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Subways of Your Mind

"Subways of Your Mind" is a single by German new wave band Fex, recorded in 1984. In 1985, a demo cassette tape containing the song was released to promote the band's live tour across Northern and Central Germany, with the tape itself being primarily sold at the tour. On 18 March 2007, a cassette tape recording from a radio broadcast in the mid-1980s was uploaded online and garnered significant attention. The song remained unidentified, even after being uploaded to the Internet, prompting a 17-year-long search to identify the artist and song title. During this search, the song earned the nickname "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet".

Composition
In an interview shortly after the song had been found, Fex's keyboardist, Michael Hädrich, gave an account of the song's inspiration and meaning: == Recordings ==
Recordings
Studio Three different studio recordings of Subways of Your Mind are known to exist. The first time the song was recorded was in June 1984, about a month before the NDR version, at the practice room building of the band, located in Heikendorf. This recording is of worse sound quality than the later recordings due to have been recorded from a microphone next to a bass amp, and due to time. The bassist on this recording is Jörg Lemcke, who also provided the recording. Michael Hädrich was not present for this rehearsal, and as such does not play on this recording. The second recording of the song took place between the rehearsal and studio sessions. It was once believed to have been released in 1983 with Volker Schenk, the bassist who preceded Lemcke in Fex, due to his remembering about it and an alleged vinyl release, but this was proven false by Jörg Lemcke, who recalled the day Rückwardt first came up with the song and started rehearsing it with the band. This therefore debunked the possibility of the song being recorded in 1983 or with Volker, as he had left to join a jazz band before the song was composed. On 8 April 2026, new information about the session in which the song was recorded was revealed, proving that Lemcke was the bassist for this recording. It was also confirmed that an Ibanez Jazz Bass was used during the recording of those tracks. Prior to the discovery, it was rumored that the bassist was either Rückwardt or Lemcke. This recording, named "NDR recording" by the community, was recorded in "Löffel studio", a name used by Hase, Fex's sound engineer at the time, to qualify any place where he kept his mixing equipment, while the session took place in the same practice room as the rehearsal. This is the version of the song that was aired on NDR, although the band has no idea how it was broadcast there. The intro on this recording is shorter than the other two, and this recording has a fade-out ending. On one of the copies, the beginning of a new keyboard part can be heard. According to Hädrich, each copy of the song had an individual fadeout. The third and professional studio recording of this song, which is featured on their 1985 EP sold during their tour, was recorded in November 1984 at Hawkeye Studios in Ganderkesee, produced by Jeff Burke and mixed by Hase. The longer intro and ending from the Heikendorf recording are kept, with NDR keyboard parts being kept and developed. The bassist on this recording is Norbert Ziermann. which predates the Heikendorf rehearsal session, and was recorded during a performance in a show room named Lutterbeker. It features the same lineup as Heikendorf rehearsal, although Rückwardt's wife Ilona performs backing vocals on the recording, and Michael Hädrich appears on keyboard. It was revealed to have been found in Rückwardt's rack of tapes, which have yet to be released. The second live recording was recorded on March 20, 1985, during a performance in the town of Uelzen, and features the same lineup as the one on the 1984 studio recording. It is planned to be released in May 2026. The third live recording was a performance made on May 25, 1985, at the Roxy in Paderborn. The lineup here is the same as the previous performance. This particular recording was the first to surface online, after Hädrich provided it to the lostwave community in order to prove the authenticity of Fex, and was released on streaming in December 2024. The fourth live recording was an acoustic performance on NDR 1, performed on November 7, 2024, after the band had been identified and rediscovered. Sievers had not joined Fex at the time, and the recording does not have any drums. The fifth and most recent live recording was recorded at Lutteberker on 14 June 2025, and is the first live performance of the song since at least 1985. Sievers had left Fex by this point, and the drums are provided by Hädrich's drum machine. == Radio broadcast ==
Radio broadcast
A German teenager named Darius S. (from Wilhelmshaven) recorded the song from a German public radio station program in the 1980s. He recorded the song on a cassette tape and made a mixtape, which also included songs from XTC and the Cure. To get clean recordings of songs, Darius purposely removed dialogue from the radio hosts, which is likely why the exact airplay date and the title were unknown. Later on, Fex determined the song was probably broadcast at the beginning of September 1984, having no idea in which show or how the song could be broadcast on the NDR. == Online search ==
Online search
