A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019) | Hacker News Reader

A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)

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157 pointselorant82 comments

This 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-...

Why wasn't she in the movie credits?

I believe she is, as "Q Lazzarus". She did not continue performing or using that name so nobody knew who she actually was.

"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.

When 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.

There's an amazing demo called 'A Mind Is Born':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

Amazing principally because the whole thing is 256 bytes:

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

I never meet anyone who has even heard of the demoscene, let alone come seen this particular work.

I was at a film festival watching a programme of short films, one of which was the well-made AI-box escape romp 'Watch Room':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th5uJNB7VU8

And similarly found my interface with my seat disrupted by the closing credits using the music from 'A Mind Is Born'. This being a festival, the director was there, so i could tell him how much i appreciated the reference!

Sadly Andrey Kolmogorov is dead. Because I'd loooove to see his face.

Fantastic, solid thanks for that, I love it for what it is.

Edit: technical question for audiologists. The underlying pulsing heartbeat of this track, which is most clear right at the start, has a kind of 'furry' quality to it. How is this done? I guess it's a sample of a ~60Hz sine wave but I'm just guessing.

It’s a c64, there are no samples*.

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ has a full breakdown of what is going on.

What you call the “heartbeat” is, I think, what Linus thinks of as “drums”, and is a rapidly descending tone in (probably) a rectangular wave - the c64 cannot generate sine waves, just sawtooth/triangle/pulse, and random noise (and some combinations of these that were not intended by the sound chip’s designer). In addition all three voices of the sound chip are being pushed through its subtractive filter, which is a hard-to-emulate bit of analog circuitry that gets noisier and noisier if you out more than one voice through it.

If you really want a close look at what’s going on you could download the “SID tune” version of it and run it through a c64 music player, most of these have oscilloscope views and the ability to selectively mute voices.

> A Mind Is Born': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

Thank you. A Crystals Castles type vibe.

The Bill & Ted films are similar. Some guitar sounds and solos are now credited to Stevie Salas (the first film) and Steve Vai (the second film), but many of the BGM clips on radios and PA systems are still unsourced and uncredited, lost forever in a sea of glam metal.

>It's someone's dream to be discovered like that - and then to fall almost faster back into obscurity?

Obscurity can be nice. I'm a stay-backstage kind of person. Even when I do work in creative public-facing endeavors my goal to make the product enjoyable without needing any non-monetary benefit. I work for a company that purposefully makes sure our name is on very little. It's not the same, of course. We obviously have to be visible enough to get clients. But it's got a comfort that suits me. You've almost certainly used one of our products, but even if I could tell you what it is you'd never know it from the branding on it.

There's a similar discovery by chance story (not that I remember what it is) about "East Hastings" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the film "28 Days Later".

Since I'm getting messages about this as the quoted source in the Stereogum article (they never contacted me for permission or to clarify btw, just took that Facebook post and ran with it), here is the fully researched article I wrote for Dazed after my experience. Hopefully it can give some more insight for anyone who's been trying to reach me to inquire more about it!

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/43946/1/where-is-...

https://music.apple.com/us/artist/q-lazzarus/279810501

If 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://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx/158-the-case-...

Ha, 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/) is a short but excellent podcast series about searching for the author of a mysterious book about Ivan Drago from the move Rocky IV!)

I 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.

And 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

I 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 ...

I immediately thought of this. Such a cool story, and an interesting insight into the state of the music industry in the 90's.

The 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.

There 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.

Yeah, 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.

I'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/

Agreed. 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.

If 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

And now the director of that movie is actually dead :-(

My "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.

Then you should definitely listen to that podcast that Cenk linked to... it will be very infuriatingly relatable!

Mine 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.

Mine 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

Mine 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.

https://archive.org/details/MusicUnderTheMoon2018-10-16 contains a track with that title, by someone calling themselves The Golden Oriole. Probably not your lost tracks.

You are correct, that isn't it. It isn't nearly surreal enough.

Thanks for poking around, though.

I bet googling the band name just gives results for Pale Fire by Nabokov these days.

Some 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_...

My 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

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

Who made this? Why?

