The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished

Author here. I bought this CD in 2011 and spent 15 years failing to find out who made it. The band charted at #47 on the UK Independent Singles Chart in June 2006, so it was a real, professionally made, commercially distributed record, and I couldn't find anything online: no credits, no fingerprint match, no company registration for the label, nothing on streaming. Part of the answer turned out to be that their website was Flash, so it was never meaningfully indexed, and their MySpace was never mirrored. A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick. It was eventually solved by searching on the producer's credits rather than the band's name, and then by two people replying to cold emails. Both the producer and the singer were generous enough to be interviewed, so there's some fresh detail in there about the recording session as well.

• anenefan · 3 days ago

  That's an epic search but at least of all a wind at the end. Sadly the ability to search via the usual suspects has diminished greatly from 2015 onwards, not all of it is on lack lustre efforts of search engines involved, some of the data had become just too hard to get from within forums where human intelligence rules. Of course the lack of competition from new search engines isn't good either, too many sites aim to block all but the top handful of bots from their content ...

  • shahidhussain · 3 days ago

    Thanks for the note. Yeah, it was almost impossible to find the data without a ton of help. I’m sure things will change again as bot internet usage overwhelms human usage — maybe more silos, maybe more bot only interfaces. Interesting times!

• doctoboggan · 11 hours ago

  > A band can be entirely findable in 2006 and entirely gone by 2026 depending on which technologies they happened to pick. This is interesting, and in some cases desirable. I wonder what technology choices one could make today if they wanted to have an internet presence now but not have it stored forever. Would that even be possible today?

  • SoftTalker · 2 hours ago

    You can block the Internet Archive with a robots.txt file, but no guarantees that other archives/scrapers or even individuals won't index or copy it. But for AI training, what exists in training data probably isn't the full site, and unlikely that an LLM could be spit back out verbatim (that's a guess).

• joshvm · 10 hours ago

  I think you’d enjoy The Case of the Missing Hit - on the Reply All podcast. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/10/reply-a... Similar situation - guy remembers a catchy song, lyrics and all, but can’t find any trace of the band or the music. I won’t say more than that as it’s worth listening to them tell the story (The Guardian article also doesn’t spoil it).

• ventricity · 10 hours ago

  A good read, thank you. There are many excellent bands and songs gone through time. It can be difficult to discover rare songs, or even slightly out there ones, through streaming apps like Spotify.

• pcthrowaway · 8 hours ago

  Do you know if any of the songs are available to listen to on a streaming service (or youtube)?

  • dkdbejwi383 · 6 hours ago

    They're linked in the article.

• longwave · 6 hours ago

  I am one of the developers behind the Official Charts site, so thank you for posting the story. It's heartwarming to know that something I have worked on has helped you on this journey - even if it's in a very small capacity, maybe you wouldn't have connected the dots otherwise. Hopefully this means my work has helped others in the same way!

Thanks for posting your search. I absolutely love stories like this. I can’t help but think that music was a little more interesting when it was primarily physically released.

Oh wow, "OK Tokyo"'s predecessor. I think I bought the "A Lesson In Crime" EP a long time ago, because a song from it got me hooked during a Michel Gondry movie? Never bothered to look for their roots. Cool pointer! Thanks.

• jo-han · 10 hours ago

  A Lesson In Crime - that's Tokyo Police Club :)

  • xnorswap · 10 hours ago

    Whom I used to confuse with Bombay Bicycle Club.

• thrawn0r · 9 hours ago

  A Lesson in Crime is a great EP, but from Tokio Police Club :)

  • GuestFAUniverse · 12 minutes ago

    Ups :-) My bad. Anyway, time to listen to both.

The streaming model really makes remembering details difficult. I used to play only local files, and then during a time at university played in the office music on Youtube. One specific album got stuck in my head, but for a long while afterwards didn't find it again. No name, no lyrics - not a good starting point. I just remembered a pink unicorn and that is was psychedelic rock and that the singer sang with a specific deep voice. After several rounds of research (the same youtube channel is still up) and looking through uploads of the timeframe and their recommendations it turned out I misremembered: The cover had a rainbow cat looking into the distance ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea1mYXUcBY , Whoopie cat). How I remembered was funny. I talked to someone about this, researched while, then talked again, when something came over me to look to the side into the distance with a slightly open mouth - just to suddenly realize that this face was on the cover, not the unicorn! But actually, I still have that image of the unicorn cover in my mind (one color silhouette, hoofs into the air, but who knows at this point). The Whoopie cat album is definitely one I heard back than and it was the music I was searching for, but the unicorn cover probably also existed in that space and was a different album. Or did I just imagine something based on space stallions ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Otaq2tmNMM )? After that experience I set up a local music player again and downloaded some of the albums I wanted to remember.

