Hello! Some of you have probably come across a phrase dubbed “Lostwave” before. Lostwave is music where some information has been lost to time, such as the title of the song and the composer. Lostwave music is often mysterious, due to important information about the song being unknown. Some songs have been found and identified and are no longer lost. However, some songs are still unidentified to this day. Some songs are even at an odd in-between stage where there is an idea of what they could be, but they haven’t been confirmed yet.
Some are even at a standstill, waiting for a specific person who might have been involved with the song’s creation to confirm the song. For example, a song “Foxes in Boxes” that is mostly likely Lamya – Foxes in Boxes, due to information that was found. But, it is in a limbo stage since the writer of the song, Carrington Daren Michael, has yet to confirm the song. The singer of the song, Lamya, can’t be contacted because she passed away in 2009. Here is a YouTube upload of the song.
Foxes in Boxes isn’t the only lostwave song that’s nearly solved. There are others that are at this odd almost solved stage.
Lostwave songs are typically named based off of agreed on heard lyrics. Sometimes, when the songs are found, these temporary titles are similar to the true titles, while other times they are far different than the true title.
The most well known Lostwave song is known as The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet. There is a YouTube link of the full song, which I can provide.
It’s a nice song, so it’s sad that we don’t know who created it, or its true title. A couple of things that people have called the song are “Like the Wind” and “Check It In, Check It Out” and “Summer Blues”, as well as similar variants based off of heard lyrics. The song is also called acronyms based off of the longer titles, and here I will simply call it TMS for short. TMS is one of the shortened nicknames for the song.
The search for TMS has been very, very long. It started all the way back in 1984 when a German teenager named Darius recorded the song onto a cassette tape. He recorded songs from a German radio station called Norddeutscher Rundfunk, known as NDR for short. In 2004, Darius’ sister Lydia bought a website domain for him for his birthday. The domain was called Unknown Pleasures, and was apparently named after the Joy Division album of the same name. Darius digitized his old radio recordings onto the website, and used the website to help search for unknown songs he had. The Most Mysterious Song wasn’t the only one he had. A song that was identified as “Old Ned” by Blue in Heaven was also posted to Unknown Pleasures.
Around the middle of March of 2007, Lydia posted clip of the mysterious song to a group on Usenet de.rec.musik.recherche, and she also searched on spiritofradio.ca and best-of-80s.de under a pseudonym as well as under the username bluuue. In 2009 the piece of the song reached WatZatSong and in 2011 it reached YouTube.
In September of 2017 a record label called Dead Wax Records uploaded Lydia’s snippet to YouTube. This led to a friend of the owner of Dead Wax Records finding out about the song, and he posted the snippet around Reddit. This friend, named Gabriel Vieira, is the person who originally called the song “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”. On June 30th of 2019, the search gained a subreddit of its own. The subreddit being r/TheMysteriousSong.
It was then discovered that TMS likely aired on a specific show of NDR called “Musik für Junge Leute”. In English its title is Music for Young People. People began to contact Paul Baskerville, the DJ for the show. However, nothing came from contacting him.
In mid 2019 the song gained traction with a popular YouTuber who explained various internet stories featuring TMS in a video. This YouTuber was Justin Whang. Before you check out his content, I’d advise to be careful, as many of his tales are a bit, inappropriate, to put it lightly. I’d advise avoiding those videos unless you are comfortable with those sort of topics. He has some safer ones such as the tale about a band that got back together, in the aftermath of an old disc rotten copy of their old album being found. This band being Panchiko, a band which I mentioned in my article about disc rot.
A Reddit user, known as u/johnnymetoo revealed that he had downloaded the full song of TMS in 2007, and he posted it to r/TheMysteriousSong.
In August of 2019, after a failed attempt of identification through Paul Baskerville playing TMS on his current show Nachtclub, a German station Radio Eins played the song, as well as a Paul Baskerville interview. Daris heard the song, most likely from Nachtclub or Radio Eins, and this led to his sister Lydia rejoining the search. In September of 2019, Lydia digitized the entire tape of songs that Darius had recorded initially.
In 2020, the type of synth used within the song was discovered, and therefore a year of the earliest time the song could have been released was pinpointed. The synth is a Yamaha DX7, which was released in 1983.
In December of 2020 a spectrogram showed that TMS was for sure played on NDR, due to a shared 10 kilohertz line in the cassette recording, which NDR recordings also had.
The search for TMS is still going on to this day, and I hope it is found one day.
On the bright side, some songs have already been found. For example, one of my favorite ex-Lostwave songs is How Long by Paula Toledo. The song was released in 2005, however the search for the song started in 2007, two years later. The search gained attention when pitch-shifted snippets were found in bootleg Russian DVDs, which is what the song became known for during the search. The song was dubbed “How Long Will it Take?” and sometimes “Dollhouse”. The song became associated with an image of a light brown teddy bear laying on sand.
I reverse-searched the teddy bear image, and it seems to have originated as a stock image from a website called depositphotos.
The teddy bear.
