I tried Substack. It felt hollow. I went back to Tumblr. It didn’t feel the same as it did in 2013. I attached my missives to the talons of doves and sent them out into the skies. The doves got eaten by coyotes. And of course, Twitter is a cesspool run by a small man who aligns himself with similarly small men. So I am back here. Welcome, solitary viewer.
For the past several years I have followed the journey of The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet, a new wave track recorded off the NDR1 radio station onto a mixtape in Germany in the early 1980s. The original recorder promptly threw the cassette in the closet and forgot about it for many years. The NDR broadcaster did not mention the name of the artist or the song, and therefore the recorder simply wrote on the label: “??? – Blind The Wind.”
Neither the title nor the question marks replacing the artist’s name are correct. In 2007, the recorder’s sister found the cassette, digitized the song, and posted it to an Internet forum asking for anyone to identify it. The clip made its way around other forums, then YouTube, then finally Reddit, where a crack team of moderators, researchers, and fervent nerds worked around the clock to find the song’s creator. You can visit the Reddit channel here and the Wikipedia page here to learn about all the details I am leaving out.
Finally, after seventeen years of searching, a Reddit user posted a picture of a cassette tape with a yellow label. The band’s name on the tape was FEX, and the first track of the three was called “Subways Of Your Mind.” The story, according to the Reddit user, was that they had reached out to a member of a band who had played at a music festival called Hörfest in 1984. The band member – Michael Hädrich – sent over the picture of the cassette, identified himself as the guitarist of FEX, and was happy to provide any other information the Reddit user wanted about the song.
Hädrich did not know, but was incredibly pleased to learn, that he had just helped solve one of the longest-running Internet mysteries. The Reddit user broke the news to the world, the identity of the song was confirmed, and now Hädrich and two of his old FEX bandmates (vocalist Ture Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann) are fielding interview requests left and right. They have plans to release official recordings of “Subways Of Your Mind” as well as other old FEX tracks, as well as reunite with drummer Hans Sievers to re-record the until-now most mysterious song.
It feels so wholesome to watch this group of musicians – who have not performed together since the mid-80s – learn that their work has touched so many hearts and made so many people happy. And they too have shared in that joy. Here are Hädrich, Rückwardt, and Ziermann performing a live acoustic version of “Subways Of Your Mind” at NDR1 studios just this past week, for the first time in almost forty years:
It has been a long week. I have not slept well. I imagine if you live in the United States and have similar political alignments, you have felt a strange uneasiness between wanting to take some action against the oncoming darkness and fear at what that darkness will bring. I remember feeling this back in 2016, standing in a hotel room in Cartagena while on vacation, and shaking my head at the TV. In my shock at the results, all I could think was: “Well, at least the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in over a hundred years.”
I thought that because it had seemed impossible for the Cubs to win. It had seemed impossible for a gross megalomaniac to win the presidency. But both things happened. And now here I am again, faced with that same feeling of two impossible things happening. That asshole is going to be back in the White House. But we found the Most Mysterious Song On The Internet, as well as other certified bangers by this rediscovered band from Germany, and that has to count for something.
There is a mod of Doom II from 2023 called MyHouse.WAD. I won’t get into the specifics of this since the lore is vast. But the game comes bundled with journal entries which add exposition, and in one of the final journals, there is a quote now somewhat famous among certain Internet circles:
“Somewhere, in another dream, the version of myself that winked back is sitting on the real beach, happy and content, knowing life is finite, there is no afterlife, and happiness is found in the small things around us that we can control… Happiness has to be fought for.“
No joy ever comes easy. No mysterious song was ever discovered without hard work. And no real freedom will come without it either.
I will see you out and about.