Subways Of Your Mind aka "Like The Wind" (found full version of FEX song; 1983)

The image "The Rolling Stone" used in their article about the song.

Status: Found

Date found:
July 2019 (full demo version)
4 November 2024 (final version)

Found by:
johnnymetoo (full demo version)
marijn1412 (final version)

Subways Of Your Mind (formerly known as Like The Wind or The Most Mysterious Song in The Internet) is a song first uploaded in the internet in 2007, by the user Lydia. The song didn't gain much attention until 2019.

After nearly 20 years of research, the song was finally identified as "Subways of Your Mind" by German band FEX.

Background

On March 18th, 2007, the user Lydia (who used the pseudonym bluuue and Anton Riedel) uploaded to the internet the first 1:15 seconds of a mysterious song onto the Usenet group de.rec.musik.recherche. Lydia brother, Darius, had recorded the song in 1984, on German radio Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). The song was written on Darius' track list simply as "? - Blind The Wind (1983)".^[1]

The search was continued on the websites spiritofradio.ca and best-of-80s. Despite this, the search did not gain much attention.^[2]

The Search

On September 20, 2017, the Spanish independent record label Dead Wax Records uploaded the snippet of the mysterious song to YouTube. This caught the attention of a friend of the owner of Dead Wax, a Brazilian named Gabriel Vieira, who in early 2019 posted the snippet on several Reddit subs, naming it "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet". On June of the same year, the r/TheMysteriousSong subreddit was founded by Gabriel. That same day, Lydia's original post was discovered, as well as the other posts on the forum.

In the subrredit was discovered that the song had possibly aired on one of NDR's programs, called Musik für Junge Leute, so research was initiated to contact the program's DJ, Paul Baskerville, for obtaining any new leads. Furthermore, links to the full version were found on the old forums, but they no longer worked, as the file-sharing sites that Lydia used had already been discontinued.

On July 9, 2019, YouTuber Justin Whang commented on the search for song in one of the episodes of his series Tales From the Internet. After the video was made, Reddit user johnnymetoo stated that he downloaded the full song in 2007, when Lydia had posted it on Usenet. Some time later, the complete song was posted on the r/TheMysteriousSong subrredit.^[3]

That same month, Gabriel got in touch with DJ Paul Baskerville, who said he didn't recognize the song, but was interested in playing it on his new show, Nachtclub. After Paul played the song at Nachtclub, he told Gabriel that he had received negative feedback from listeners.

In August 2019, German radio station Radio Eins broadcast the song, along with an interview with Paul Baskerville. Darius heard the song on the radio, which prompted his sister Lydia to contact Gabriel about rejoining the search. In September of the same year, Lydia digitized the entire tape the song was originally on.

In late 2019 and early 2020, numerous news outlets, the most notable being Rolling Stone, published about mysterious music history to try to draw new attention to the search.^[4] No new leads came from these articles. However, it was discovered in early 2020 that the synthesizer used in the chorus was a Yamaha DX7. DX7 was released in 1983, which means the music couldn't be from anything before that year.

Discovery

After some time without any progress in research, Reddit user marijn1412 found a German newspaper that mentioned an unknown band called FEX, who won a Rock talent contest with Wave and Pop influences. Investigating about it, he got in touch with a from the band members, who stated that they were the authors behind the mysterious song, sending the user the final version of the song, which contained some differences from the version that was originally posted on the internet by Lydia.^[5]

Gallery

Images

The original Darius track list.
A photo of the tape containing the final version of the song.

Videos

The demo version of the song.

The final version of the song.

References

[1] Lydia post about the song in a forum.

[2] spiritofradio.ca post.

[3] ymetoo post with the full demo version of the song.

[4] The Rolling Stone article

[5] The post on Reddit announcing the discovery of the song.

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Subways Of Your Mind aka "Like The Wind" (found full version of FEX song; 1983)

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