In 2004, Darius' older sister, Lydia H., bought him a website domain as a birthday present, which he used to raise awareness of the unidentified songs in his collection. He then digitized his radio recordings, saving the songs as .aiff and .m4a files, and uploaded them to his site, named Unknown Pleasures after the 1979 album by English post-punk band Joy Division. On March 18, 2007, Lydia began her online search for the song on a Usenet group, but later migrated to websites with song identification tools. She posted a 1:15 excerpt of the song to best-of-80s.de (a German forum devoted to eighties synth-pop) and to The Spirit of Radio (a fan site dedicated to Canadian radio station CFNY-FM). Searchers made contact with individuals potentially pertinent to the search, such as NDR disc jockey Paul Baskerville, German performance rights organization GEMA, and YouTube channel "80zforever", which posts obscure music. Although no new leads came of it, it did make Lydia and Darius aware of the new wave of investigation, and Lydia subsequently became involved with the Reddit community in August. There had been some speculation that the song was recorded in 1984, since most of the other songs on the cassette tape were released around that time. Further evidence for this is that the Technics tape deck which Darius S. likely used to record the song was manufactured that year. One article from March 2021 claimed that the song was likely written and performed by Viennese singer Christian Brandl and drummer Ronnie Urini in 1983, with both German and English versions. The song would have been recorded in the studio of the late Fred Jakesch on Mariahilferstraße in Vienna. Alto saxophonist Heinz Hochrainer said he was present for a planned saxophone element, but that was never recorded. A preliminary mix of the song then would have made its way to a radio station in 1984. Urini corroborated the story and also provided an old typewritten version of the German lyrics as evidence. However, Robert Wolf, Brandl's musical colleague and the frontman of their band Chuzpe, invalidated the argument, saying that he did not recognize Brandl's voice in the song and that the drums sounded more like an electronic drum machine than Urini. Following the discovery of the song's name and band, Urini claimed to the press that the recordings that surfaced were forged by AI, and that he did not want to be further involved with the search. == Viral internet phenomenon ==
Viral internet phenomenon
On May 27, 2019, Australian music news website Tone Deaf wrote the earliest article focusing on the song, with author Tyler Jenke discussing the preliminary stages of the search for the track and noting that the search was similar to a 2013 search for a song which was ultimately identified as "On the Roof", the English version of "Lämna någonting kvar" by Swedish musician Johan Lindell. Between 2019 and 2021, American YouTuber Justin Whang posted five episodes of his series Tales from the Internet discussing the song and the progress of the search. His videos further galvanized Internet users to contribute to the effort to identify the song. In March 2023, the song was used in MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod posted to the Doomworld forums by the pseudonymous user "Veddge". As described in PC Gamer, "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". The song's cryptic nature led it to be widely associated with the "liminal space" internet aesthetic. == Identification and aftermath ==
Identification and aftermath
On November 4, 2024, Reddit user u/marijn1412 claimed to have identified the song as "Subways of Your Mind" by the German band Fex. While researching bands who participated in Hörfest, an annual event highlighting lesser-known musical artists, the user contacted a Fex band member listed in an issue of the German newspaper . According to the user, the band member confirmed that Fex was the creator of the song and planned to re-release it as a result of it being unearthed. One member of Fex, Michael Hädrich, confirmed the story to German tabloid tz, while the band's lead singer, Ture Rückwardt, participated in an interview with the Kiel newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, further corroborating the story. On November 7, 2024, three of the four original members of the band, Hädrich, Rückwardt and bassist Norbert Ziermann, performed an acoustic version of the song for the German radio station NDR 1 Welle Nord in Kiel. Sievers had not yet rejoined Fex at the time and was absent from this recording, which does not feature any drums. The song later made a licensed appearance in the 2025 horror film Black Phone 2; the film is set in 1982, and an early scene has the character Finney (Mason Thames) watching an episode of the variety series Night Flight, which airs a "Subways of Your Mind" music video. On October 1, 2025, the band officially released the music video for the song, featuring Darius as a special guest. == Track listing ==
Track listing
Studio version TMMS version == Personnel ==
Personnel
Studio versions • Ture Rückwardt – composer, lead vocals, guitar), Practice room rehearsal version) Live versions • Ture Rückwardt – lead vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar (2024 NDR Unplugged performance) • Norbert Ziermann – bass, acoustic bass guitar (2024 NDR Unplugged performance) • Michael Hädrich – keyboards, electric guitar, backing vocals, acoustic guitar (2024 NDR Unplugged performance), drum machine (2025 Lutterbeker concert) • Hans-Reimer Sievers – drums (1980s concerts) • Jörg Lemcke – bass (1984 Lutterbeker concert) • Ilona Rückwardt – backing vocals (1984 Lutterbeker concert) == See also ==
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