[HN Gopher] A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)
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A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)
Author : elorant
Score : 130 points
Date : 2020-03-20 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rollingstone.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rollingstone.com)
| zzzeek wrote:
| 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.
| chasing wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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/
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| 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.
| wgx wrote:
| 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.
| nidhalbt wrote:
| 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.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| 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!
| elldoubleyew wrote:
| This looks like hoax to me.
| rozab wrote:
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| davidpfarrell wrote:
| 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
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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
| davidpfarrell wrote:
| Hey thanks for the lead, and for having a listen of the track
| !
| djmips wrote:
| Did you make this track and are trying to make it popular?
| aitait wrote:
| It sounds like music for a computer game from the 80ies, early
| 90ies the latest.
| userbinator wrote:
| _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.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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).
| gjmacd wrote:
| 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.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Production, instruments, vocal ..sounds like eastern
| Europe/Russia region.
| rwmj wrote:
| (Obviously it isn't them, but ...) it sounded like Laibach to
| me, so yes Eastern European.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > 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.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| 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?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| 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).
| jerrysievert wrote:
| > 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 :)
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > 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 ht
| tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmOLtTGvsbM&feature=youtu.b
| e...
|
| Again, in the sense of it might be derivative of that.
| Any kid who had a radio in 1982 would have heard it.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| 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.
| kkotak wrote:
| 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 :)
| twic wrote:
| 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?
| djmips wrote:
| Spaghetti Disco
| rozab wrote:
| Definitely a film school assignment.
| jmmcd wrote:
| 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.
| bob818 wrote:
| 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
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| mrspeaker wrote:
| Then you should definitely listen to that podcast that Cenk
| linked to... it will be very infuriatingly relatable!
| saati wrote:
| 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.
| davidpfarrell wrote:
| 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
| zw123456 wrote:
| Probably Satoshi Nakamoto :)
| exogen wrote:
| 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.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > 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.
| Vaslo wrote:
| 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-...
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >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.
| joegahona wrote:
| "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.
| ctdonath wrote:
| https://music.apple.com/us/artist/q-lazzarus/279810501
| tosser0001 wrote:
| 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.
| twic wrote:
| 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!
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > A Mind Is Born':
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8
|
| Thank you. A Crystals Castles type vibe.
| kelseychapstick wrote:
| 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-...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why wasn't she in the movie credits?
| tylersmith wrote:
| I believe she is, as "Q Lazzarus". She did not continue
| performing or using that name so nobody knew who she actually
| was.
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| 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.
| mirimir wrote:
| 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".
| yumashka wrote:
| The simplest way: make video, insert this song, post to youtube,
| see where DMCA claim come from :)
| smohnot wrote:
| 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
| jacobush wrote:
| And now the director of that movie is actually dead :-(
| Cenk wrote:
| 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-...
| psalminen wrote:
| I immediately thought of this. Such a cool story, and an
| interesting insight into the state of the music industry in the
| 90's.
| ngold wrote:
| 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.
| mrspeaker wrote:
| 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!)
| joegahona wrote:
| 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.
| RyJones wrote:
| 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
| RichieAHB wrote:
| 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 ...
| [deleted]
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Honestly wouldn't surprise me if it eventually turned out to be
| part of a long-term ARG for Half Life 3 or something.
| [deleted]
| StavrosK wrote:
| 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_...
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(page generated 2020-03-20 23:00 UTC)