I've had a few of these musical splinters, and most of them have worked their way out with time. One was quite recent: the music video for Underwater Love by Smoke City, which was memorable for their bullet-time-ish effect that pre-dated The Matrix by a year or few. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M (uploaded 12 years ago, but I couldn't find it for a long time and only looked again recently - whilst looking for Faith no More's song of the same name). Another was the song Purple, for which the commonly shared MP3 was mislabelled as by the band Air. Turns out it was a band called Crustation, who released a single magnificent trip-hop album, with Irish vocalist Bronagh Slevin, and then disappeared into the ether. Took me a few sessions over a few years to track all that down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNJCVruRLc https://bronaghslevin.com/ Another one was a song that got high rotation for a very brief period of time (when I was on a driving holiday, and so had the radio on a lot) maybe on Triple J, early 2000s, called Media Junkies by the band of the same name. Turns out the song was actually called News Addiction. One hit wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyZxYopvowA The last remaining splinter (that I can recall) is a song from the mid-90s, "eager beaver" or "tenfour" or some variation on that features heavily in the lyrics as truckers chatting over CB radios. Haven't done a search session in a number of years on that one, but never got anything close to a lead on previous attempts. Maybe it's time to have another go. Way back then, it was the research that was at least part of the enjoyment. I think it taught me how to research, to some degree at least. I went from Faith No More to Mr Bungle, and back then it wasn't easy to find this kind of stuff. Mr Bungle then changed my entire future musical taste journey. Good times. Worth the effort.

• BLKNSLVR · 10 hours ago

  Hah! Thanks to asking AI, just found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXlWWeDLxYU Slightly underwhelming (and I knew it would be). My taste has changed a fair bit in the last 25 years. Looks like someone else had been looking for it almost as long as me. Released in 98 or 99. 27 years. Satisfying.

• Intermernet · 6 hours ago

  Thanks for this! I could have answered the first one (Crustation) for you, but the others are a trip down memory lane. JJJ FTW :-)

For me it was a Bjork song but it was in Icelandic. I had heard it around 2010ish and didn't have the song. Because it was in Icelandic and I didn't know the name of the track I couldn't figure out how to find it - because I had streamed through all of Biorks albums on one of these streaming services and it wasn't on any of them. I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics, but I couldn't even identify a single word from memory that I could use to search for the lyrics. After more than a decade The Guardian had an article on Bjork and mentioned something about her fan club on Reddit. So I thought I would ask there. That hit the jackpot, someone mentioned she had an earlier band called Tappi Tíkarrass (from 1981-1983) and it was a song they performed on some TV show. https://youtu.be/nkuXOtFLMZw

• sollewitt · 9 hours ago

  That is amazing. She was already 100% “Bjork” at 17.

  • bjoli · 8 hours ago

    Her interview with Arvo Pärt (composer) is amazing. She starts off being very Björk, and as a viewer I wondered where this would go. Turns out they live on the same planet, speaking the same language.

• masklinn · 7 hours ago

  > I don't know how similar Icelandic is to other Nordic/Scandinavian languages so maybe a speaker of these languages would have been able to identify the lyrics Not likely, Icelandic has kept much closer to old norse in grammar and phonology so sounds nothing like continental scandinavian (also much prefers neologisms to loanwords, but that’s maybe less of an issue for song lyrics). You’d have had to ask specifically icelanders, maybe faroe islanders as a last recourse, but there’s a lot less of the latter than the former.

  • vidarh · 7 hours ago

    Yeah, as a Norwegian, I can sometimes somewhat read Icelandic, but it takes a lot of effort, and it sounds familiar but not enough for me to remotely reliably transcribe.

    • embedding-shape · 6 hours ago

      As a Swede, Icelandic is a foreign to me as Finnish, meaning I don't understand it at all, in any way. Some words could be guessed, but that's the same for German too for most of us. Danish and Norwegian people I have no problem talking with though.

      • vidarh · 6 hours ago

        I might be biased with some exposure to Norse and Old English too, so I don't know whether Norwegians without that would recognise nearly as much (or little) Icelandic given how much Icelandic still takes from Norse.

        • masklinn · 6 hours ago

          I understand the western Norwegian dialects (/ nynorsk) have a much stronger old / west norse influence so are closer to Icelandic, maybe you are from those regions or are familiar with these dialects?

          • vidarh · 6 hours ago

            I'm from the east, but Nynorsk is required for all students (each region picks the main written language they want to use in schools, but also need to teach the other one), so we do certainly all get some exposure to Nynorsk as well and it certainly might help.

