What is ‘Lostwave’? The internet’s lunatic obsession with tracing ‘lost’ music

It sounds like a hit single half-remembered from your childhood. Eighties-style synths and electronic handclaps lead into a ghostly new-wave vocal. If it wasn’t for the tape hiss, you could be listening to an early Roxette tune or a version of Kim Carnes’s Bette Davis Eyes from an alternate universe.

But this 17-second snippet is not a smash from yesteryear − a melody buried away in the part of your brain reserved for old Top of the Pops highlights or a Now… That’s What I Call Music! cassette discovered down the back of a sofa.

It is, rather, a mystery that has gripped a significant segment of the internet for the past several years − or at least it did until the puzzle was finally solved.

The track is widely referred to as Everyone Knows That and is perhaps the highest-profile example of the genre known as “Lostwave”. This refers to obscure recordings, often culled from DVD menus, Japanese TV ads or video game scores, that have floated around the web like digital banshees −their provenance uncertain, the identity of the performers shrouded in murk.

The thrill for the thousands of Lostwave geeks who gather on forums such as Reddit or website WatZatSong comes from joining the cyber-dots and cracking the riddle. In the case of Everyone Knows That, however, even the most ardent amateur detectives were frustrated at every turn.

“Why are people obsessed with it?” one redditor wondered to Rolling Stone. “On one hand, it’s an incredibly catchy and recognisable tune, while on the other hand loaded with mystery. Especially [in the 21st century], with everything digitised and music freely available, it’s probably very interesting to a lot of young people that this song is seemingly untraceable.”

Everyone Knows That was first brought to the internet’s attention by a WatZatSong user named Carl92, who found it “between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup”. Across cyberspace, sleuths sprang into action, though this led to an outbreak of trolling and “doxing” (revealing someone’s real-life identity) on Reddit.

“It is OK to question folks, press for proof, and keep those that claim they have leads accountable until they either get debunked or are found as a hoax,” said the moderator of a Reddit forum dedicated to Everyone Knows That. “This keeps integrity to the search. Being a troll in people’s [direct messages] does not.”

The trolls will have to find another source of amusement because the mystery has now finally been solved.

There were theories Everyone Knows That was an obscure pop song from central Europe or the former Soviet Union − or that it came from a forgotten video game. In fact, it comes from a 1986 pornographic film, as discovered by a Reddit user when watching a different Eighties porn movie with a score uncannily similar to “EKT”.

Having no other choice, he forced himself to sit through a number of other 1980s “pornos” with the same ­listed soundtrack composers. Finally, he stumbled upon Everyone Knows That −which is actually called Ulterior Motives, as featured in the movie Angels of Passion.

The reveal surprised everyone − even its composers, twins Christopher and Philip Booth, who had a murky history as Canadian prog rockers who once played in a band with Bryan Adams.

“Ulterior Motives was recorded around 1986, it was recorded as a pop song, and then to make money − we were just doing anything to make money, because we were musicians,” Christopher told Rolling Stone. “Even worse today, trying to make any money. We took jobs working on movies, like as production assistants, in the art department, we did some really big films. And then there was a friend of ours that was doing adult movies and they needed somebody to do craft services and move stuff around.”

He and his brother moved on and ended up making paranormal documentaries for the SyFy Channel and low-budget horror movies for Sony.

“People started writing ‘release EKT’ or Ulterior Motives and I’m going, ‘What’s that?’. I didn’t remember the song at all, that’s 40 years ago. And then it got crazy. Someone sent me a link to [a Rolling Stone article about the song]. And then I went, ‘Oh, yeah’. Then I heard the song and I went ‘Oh yeah, that’s us’. That’s how we found out.”

The twins plan to release a polished version of Everyone Know That − minus the tape hiss. But now that the mystery is solved, does it have the same aura?

Part of the appeal of Lostwave music, surely, is that it is, indeed, lost.

“With the internet, especially younger generations who have grown up with it, you have this notion that you can find anything easily,”one Lostwave fan on Reddit told Dazed. “Then when you can’t, that’s a really interesting thing. Why can’t we find it?”

“We live in a time when knowledge is freely available to us and we can consume music without much restriction,”agreed a moderator of the Lostwave forum when speaking to another website. “Music that is lost in pre-internet times is likely very interesting to younger people, because it’s such a foreign thing to them, to not be able to simply look up the song.”

Still, if one puzzle is deciphered, others remain. One track has proved especially challenging to the Lostwave community. The white whale of ghost ditties is a Joy Division-meets-Toto clip known simply as “The Most Mysterious Song On the Internet”. As with Everyone Knows That, it sounds like it has beamed in from a dystopian ’80s netherworld.

The origin story is that it was tapped off the radio in Germany 40 years ago, though even basic facts about the composition are uncertain.

“Everything about this song is mysterious, from the creation to the lyrics to where it played on the radio,” Lostwave sleuth Mkll revealed to Rolling Stone. “It’s not often that songs of this age are dug up, and the fact that a search has been happening for over a decade on the internet really made this case unique.”

The tune was allegedly broadcast on local radio in north Germany in 1984 − and taped on to cassette by a then-teenage Darius S (who wants to keep his real name secret). “It was just one of many songs I recorded and didn’t know the artist,”he says. “I believe I didn’t hear an announcement. Maybe I heard it partially and missed the artist’s name.”

In 2007, his sister posted the track online, curious if anyone recognised it. They thought they did − it ­sounded familiar, a song you might have listened to with your parents or encountered as background music on holidays. Nostalgia was playing a trick: the ditty was a mystery. The vocals were hard to decipher: some thought the singer was crooning “like the wind”. Yet if the truth is out there the internet has yet to find it.

“I think the fact that I’m so interested in this isn’t even because of the song itself − it’s understanding why this song is so mysterious and why nobody can find anything about it,” Lostwave enthusiast Gabriel da Silva Vieira told Rolling Stone. “It’s simply surreal.”

But that’s the fun of Lostwave − the not knowing. “The idea of a song being once popular and decades later being unidentified with only a snippet being circulated is genuinely something that both interests me and invokes a sense of uncanny valley,”one Lostwave fan told Dazed, summing up the appeal of the genre. “It’s just a really unique side of the internet.”

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