Definitely a film school assignment.

Spaghetti Disco

I 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

Its posted SoundCloud too:

https://soundcloud.com/davidpfarrell/cool-unknown-techno

This 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

Hey thanks for the lead, and for having a listen of the track !

It sounds like music for a computer game from the 80ies, early 90ies the latest.

Yeah, being a child of 80's video games is probably why I like it (and techno in general).

Thanks for having a listen !

Did you make this track and are trying to make it popular?

LOL 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 !

beginning sounds a little like turbo lover but ends there

Checked it out to see and yeah starting rumble had some similarities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhY9GOhFwN4

Been awhile since I've heard it so listened to the first chorus -- Took two minutes to get to the first utterance of "Turbo Lover" -- ahh thats how it should be, I was in suspense waiting for it ... not like today when songs hit the full-power chorus at the 10-15 second mark

Thanks for having a listen of my mystery track!

I don't have a direct lead for you, but this sounds like it's tracker music (music written on Modtracker, Screamtracker, Impulse Tracker, Fasttracker, etc.) - I'd hazard a guess that it was recorded in the mid-to-late 90s.

Unfortunately, the only clue you have to its origin - "candyman" - is the name of a film being actively promoted right now, so it's going to be even more difficult to chase down than it was even just a few months ago.

It's possible that the name of the MP3 is a reference to the person who wrote the music, or it could be the name of the song they wrote. I've found at least five different "candyman" musicians doing tracker music, demoscene music, cracktro music, etc., the actual files are hard to come by, and the music I do find is techno, but not the same genre.

I could see the tune you linked being played over the end credits of some demoscene disk.

Anyway - I'm pretty sure that what you're listening to is an MP3 of a tracker file.

Every little bit of information helps :)

I hadn't thought of that - I'll into the idea of musicians named "candyman" in the tracker scene.

Thanks for the lead, and for having a listen of the track !

It sounds a lot like the music for the 90s tank game Mass Destruction. Check out the soundtrack!

Greetings!

So my searching turned up a couple of game play videos, none of which seemed to include any songs.

Found the wikipedia and moby games pages of course, but no mention of soundtracks (although they do mention sound credits for game)

I was able to find this yt video of the title track * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10wdVXC4cw

Its definitely reminiscent of my mystery track, so good find!

Thanks for sharing and having a listen of my mystery track !

she 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.

Reminds 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.

I'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).

The simplest way: make video, insert this song, post to youtube, see where DMCA claim come from :)

IMHO: 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.

Exactly! 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 :)

Fascinating. 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.

Back 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.

Production, instruments, vocal ..sounds like eastern Europe/Russia region.

(Obviously it isn't them, but ...) it sounded like Laibach to me, so yes Eastern European.

> it sounded like Laibach to me

What? how does this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=70&v=zPGf4liO-KQ

Sound like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glu9wA4HjE0

to you?

The guitar in the first sounds more this:

https://youtu.be/_guOyN2wmkM?t=78 Or, IDK influenced by Foreigner and those kind of bands.

to 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?

The "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).

> 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 :)

> thinking something like xymox or sisters

I would agree with that suggestion more. As in it sounds derivative of those, not that it could be one of those bands. It definitely suggests "local band" to me.

Although, what I was thinking of might be the guitar riff at 10-12 seconds in, not totally unlike this from 1982 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmOLtTGvsbM&feature=youtu.be...

Again, in the sense of it might be derivative of that. Any kid who had a radio in 1982 would have heard it.

The vocalist's voice is unusual, that helps. A lot of singers might try that up an octave.

I hear this as the first line: "Like the wind you came here runnin"...

For 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!

That 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 - you can understand the whole text very well but google yields nothing.

The 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.

Growing 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

The 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.

> 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.

This looks like hoax to me.

Me 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.

I 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.

To 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

I don't know how/why it's listed there, but it is listed now on Shazam as "Like the Wind" by Antwon01 on Shazam.

Honestly wouldn't surprise me if it eventually turned out to be part of a long-term ARG for Half Life 3 or something.

Probably Satoshi Nakamoto :)

Article 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.

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