AI to the rescue. I was just revisiting my own Holy Grail, though much less rare. From the Napster days: My Gay Uncle's version of "Back That Azz Up": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDj2JpJr3vU This is the same version I downloaded randomly from Napster when I would search vaguely for "punk covers". It's just so great, but with potato recording quality (maybe naturally) and a bunch of skips and clicks that sound like a shitty CD rip or early MP3 encoding artifacts. I'd love to find an actually clean version of the song, but to no avail. It may not exist.

Unusual article on HN, but it is really enjoyable.

• ChrisRR · 6 hours ago

  I like the "not technical but tangentially interesting" side of HN

Quite reminiscent of Searching for Sugar Man! (true story and excellent movie in case you haven't seen it yet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Sugar_Man

• BLKNSLVR · 9 hours ago

  +1 absolutely recommend.

• JMiao · 8 hours ago

  I think of youuuu

For me it was: A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song ‘Cheer it On’. (For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!). And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny. —————— Comment from the other thread: > The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects. My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes. The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa. (I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!) I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks. I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated. I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

• studog · 8 hours ago

  Canadian here. Let me know if I can help

  • devonsolomon · 7 hours ago

    I went through the Canadian Indie and Post Rock Wikipedia: category pages. Can’t believe how many of my band crushes from my iPod days were Canadian!

• _whiteCaps_ · 1 hour ago

  > I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band Post the lyrics here, let's get this figured out.

“return to innocence” by enigma mesmerized by it growing up, could only recall the native american-sounding chanting. googled “hey yah heyyyyyyy” and found the answer on reddit. turns out it samples/infringes an indigenous taiwanese (amis) chant.

Great story - thanks for posting it here!

Another thread like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319995 Gah this can be so annoying. I've got one going for 56 years. A cassette tape that I had as a kid, all I remember is that it was orange and that it had the most amazing jazzy tracks on it (mostly instrumental). I've listened to every orange labelled tape on various tape archives and still haven't found it, the memory has faded far enough that I only occasionally remember snatches of it. But I'll keep looking. Other ones: Tony Banks, Portrait of Jerry Jackson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_U0jhtzmzI Cori Josias, Takin' it straight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPuCra-t_Bw

• Intermernet · 6 hours ago

  The search is more fulfilling than the result in these cases, but still keep searching!

  • jacquesm · 44 minutes ago

    I don't know about that. The years that I could have been listening to that music again are ticking by awfully fast.

• MontgomeryPy · 4 hours ago

  Maybe a K-Tel mixed track cassette like this one, which looks orange: https://www.discogs.com/release/5291004-Various-Instrumental...

  • jacquesm · 42 minutes ago

    Oh, good idea, yes, I should look into those as well, but as for the orange, it was a hard orange, the color of ... an orange. Every year I get the urge to solve it once and for all and so far no luck. There is a good chance it never got digitized.

For me it was Station Approach by Elbow [0] - the one with the giant slow semibreve vocoder chorus [1] Not obscure at all, but i sang it to bemused twenty-somethings in a dozen record shops. I had high confidence from the timbre it was Super Furry Animals, so i also combed their catalogue. In the end i bought the album blind (deaf?) on a recommendation and was gobsmacked to find the track on it. Serendipity, baby! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2k5EfLPB3A [1] all this time, i thought it was a vocoder! I was just listening on crappy speakers, i guess. It's just tight vocal harmony and a production that possibly puts the bass through the vocal reverb

• jacquesm · 6 hours ago

  That video is something else, wow.

> I searched for the song on Pandora. We hadn’t checked it before because it’s no longer a major music service I find that take interesting. I use Pandora to this day as my primary streaming source, as it has my vibes down perfectly, and no other services has that many years of training into what I like to listen to. But even more important, it is almost always the music source I see when I'm restaurants. I prefer small mom-and-pop type places, so maybe I'm only seeing a niche. I'm not trying to argue it is a leading platform, as it clearly is not. But it is fascinating that people searching for music don't check what was a leading platform 10 years ago. Especially when the music in question is older than that. And the search started when it was a leading platform. Actually that last point really confuses me - why would today's platform popularity have limited the search 15 years ago? That part of the story makes little sense. If this search began back when Pandora was at its peak, why wouldn't they have started from there long ago?

• drdexebtjl · 3 hours ago

  I think the leading streaming platforms still have not caught up to Pandora’s algorithmic feed from 10+ years ago. It felt like it suggested songs that have something in common with other songs you liked, while Spotify feels like it suggests songs that are popular with users who listened to the same songs as you did. I wish it had taken off instead.

