There’s an entire corner of the internet where song sleuths spend hours trying to identify songs of unknown origin. Among these quests was the track dubbed “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet,” which, after years of fruitless searching, was identified as Subways of Your Mind by a German band called Fex. A forty-year riddle had been cracked.
The song, a mostly unremarkable example of European synth-pop, became famous only because of its obscurity. In the digital age with lyric searches, Shazam, and other online tools, how was it possible for a song to be truly unknown, especially if so many people were looking for it? Once the chase was on, a lot of prestige rode on whoever won.
For their part, Fex had no idea that their 80s track had become the Holy Grail of “lostwave,” those orphaned songs of unknown origin and provenance that float around the Internet, ignored by all except those determined to find the answer. In the case of Fex, they’re delighted. In fact, they’ve reunited, started playing gigs, and have even had “Subways of Your Mind” placed in a film or two.
Now that one mystery has been solved, song sleuths have turned to another: A Canadian song (allegedly) called (allegedly) CIA that (allegedly) taped off the radio onto cassette when it was (allegedly) played on CFNY/Toronto in (allegedly) mid-to-late 1984.
The prevailing theory is that this is some band from somewhere in Southern Ontario that may have entered one of the station’s talent searches, called The Great Ontario Talent Search, a winter project that ran between October 1984 and February 1985 and typically received more than a thousand entries annually.
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Or the song appeared on a cassette to be played on CFNY’s indie music show, The Streets of Ontario, which was devoted to indie music and emerging talent. I have no idea where all those cassettes are now, but if an archive exists somewhere, it would contain thousands upon thousands of tapes.
CIA, or whatever it’s called (Coming Home? This Winter?), received its second life around 2020 when it was uploaded to YouTube and has since been viewed nearly 600,000 times.
This is what everyone is wondering about. Disregard the artwork; that’s just a placeholder by whoever uploaded the song to YouTube.
Here it is again, but in what appears to be a sped-up version. Confusing things is this post that features audio from Subways of Your Mind by Fex. That led some to believe that CIA had been positively identified. It hasn’t.
I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve received about this song. I’ve consulted with all of my old CFNY colleagues, combed through the original CFNY library (most of which sits in my basement, but that’s another story), and gone back through any station playlists that still exist. Liz Janik, the co-host of The Streets of Ontario back in ’84, kept meticulous records and has nothing to offer. We have come up with nothing, so you can stop the emails.
Except that the CIA hunters will not give up. The CBC recently picked up on the story and suggested that the song might have roots in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. I’ve also had a couple of messages from people who back up the theory.
The latest comes from a mysterious lostwave hunter who goes by the name Riff. He/she/it (there are hints that some sort of AI agent is involved) has been compiling a paper trail to find who is behind CIA. With permission, I share the following.
CIA was first uploaded to YouTube and then re-uploaded in 2021, which pointed to some involvement with The Great Ontario Talent Search. Further research indicates that our artist was one of approximately 90 unsigned bands from Southern Ontario. No one has a list of those acts.
Riff went through 63 issues of RPM, the one-time bible of the Canadian radio and recorded music industry. He also scoured the issues from Oct 1983 through Dec 1984. No luck.
The winner of the 1984 Great Ontario Talent Search is lost to history — at least as far as I can tell, based on searches of my CFNY archives that still exist in the homes of co-workers. Any documentation we uncovered left the winner field blank. I started at CFNY in 1986, so this pre-dates me, meaning that I wouldn’t have the cassette anywhere in my personal archives.
A tracklisting cassette issued with the winners for that year’s Great Ontario Talent Search. Those finalists were MIA, Tibet, Europa, and Zip Zip. Four answered inquiries and were ruled out. The fifth finalist, Sample & Hold, flatly said it wasn’t them but did say the song “sounds familiar as a GOTS band. The sixth band on the tracklisting? We don’t know. It was left blank.
A letter asking one of the 1985 judges, J.J. Macrae, who the sixth finalist was (and who won ’84) went out. No answer despite a follow-up.
This is geeky: the synth intro to CIA runs on a strings preset from a Korg Poly-800 — which rules out any release date before 1983, the year that synth hit the market
Who taped the song? Unknown. That person’s identity has been protected since 2021. Interesting, given that person might be the key to the mystery.
That’s all I’ve got, but Riff is offering the entire search dossier (i.e., the entire paper trail) for $30. If you’re the kind of person who wants to dig into this, drop me a line at [email protected], and I’ll put you in touch. Meanwhile, there’s an entire lostwave wiki entry on CIA that purports to contain all the latest on the search for this song.
That’s it. I swear it’s all I’ve got. And given all the attention this matter is getting, I’m surprised no one has come forward yet. The mystery may never be solved–but if it happened for Fex and Subways of Your Mind after more than four decades, nothing is impossible.
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