Check it in, check it out, but the sun will never shine.
“The most mysterious song on the internet”—called so because it was, well, mysterious—is no longer a mystery. A backrooms-tier secret, the song, now apparently ID’d as Subways Of the Mind by FEX, saw consistent use across the information highway precisely because of its enigmatic nature.
So enigmatic, in fact, that it had a whole article written about it in music mag Rolling Stone, which claims that a German by the name of “Darius S.” recorded it back in the ’80s from a radio program called Musik für junge Leute (Music for Young People) on Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). “It was just one of many songs I recorded and didn’t know the artist,” he told magazine back in 2019: “I believe I didn’t hear an announcement. Maybe I heard it partially and missed the artist’s name. Everything is possible.”
Eventually, his sister—burdened by curiosity—posted a clip to the internet in 2007, where it stayed dormant for a decade and a half. Then, in 2019, the thing went viral, kicking off a voracious hunt for any info.
Its cryptic nature (and the fact that it’s kind of a banger) saw it used in a bunch of liminal space-adjacent media, including DOOM mod MyHouse.wad, where you can find it playing from the open door of a lonely car, several layers deep into the inception-style madness that plagues the mod—anything else I say on the subject would constitute a spoiler for the thing, so my lips are sealed.
Now (as spotted by 404media), it looks like the hunt is at an end. Using Hörfest, an annual music contest with lists of local musicians in Hamburg whose work would then be played on NDR, TheMysteriousSong‘s subreddit compiled a list of potential attendees for its 1984 show. The group’s thousands of members would then engage in deep-dives angled towards the featured bands—and one of said dives brought up gold.
“About two weeks ago I came across an old newspaper article in the Nordwest Zeitung archive, while researching Hörfest bands,” user marijn1412 writes, “The article was about a band called FEX from Kiel, who won a talent contest in Bremen in Sep 1984, and their music was described as Rock with Wave and Pop influences.
“It also mentioned their members, and one of them I recognised from a Hörfest 83 band called Phret. I managed to get in touch with him and asked him if he still had some old material from those bands. He then sent me some of the songs he made with FEX and Phret … and lo and behold, one of them was titled Subways Of Your Mind. It’s a slightly different version from the one we know.” You can listen to that version here.
Former FEX keyboard player Michael Haedrich, now a member of the German band Silk Vision, also posted confirmation under a YouTube video to one of Silk Vision’s songs: “This is Michael from Silk Vision: In the 1980’s I was a member of the Band FEX in northern Germany. A few days ago I learned that a song we recorded with the Band around 1983 is the ‘most mysterious song on the internet’. This absolutely caught me by surprise because I was not aware of the phenomena. I immediately contacted the original band members and we couldn’t believe something like this was happening. Now we are busy resolving the mystery and we decided to re-unite to re-record the song.”
This desire to get the band back together was also confirmed by marijn1412, who added: “I just got word from them that they are planning a reunion to re-record the track.”
It’s been one hell of a year for discovering mysteries—back in May, the origin of the Backrooms photo was discovered. A similarly-cryptic song by the pseudonym “Everyone Knows That” was also discovered to be a song called “Ulterior Motives” (which was then, er, used in a porn film 6 years later), alongside the enigmatic Celebrity Number 6. While I’m proud of these internet sleuths, I can’t help but sigh wistfully at the idea that there may one day be no decades-old mysteries left to discover. These archaeologists are tying together bits of information from before the information age—which means that surprise is in finite supply. There’s nothing new under the sun, even if FEX claims it’ll “never shine”.
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