  • conductr · 2 hours ago

    I’ve been using pandora again recently for exactly this reason. Feels like a good dj that is broadening my horizons by exposing me to tangential works. Spotify plays me the most relevant works. So, if Nirvana is playing I’ll then hear nothing besides the 90s alt rock stuff. Usually the same 10 bands anyone familiar with the genre would expect.

• mingus88 · 3 hours ago

  The power of platforms. It’s interesting the author spent all this time on modern platforms, using multiple LLMs, scouring public APIs… And the answer was right there on the original platform, invisible to even he who found it there in the first place. For all the power of search engines and AI it was the author’s memory that finally unlocked the mystery. This says SO MUCH about how our society has come to rely on this technology and it has so many blind spots it can’t find something that is still online and untouched for over a decade. We can literally dig up artifacts from thousands of years ago and learn how people lived back then, but in ten years we will have forgotten everything we did while we are still here and the resources are still online. Just rotting out in the open ignored and one day gone forever with no way to recover it. Insane

Reminds me of the hunt for "Subways of your mind" - since found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_of_Your_Mind#Online_se... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22636989 2020 (82 comments)

Never underestimate naming your next project something googlable

I think the name of the band is a bit ironic. I had a similar thing. A while back, I watched the first episode of Second Chance ; a rather forgettable show, that I decided not to continue, but it did have a great song, in the early part of the episode: No Evil , by a Canadian singer; Serena Ryder. Good luck finding it. If you do, let me know. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4378456/

• ChrisMarshallNY · 4 hours ago

  Just FYI: I found this[0], by an artist named Shawnee Kish (Indigenous Canadian). It's the same song, and I think that Serena Ryder worked with Shawnee Kish, so I'll bet there's a rights issue, which is why Ryder's version isn't out there. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0NFTw7zMf0

This reminds me of when I rediscovered the track-listing of a CD titled "The Best Album of the Next Century Ever" which came with boxes of Golden/Cinnamon Grahams cereal. Had some real bangers like Josephine by Terrorvision and Come On Spring by Antenna, plus some very early tracks by Space and Muse who both went on to make it pretty big. I listened to it on repeat for months as a young teen. That kind of nostalgia probably isn't available to the generations below.

• criddell · 5 hours ago

  Today if they did that, there would be a QR code that you scan and then have to create an account to hear the music streamed from their website (which is really just a big ad), and then 8 weeks later when the promotion ends, the best album of the next century would be gone.

• BLKNSLVR · 5 hours ago

  Hah! Come On Spring by Antenna was on the same, and only, album by Antenna that one of my white whales was on: 10-4 (explained elsewhere in the thread).

Mine was back in the kazaa/limewire days, there was a particular track that get repeatedly uploaded under fake names. Except it was just a 10 second loop rather than an entire track so I only had 1 line of lyrics to work from "I am suffocating" Back in the day it wasn't as easy to search things online, but I eventually found it was Breathless by Lifer Edit: Also it's quite UK specific, but there was a pop group called Alisha's attic in the 90s that did a live rock version of one their songs. I recorded it off the radio but that cassette got lost somewhere. I couldn't even find a mention of it online

Ok HN, a challenge. I have given this challenge to many, and I'm either completely mistaken, or the world has forgotten something. In 1984, as many of you may know, Giorgio Moroder released his version of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". This is a moderately good version of the movie, but would be superseded by newer versions with more recovered scenes etc. Moroder's soundtrack, however, was brilliant. He brought in many of the stars of the time to do songs (Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant etc) and they were good songs. He also wrote a lot of original incidental music for this version. 2 versions of the soundtrack were released. One has the pop artist's tracks and a couple of Giorgio's originals, and the other has the complete soundtrack (all of the pop artist's tracks and all of Giorgio's music). Both were released in multiple countries. Both were released on CD The first, shorter version was released on Vinyl. Apparently the second, longer version was never released on Vinyl. Except... After seeing the movie in 1984, my mum ordered the soundtrack (specifically the longer version) at HMV in Parramatta in Sydney (Australia). It took a few weeks to arrive, and I happened to be there when we picked it up (at the age of 7 or 8). I remember it vividly, because it was a multi-disk release, and it had a gorgeous fold out sleeve. The only problem was that mum had ordered the CD version, and they had ordered the vinyl version. They subsequently re-ordered it, we picked up the CD a few weeks later, and I still own that CD. Problem is, I want the Vinyl version. I've asked the internet, I've asked record stores in multiple countries, I sent an email to Giorgio Moroder's nephew(?) (no reply) and it doesn't seem to exist. I'd put this down to imagination except for the fact that Australia (and Japan, and probably elsewhere) has a track-record of receiving weird / customised versions of records, and some of them seem to have disappeared from the official databases. So, if anyone out there feels like doing some sleuthing, that's the challenge. Find the Vinyl version of this[0], or prove it doesn't exist. (I know, proving non-existence is impossible, but it's worth a try!) Either way, it's a great soundtrack, and worth a listen! [0]: https://archive.org/details/Giorgio-moroder-metropolis-score

