Nonetheless, Roloff has began the slow, laborious process of listening back to all his cassettes, most of which aren’t dated and simply have handwritten notations like “Deutsch New Wave” or “New Power Musik.” “This needs a lot of time,” he admits.
“I really liked the song,” Vieira says, “so I started searching intensively until I found something relevant.”Vieira uploaded bluuue’s clip of the song onto his own YouTube channel and a handful of On Reddit and Discord (a popular chat-room site for gamers), several thousand users got in on the pursuit, posting theories and possible contact info, and dissecting the song in ways that would rival the most dedicated Dylanologists.
There are also many false leads generated by trolls: Hopes were raised when one poster said he knew the band and its name, but those dreams turned to despair when the person wrote it was the last song the mystery band made “before all being shot dead while attempting to climb over the wall and escape to West Berlin.”In late August, Darius came home from work, switched on the radio and heard a report on German media about the search, followed by the song itself. “I’m amazed at the energy devoted to this online,” says B. George of the Archive of Contemporary Music, a music library and research center in New York that was contacted by the Reddit group.
It will take a few months to produce but finally their first independently released 5 song CD is released in 1992. Amateur detectives have spent thousands of hours since trying to figure out where it came from — with little luck. “Guitar, synths and gothic vocals are something that always interested me,” he says.
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“It was just one of many songs I recorded and didn’t know the artist,” he says.
“It sounds like the bad English that Germans might sing,” he says, “but it could be Polish or Russian.
Very soon it became clear that the search was based on my own attempts to find the song: In 2007 I had much free time at some point and so I had the idea to support my brother in finding the song.
Close your eyes and you can imagine a music video: awkwardly lip-synching musicians, exploding lightbulbs, foggy streets. )That portion of the song bounced around on the web — Nicolás Zúñiga of Dead Wax, an indie label that specializes in synth-pop and post-punk bands, was among those who heard it and were entranced by it — but no one stepped forward to claim credit or supply any useful background about its origins or creators.