On December 8th of 2023, the song was identified as How Long by Paula Toledo. The next day Paula Toledo herself made a video on YouTube with her response to the search, answering some questions and saying some information about the song. I think her song is beautiful, and I’m very happy that it was found and identified.
After the search for the song concluded, Paula released the song as a single, as initially it never had a commercial release and was only used in the movie Secret Lives, and in the tv series 15/Love. Secret Lives was a made-for-tv film, and 15/Love was a show.
The release of the single occurred in 2023, 20 years after she first recorded the song in 2003. Better late than never, I suppose! She also released the song to Spotify and Apple Music, however it was taken down as a result of streaming fraud, where someone else took credit for the song, most likely by falsely claiming it was theirs. I bet that was frustrating! Luckily, she re-uploaded the song under the title “How Long (Will It Take)” and that time it stayed up.
This is a YouTube video of the full song that was uploaded once it was identified. It’s such a pretty song.
This is Paula’s video about the song.
Some Lostwave songs, when found, are found in…unusual places. An example being Everyone Knows That, now identified as Ulterior Motives, a song created by twin brothers Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. The song was created in the mid-1980s, and the song was found in an adult film. The song was found in late April of 2024. Now, I will not be naming the film, as it is quite inappropriate in nature. However, I will clarify that there was a reason for it being in an adult film in the first place. Ulterior Motives was originally recorded as a pop song, and the reason it was used in a 1986 adult film was due to their friend paying the brothers for usage of their work. The song wasn’t made specifically for the film, a friend of the brothers just needed some music for a film. I sadly cannot link the full song, as the only full version that exists at the moment, contains background audio from the adult film. However, Christopher has been looking for the tracks that make up the song to remaster it, he has found the guitar, bass and drum tracks, but he hadn’t found the vocal or synth tracks. An ordeal involving a box of masters being given back to him after a friend passed away occurred. Sadly this box didn’t have the vocal track for Ulterior Motives. The box of masters did have tracks from other songs, but not from Ulterior Motives. Christopher has stated that he will be re-recording the vocal and guitar tracks, and remastering the song. I assume the found master tracks will either be incorporated, or re-recorded with the originals as reference, depending on their quality I suppose. It won’t be exactly like the original song, but it will be as close as he can get, considering some of the master tracks have been seemingly lost. Christopher does have plans to release an album of songs similar to Ulterior Motives, under the alias Who’s Who?, which is an alias Christopher and Philip had used throughout the 1980s. The complete album will be called Ulterior Motives – The Lost Album. I’m excited for it!
A song that was actually found very recently is Waste My Time, the correct name being Avail by The Burns. When the song was lost, it was dubbed Waste My Time, and was associated with a simple image edit of an angry Barney the Dinosaur holding a yellow ball. From what I can see, the only edit that was done to the image was the eyelids, giving him an angry expression. The search started in 2013 because of a WatZatSong post. The person who made the post stated that they recorded the song from a radio station in Minsk, Belarus. On May 21st, 2024 the song was found. The band The Burns was an indie rock band from Moscow, Russia. The band was active between 2007 through 2010. Avail was a later song of theirs, as it was released in 2009.
Many Lostwave songs have been found in 2024, and most likely more will follow. I’m happy that so many songs are being identified, so we can give the singers or bands their well-deserved credit for the songs!
However, not all Lostwave, is truly Lostwave. Some people create hoaxes to get attention. Sometimes it can be their own songs, AI-generated songs, and even fake Lostwave from actual songs that aren’t actually lost!
An example is Above The Clouds, a very short-lived “Lostwave”, that was truly the song This One’s Gonna Fly by Templeton Thompson. This hoax was created during the search of How Long Will it Take. A WatZatSong user known as Kerlo claimed he had a lot of pirated DVDs from his childhood. One of the DVDs being a bootleg Mr. Peabody and Sherman DVD. Someone noticed the supposed bootleg DVD menu in the video resembled the background and frames of DVDStyler, confirming it wasn’t actually from a bootleg DVD at all! The “search” was from early January 2024, to late January 2024.
In late February 2024, a reddit user called u/thenormalelevator32 realized that Kerlo had listened to the song before posting the snippet that started the search. Kerlo admitted it was a hoax.
Another hoax song is Claw Machine, a very short hoax that only lasted a couple weeks, from mid-Febuary to early March of 2024. The search began when a YouTuber called Sallywantsdolls uploaded a 30 second snippet of the song on February 19th of 2024. Sallywantsdolls claimed to have found it from a post from WatZatSong. Two days later, Sallywantsdolls uploaded a screen recording of the supposed WatZatSong post. On March 3rd of 2024, another YouTuber called Spongeboy37 revealed that he was the poster of the snippet and that it was AI-generated and was supposed to be for an ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. He probably wasn’t planning on the large amount of attention it got.
Hopefully he can still do that ARG, because ARGs can be entertaining to participate in!
In summary, Lostwave is something else, and can come from a variety of places, even….unexpected ones, sometimes can be tricky, and often takes a while to find when its legit! There are many unidentified songs out there, and more keep being discovered, whether only a snippet, or the full song, but simply without a title or known creator.