I think researching things that have little internet footprint is an underrated use of LLMs. Most recently, I did quite an extensive research on a card game called "king", variants of which are played in Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Belgium, France, Russia, Italy, Poland (under the name "Kierki"), and several other countries (but seemingly not known in English speaking countries, despite the English name). It allowed me to uncover scoring patterns that tie various versions together and reconstruct its possible origins and development, however speculative.

It didn’t take me 15 years, but I had a similar experience with the Norwegian band Kaizers Orchestra. I first heard one of their songs used in a Flash animation (Bak et Hallelujah) in 2003 and I just loved it, but I had no idea who it was nor did I understand Norwegian. I listened over and over trying to hear the lyrics and transcribe what I was hearing as best I could until I got something close enough to correct that I could search for it. The song was from their first album and came out in 2001 so finally I got lucky a few months later and found a Norwegian site that had the lyrics. I’ve listened to every album of theirs since and they’re still one of my favorite bands. I even got to see them live when they toured the US last year. It wasn’t a huge audience but me and few of the other obvious diehard fans in the audience were glad they came over here.

Super interesting! Good you find it. Sounds like math rock/post rock somehow, or at least adjacent to that.

I love internet archeology! Some time ago I found out that Microsoft had released an official free expansion for Frontpage 98 with a bunch of themes. I managed to find on web.archive.org official Microsoft page with the expansion to download, but the download was done through some form and unfortunately none of the many website versions archived it correctly. Next I've checked if maybe it was archived on some PC magazine cover CD on archive.org, but no luck. Then I've started digging through Google but still nothing, except some old post on forum which had an attachment to download it, but it was not available anymore and once again, not archived... So I've started searching by the filename contained in the download link - nothing. Finally I've tried DiscMaster [1] to look for the filename and boom, there it was! I love the feeling when you are so many times on the edge of giving up thinking "it's gone forever", but try new things and finally find it, long forgotten but now safely (hopefully) preserved on my computer and backup drives. [1] https://discmaster.textfiles.com/

• basilikum · 4 hours ago

  Consider uploading it to archive.org.

  • QuantumNomad_ · 3 hours ago

    DiscMaster is showing data about things uploaded to archive.org, from what I’ve understood

    • pkorzeniewski · 3 hours ago

      DiscMaster actually searches inside all the ISO and other image files (not only by filenames, but also content of the files), which archive.org doesn't.

• QuantumNomad_ · 3 hours ago

  What was the file name?

  • pkorzeniewski · 2 hours ago

    The original filename was fpdlenu.exe, but I found it under different name on the forum, however now that I've searched the archive.org it has been uploaded in 2022, but I couldn't find it back then so.. I'm confused xD nevertheless it was a lot of fun looking for it, even if I did it the hard way!

• samudrijan · 1 hour ago

  Hijacking the top comment to plug Discogs. Amazing DB of music and used record shop. https://www.discogs.com/

Loved Spotify when it was good. I found so many bands east Europe, all written in Cyrillic, so I couldn't have searched for them easily. Before that I used Soulseek for Japanese bands.

• marliechiller · 4 hours ago

  Whats made it not good nowadays in your opinion? Im a 10 year+ subscriber but always open to better alternatives where possible

• slowin · 46 minutes ago

  I use Apple Music now for Japanese bands. It's quite good for that. Much, much better than Spotify last I checked, which admittedly was years ago.

My wife and her siblings had a book as kids. They don't know the title. 8 years ago I posted on Reddit in the hope someone could help... We're still none the wiser! https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9865u4/wha...

• rikkipitt · 5 hours ago

  Oh, it's archived now... that's convenient!

As I was starting to read the article, I was thinking (correctly) that this was going to be fruitless internet searches until they manage to contact a human and that was what was going to solve it, because there is so much obscure information stored in people's memories that was never put to text and shared online. I have a similar 20+ years story of a house session that I downloaded with AudioGalaxy at around 2002, which I lost but I vividly remembered some songs. I remembered the name of the DJ and the club, and I would randomly search around to no avail. Same type of dead ends, some forum posts listing track names but not linking to audio, etc. 15 years later I happened to find a CD I had burned with the session, buried among old CDs in old boxes. The feeling of being able to listen to something that you clearly remember but haven't heard in more than a decade, it's indescribable. Years later, a couple of years ago, I googled his name again out of curiosity and I found an instagram profile which I'm 99% sure is the guy in question: same rare name, from the small city where the club where the session was recorded is, his age also fits the timeline, etc. I haven't contacted him though. On the one hand it could be a nice surprise for him to know that somebody enjoyed something obscure he made like 25 years ago, but on the other hand it's kinda weird that I remember his name from one super old mp3 and I stalked him over decades to finally get to his instagram profile...

