claiming the song was theirs, but had no proof. Darius and Lydia, who were also active in the search party, eventually got doxxed and gave up on the search.

A couple of years into the hunt, all the trails went cold.

How to Solve a Lostwave Mystery

Sometimes it happens randomly.

Stay (The Second Time Around) ended up on Reddit around 2013.

A DJ at Sveriges Radio P3, a Swedish pubic service broadcaster, heard it and did a segment on it on their show.

The station's phone rang, and on the other side, there was a listener who claimed that not only did they know the song, but that it was actually Swedish!

The artist was a Swedish musician and actor Johann Lindell. Some pretty famous people played on his records, but his music was nowhere to be found on the internet, apart from his website.

The search for Like The Wind resumed in late 2023. Without hard leads, the activity around it relied on analyzing the singer's accent and lyrics. Some people thought the song had to have originated behind the Iron Curtain. Some of them thought it had to have been made by Statues in Motion. Some of them thought it was Serbian. The lyrics, which were unintelligible in the first couple of attempts to digitize the recording, made everybody hear what they wanted to hear. It could've been Russian, Polish, Dutch, or Greek.

Stasi archives were contacted, because the Stasi used to monitor West German radio broadcasts.

But then, suddenly, there was new hope. In the eighties, NDR organized Hörfest. That was an annual music competition aimed at promoting emerging and unsigned bands. The event featured live performances, with selected acts broadcast on the radio. Every year, the station would receive hundreds of demo tapes. Maybe Like the Wind was one of them?

No playlists were available for the festival broadcasts, and the headliners were quickly ruled out. By this time, NDR was fed up with constant requests to look for this song. But there was a lot of Hörfest-related material still kept at the Hamburg Archive. Somebody went there and spent two days scanning the documents.

While sifting through the information about Hörfest, a Dutch guy named Marijn found a newspaper article about a band called Fex. They didn't perform at the festival. But one of the members of Fex played in Phret, a band that did play Hörfest 1983. Phret was previously ruled out because their songs were in German.

Marijn reached out to Fex and asked them for some recordings from back then, without telling them about the search. And lo and behold, there was a tape. And a song on it was called Subways of Your Mind, which kinda sounded like a lyric in the chorus of what was dubbed The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.

The song was found.

It turned out that one of the shows that Darius listened to was occasionally broadcast from NDR's studio in Kiel. There was also a Kiel-based DJ, who had, on that day in September of 1984, played a Kiel-based band.

The band had no idea they were even on the radio. And it took them exactly forty years to find out!

Why Search?

In order to join a search for a lostwave song, you first have to vibe with it. A lot of these songs sound oddly familiar - maybe they are just of their time - and most of the time, they are pretty good.

Apart from curiosity and the thrill of the hunt, today's internet is experiencing a resurgence of archival spirit. With media disappearing all the time, there's a drive to preserve obscure or nearly-lost pieces of history. In this instance, musical!

There was a lot of media that was lost during the transition to digital. However, not even digital storage lived up to its promise: in 2019, Myspace admitted to accidentally losing twelve entire years of music uploads. Fifty million songs from 14 million artists vanished into thin air. If you were around during the late aughts and early tens, you probably know how big of a loss this was.

Not even being signed to a major label is a way out of this: In 2008, Universal Music's physical archive was devastated by fire. But the artists who never made it big often only exist through obscure and forgotten recordings, personal archives, and fans' memories. Some lostwave artists had even released actual, physical records back in the day! And yet, their claim to fame came decades later.

If you made something, someone, sometime, might find value in it, even if it seems that right now nobody's listening. So, put it out there even though it seems that nobody cares.

And if you vibe with something, archive it! The analog world was chaotic, but the digital world sometimes turns out to be even messier.

I like lostwave because I, too, want to, one day, become lostwave.