340 points | 3d ago | Discuss on Hacker News | Back to Radar
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
(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.
Can’t believe how many of my band crushes from my iPod days were Canadian!
Post the lyrics here, let's get this figured out.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_of_Your_Mind#Online_se...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22636989 2020 (82 comments)
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.
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.
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
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
Check the CD you still own. Look at the catalogue number on the spine and count the tracks. If it really has 20 or more score cues, that would be a genuine find, and I’d love to know the catalogue number and label. No catalogued release matches that.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/9865u4/wha...
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...
My dad loved Deep Purple so thats probably where the seed planted. lol
The Stranger Things final season teaser would have solved it for you.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
• 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
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.
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...
Absolutely worth a listen!
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.
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.
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.
If you want to hear the track that started all this, you can hear it on YouTube or Apple Music.
I would crash out if I got feedback like that lmao
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.
Back in the late 60s (IIRC) two songs from the radio stuck in my head and would not move until I found out what they were.
One turned out to be Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. Finally finding out what the song was was fantastic. The other turned out - after at least two decades! - to be "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" by Napoleon XIV. It seems nuts that a song would have such an influence on a young mind and be on tap, waiting for recognition, for so long.
But seriously, having heard something like that on Dr Demento while you're trapped in the back of a car during a 8 hour trip to grandma's and then trying to find a copy of it somewhere which involved asking every music section/record store clerk you came across for the next 8 years, makes you remember that we really are living in an incredible time...
This is a long shot but I used to have a book I bought from CPS, Nobel Elementary book sale to be exact. It was a series of stories that left an impact on me. The two stories I remember the most: one, of a kid shaving with his dad and learning to whistle; two, of aliens coming to earth and thinking cars are bugs. I don't remember the contents of the stories much, but I loved the artwork. I've gone down rabbit holes and I've looked at book collections like "Impressions By William K. Durr 1978 Houghton Mifflin Hardcover" and the like but no dice. I believe it also has a story of 3 goats. Anyway, if anyone knows, would appreciate the KT.
I bought it in 1st grade so it was for little kids. It was a textbook for sure because I remember the name list behind the cover and wondering why it was never used. I read it over and over again for years.
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shahidhussain (author) 3d ago on HN
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 3d ago on HN
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 (author) 3d ago on HN
doctoboggan 14h ago on HN
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 6h ago on HN
joshvm 14h ago on HN
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 13h ago on HN
pcthrowaway 11h ago on HN
dkdbejwi383 9h ago on HN
longwave 9h ago on HN