Excellent writeup, and the song (Searchlights) is pretty good too. Remember to always archive lost music in its full quality as ripped from the original CD or vinyl, in WAV or FLAC formats. Don't be an MP3 chump!

"child in time" by Deep Purple. My whole life this song would randomly get stuck in my head. I remember trying to figure this out at the bar when I was 30 with a bunch of people there and we figured it might be Rainbow. So I went home and listened through every Rainbow song, including the crap after Dio left and nothing. It drove me crazy, I even thought I made it up in my head lol. I cant remember how, but I eventually figured it out a few weeks later. My dad loved Deep Purple so thats probably where the seed planted. lol https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FpA707p7w9A&ra=m

• BLKNSLVR · 5 hours ago

  At least you picked a great song too obsess over. The Stranger Things final season teaser would have solved it for you.

If archaeology is this difficult just to go back twenty years back in the internet era I don’t know how real historians even function.

Hah, I remember OK Tokyo! That’s such a rad story

I went through this once, but it was in the mid-90s when resources were scarcer and the band was not at all someone who charted. Heard something between sets at a local club that blew my mind. Didn't think to ask. Set me down a path, posting across usenet boards, IRC, talking to people at shows, talking to friends. Plenty of suggestions of potential hits, and while a lot of those suggestions were also cool, it took me a few years to finally find it. That journey was totally worth it though, as there's a lot of stuff I came across in my search that I still listen to today.

I'm about 25 years looking for a book I remember getting out of the library as a teenager. I've even gone back to the library to see if there are any records of books borrowed in the late 90s (there weren't). None of the LLMs have helped and neither have a number of subreddits. So I occasionally use it as motivation to read obscure stuff from about the right era. However, my memory is confused and has definitely conflated a number of different titles (I found a couple of scenes in an Arthur C Clarke anthology, but not the main plot thread).

Awesome story! Thanks for sharing. I will now go and have a listen

Oh God, that reminds me of the mission to recover the awesome midi tracks on one of the Gold Games I compilation CDs that I loved as a kid. The CD had the game MiG29 Fulcrum on it, but also others, and I never triggered the music in-game (it was stored as audio tracks on the game disk). So I guess my best bet is finding someone with an original working cd or disk images online (anyone? :) ) EDIT: For anyone with the same disposition, look for "goldgames" on archive.org. And thanks to OP for the impulse to look.

Funny timing... I'm a lost media junkie, here's my related story. So there's this little mid 80's cow-punk band from NYC called Cowboy Mouth. They had a song called "Hurricane" that got some college radio play. They had one album, Cowboys and Indians, which I just love. Sold something like 10,000 copies, and vanished soon after that. There's basically 12 known songs by the band, a maddeningly small catalog. Anyhow... Trying to find info on this band is beyond difficult.. Because there just happens to be another band called Cowboy Mouth out of New Orleans which have been active for 30 years and are much much bigger. Adding insult to injury, this other Cowboy Mouth had a hit song called "Hurricane Party"... So there is practically no way to search for the NYC band or the song Hurricane without bumping up against this other band. Anyhow, in a stroke of luck I stumbled upon an old demo cassette tape by the NYC Cowboy Mouth. I was excited as the tape cover lists two songs that aren't on their album. I recently ripped the tape. The story gets stranger because none of the songs on the tape match the song names on the cover label. Ends up the tape has three previously unknown tracks (of high quality, sounds like they were recorded in the same sessions as the album). Its an amazing find, adding 3 songs to a 12 song catalog! But it's driving me crazy as I don't even know the names and have no way of finding out. And there are those other two unknown tracks listed on the label which I'm dying to find out about and hopefully hear one day. Anyhow, I say the timing of this article is funny, because I just put the demo tape tracks up on YouTube a month ago, in hopes that someone might recognize them and shed some light on them. Or just to get the tracks into the hands of fans that are still out there. Here's the tracks in case anyone remembers Cowboy Mouth and is interested in hearing them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7J9sU3qg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYuK1on2ys8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMyXn91UB_0

