A phenomena I find somewhat interesting but am not too heavily into is the subject of lost media or, more correctly in this case, unidentified media; a scene commonly called “Lost Wave.” This usually comes in the form of song clips that no one can identify, often recorded years ago on audio cassette from the radio or from the TV, like I used to do as a kid, but really they can come from anywhere: random YouTube videos, old TV shows, anything can be a source for the initial sample to be hunted for. Hell, there’s a few tracks out there on YouTube that I’d love to have identified myself, but as I said, I’m not super into the whole scene and thus don’t approach it for help in identifying such. In fact, I got curious just now and found one video which contained a track I was wondering about has since been privated and I don’t believe I made a copy of the audio, so that may well be lost to me forever… but I digress.
Over the past couple of years, much of what I’ll call the unidentified media community was curious about a song that was given the name “Ulterior Motive / Everyone Knows That” by the community, based on what was audible in a low quality 18 second sample.
It’s a pretty typical throw-away 80’s track that sounded honestly more like it was from a commercial than anything else — some kind of TV programming or something of that nature, for sure, and not so much a polished album release or anything of that nature.
Last week it was finally found, and the source was unexpected. Apparently the song features in an 80’s porn film. Apparently the people on the hunt for the song had done some searching based on the “Ulterior Motives” suspected song name and came across the name of a man by the name of Christopher Booth who happened to have made music for porn films in the 80’s and, after a user scoured them one by one he found it: An hour into the film “Angels of Passion” it was there. The song was found.
We know who made it, and have a complete in-film cut of the song, including all the moaning that was going on. Yeah, apparently the sample given happened to be a part not containing the sounds of sexual escapades from 40 years ago. Almost seems intentional, like this whole thing was planted as a challenge but eh, I don’t care one way or the other. I am interested in the fact that Chris Booth is apparently working on re-creating the song, so that will be cool to check out once it’s available.
This discovery, though, combined with many other recently found music tracks, does bring a hope that my personal favorite bit of unknown media, a song commonly called “Like The Wind” recorded from West German radio in the 80’s may well be identified finally. We do have a few full copies of that song, all from the same original source apparently, but to know who made it is really the focus, since it’s just such a cool song, to me and many others: it, having been a subject of investigation since the early 2000’s, being commonly called the “Most Mysterious Song On The Internet.”
Back to Ulterior Motives, however. Yeah, it’s cool it was found but I honestly don’t much care for the song. Like, at all. I see people talking about how amazing it is and I just can’t see it. Trust me, I like some garbage music. 80’s pop is right up there in the stuff you could play all day and I wouldn’t grow too bored of it, but Ulterior Motives is just… not very good to me. Maybe it would be a little more enjoyable if the source we had wasn’t pulled from a cheap VHS tape of an 80’s porn flick, but eh, composition is only so-so to me and all in all it just isn’t my kind of thing. Maybe the new version that is apparently being worked on will give me a better appreciation for the track.
In whatever case, here’s the full song, moaning and all.