• scarecrowbob · 1 hour ago

  When I started reading the post, I thought "ah, I've heard of Cowboy Mouth".... but I am probably thinking of the NOLA group. I find the effort to find lost media interesting, personally. It might sound weird, but the ephemerality of these things is something I personally find a bit liberating. I've performed in maybe 130-ish bands over the last 30 years almost none of which played more than 10-20 shows. I've put out a lot of recordings for other people, and am around a lot of folks who have put out a lot of recordings for a lot of people. All that work was highly ephemeral and mostly lost as soon as the band stopped playing. If there were recordings at all, they probably ended up in a cardboard box in someone's flooded basement. At times, it's been kind of odd to think about how far all that goes back in time, like, probably as far as there have been people playing music. The idea that we could somehow track these incredibly short-lived events that touched a vanishingly small group of people at all would have a meaningful trace that you could pickup at a granular level is a bit odd to me. It seems so impossible that when I don't have access to the specific musicians involved, the chance meaningfully following up on the history or finding artifacts like recordings or t-shirts seems improbable. For instance, in the mid-60s in Texas there was a big swell of garage rock in the wake of the Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan. It seems like a measurable thing to me, insofar as I played a whole lot of music with folks who came out of that scene, specifically ex 13th Floor Elevator guys. Some of that work from those bands eventually went to get large enough to become visible, The Moving Sidewalks prefigures ZZ Top, for instance. And so it's a bit easier to track. And some of the folks in that scene had longer careers, I used to work for a guy named Jay Boy Adams, who still performs in Santa Fe. All that happened before I was born in the late 1970s. But as it was told to me there are many dozens of other groups that were trying similar kinds of music, to varying degrees of success, many of which are barely even remembered by the people who were in those groups. Which is relatable to my own experience- sometimes some old project will come back in a memory, 3-4 folks who were on the same page artistically for a moment but then moved on. I personally enjoy that situation- it's been a long life and it's statistically only half-over, and the idea of forgetting even the bands I will perform with this month makes playing with them a lot easier. The stakes become so low that following whatever creative impulse becomes less of a feat of overcoming. At the same time, the music is both important enough that I can take hard-lines in my opinions and not have to worry about those boundaries biting me in the ass by preventing me from attaining some artistic recognition that will never come. All that is kind of immaterial to what I was intending to respond, which is that unless you can find the folks who were in that band (which is not unlikely) your quest to find the other tracks will likely be fruitless. You would have a lot easier time finding Dave Laredo and company (whoever that is) personally.

  • lordfrito · 42 minutes ago

    > If there were recordings at all, they probably ended up in a cardboard box in someone's flooded basement. At times, it's been kind of odd to think about how far all that goes back in time, like, probably as far as there have been people playing music. The idea that we could somehow track these incredibly short-lived events that touched a vanishingly small group of people at all would have a meaningful trace that you could pickup at a granular level is a bit odd to me. I think that's part of the excitement and wonder of this type of lost media. It perfectly captures a period/moment in time. We think we remember that time, but the details get smoothed over and lost in our memories. But many of those discrete details are captured on that old media. These old recordings are "of their time"... and for me it's fun to reach out and touch that past in a tangible way. To recognize how it still influences/echoes today. For example, my father sort of casually played acoustic guitar his entire life. You know, taking the guitar out when sitting around the campfire and playing a few songs. Turns out he and his friends "made music" while in high school in the 50s. I'm pretty sure it was just them noodling in someone's basement. But about 10 years ago one of his old friends contacted him, they had found a reel-to-reel tape that one of them made while they were goofing around so long ago. And they digitized it and sent him the mp3. Was an incredible thing to be a fly on the wall listening to these 1950's teenagers jamming and talking/laughing with each other in the way they did back then. I think preservation of lost media is critical for anyone trying to keep perspective in our modern age. Everything is so ephemeral now, and even nostalgia is repackaged and resold to us for profit or political influence. Lost media lets you experience some of it directly yourself, fly on the wall style, and I think it's one of the few ways we can keep a firm grasp on where we've come from, what we've lost, and what we've gained. > unless you can find the folks who were in that band (which is not unlikely) your quest to find the other tracks will likely be fruitless. You would have a lot easier time finding Dave Laredo and company (whoever that is) personally. Well I've found Dave L's website and channel on YouTube and have reached out, to no avail. Looks like the site hasn't been touched in 18 years. I also reached out to the owner of Throbbing Lobster records (their label), who has a storefront on Discogs. Again, no avail. I'm just excited for my find, and that these digital tracks eventually make their way to other Cowboy Mouth fans. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

• soperj · 43 minutes ago

  I think you need to try to find Chuck Warner from Brookline Mass, who was the record label founder (Throbbing Lobster) that put out Cowboys and Indians. Or try to find members of the band. • Dave Laredo – Vocals, guitar, producer (aka Dave Lichtenstein, worked a bunch with John Cale of Velvet Underground fame) • Steve Cohen – Bass, backing vocals • Julius Klepacz – Drums • Knut Bøhn – Keyboards, backing vocals

  • lordfrito · 39 minutes ago

    > I think you need to try to find Chuck Warner from Brookline Mass, who was the record label founder (Throbbing Lobster) that put out Cowboys and Indians. I did find his storefront on Discogs where he sells sells relics from that era and tried to contact him. Unfortunately he hasn't written me back. Thanks for the info... means I'm on the right track. https://www.discogs.com/user/chuckH2D

    • soperj · 23 minutes ago

      Like through his P.O. box? P.O. Box 351 Westminster, Massachusetts

If you like this kind of thing, you really need to listen to the podcast Reply All, episode 158 “The Case of the Missing Hit." In a nutshell a guy in California recalled a song he loved in the 1990s, basically some lyrics and the melody, but was unable to locate any record of the song online or anywhere else. What he did in an attempt to identify the song and the musician behind it is truly next level. It really was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve ever heard. https://soundcloud.com/replyall/158-the-case-of-the-missing-... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/158-the-case-of-the-mi... https://open.spotify.com/episode/0CaOGo6xSN51B2aLAQa1kU

• tobr · 3 hours ago

  If anyone asked me what my favorite podcast episode ever was, this would be it. Your comment very slightly spoils it though I think, it’s one of those stories that are best if you know very little going into it.

  • ilamont · 2 hours ago

    Fair point. Edited.

• sorentwo · 3 hours ago

  Came to share the same thing! I just listened to that episode on a road trip last week, it was fantastic. Absolutely worth a listen!

• altilunium · 2 hours ago

  > He and a music producer recreated the song haha. back then i also used this exact same method to search for a song i'd heard a long time ago (but i didn't know either the artist or the title). it wasn't really that complicated, since i just reproduced the chorus using a keyboard. turns out somebody on the forum knew the song and gave me the details, so i finally reunited with that song after decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMMRqCa2k0o

• x187463 · 2 hours ago

  This was my first thought so I scrolled to find this comment. It's a fantastic episode. It's a shame Reply All fell apart. However, PJ Vogt went on to make a new podcast called Search Engine and it's also great.

  • legitster · 2 hours ago

    It still breaks my heart that Reply All ended. I think it truly was the greatest podcast, and when it collapsed I began losing interest in podcasts all together.

> I created a prompt and dataset containing everything I knew - cover art, audio files, metadata and URLs for everything I had found, and gave it to one model. I instructed it to also keep a running log in an MD file with the investigation results – what it tried, what hadn’t worked, open hypotheses. This immediately invoked the old phrase, "bicycle for the mind" for me. I've had success with agents finding old bits of media I couldn't find on my own through search engines, but I've never taken it to the project management level like this. Hard problems require more intensive scaffolding, I suppose! To me, the AI is more of a side story here considering everything OP did, but it clearly was useful, even essential.

I lost a disc we bought from a busking vocal group of Mongolians in Amsterdam back in May of 1999. Also from same year from southern Mexico we got a bootleg NBA rap disc with different tracks than any official release. Burned disc that slowly failed but that we still have liner notes.

• bombcar · 3 hours ago

  Even counting "pressed CDs" or whatever you call non-burned ones, there are so many small runs that nobody has any evidence ever existed - nothing online. Often the only hint are the liner notes and sometimes a manufacturing code on the center of the disc - and if it's broken, there's no recovery.

See also the fantastic movie "Searching for Sugar Man" (the less you know about it going in, the better -- I recommend avoiding the trailer if possible)

So is there a way I can listen to the songs that captured your attention for so long ?

• JoshGG · 2 hours ago

  Ok I found it at the end of the article ! Scroll to the bottom for links. If you want to hear the track that started all this, you can hear it on YouTube or Apple Music.

> this song is something a band would drop on a 3rd album, not the 1st album. It’s too mature I would crash out if I got feedback like that lmao

Way, way pre-WWW I was at an REM concert when the lyrics were suddenly wrong, "I did not invent this world" snuck in somehow. My friends didn't notice, didn't recall it. Six years later I'm riding my bike through a bar-heavy area in a large city, and I hear a snippet of that same lyric somewhere, where? I went to every bar there the next six months, until I heard it across the street. Went to the manager, then another one, then another one, until I got the answer. Future 40s, Syd Straw, with Michael Stipe, on Golden Palaminos. Of course. It was maybe 1991 by now. I told my friends years later, and and nobody had any idea what was talking about.