I will pay $200 to anyone who can find this song for me

You're probably about to say "undo, I know you're not rich, I can't take your money at a time like this." Don't bother with this. You know you can take it, or you know someone else who needs it right now. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I last actually heard this song back in 2002 or 2003, maybe as recently as 2004 but I really can't say. It has been playing in my head almost continuously since then and I would really love some help in tracking it down. "I would love some help" is a huge understatement but rather than elaborate on that, I hope that the degree of my desire here doesn't require any additional explanation.

My first halfhearted attempt to do this was in a blog post I wrote back in 2008. My old music blog is still online, it's terrible and embarrassing... but honestly not as bad as I thought it would be when I spent a few minutes skimming through it (I can't forbid you from doing this but I don't advise it, mainly I'd really like it if we could stay on task here). This entry is not actually about the song that's listed in the blog entry's title (a song from 1989 by Barbara Manning, listen to it if you want but it has almost nothing to do with our main objective). I'm looking for a song that was on a mixtape I got back then, "Mark E. Smith & Brix" was on there along with it, that's really all there is to the premise of this old post you're about to read.

I'm going back to this post because, even twelve years after I wrote it, it pretty much sums up my problem and is the best place for me to start explaining what I'm looking for. Some of this writing is awful but I'm not censoring my younger self in order to save face.

http://burningsled.blogspot.com/2008/06/barbara-manning-mark-e-smith-brix.html

I will paste the entire entry here if you don't feel like clicking the link (YouTube links were not originally in this entry but have been edited in where appropriate):

The first message board I ever belonged to was the Stereolab Correspondence discussion forum, which finally went offline sometime in 2002 or 2003. To get a quick idea of what it looked like, its closest cousin is the still-kicking Pavement Message Board, running on the same turn-of-the century template that SC used. It was a casual board -- the Internet wasn't Serious Business yet -- that didn't require registration, hadn't enabled image posting, and predated the rise of filesharing by a few years, so everyone had to come up with other ways to make it a fun experience. Thus, between 1999 and 2000, the Stereolab Correspondence tape-trading circle was born.

My mixes? Total garbage. And the shipping was a major pain given how my place in the circle placed me just behind someone in Australia. But once a month or so I'd get the coolest, weirdest tapes in the mail, full of songs that I'd never have heard otherwise, even today with the entire history of music seemingly at my fingertips. Sadly, though not surprisingly, the circle broke down within less than a year's time, though before the rise of Napster and other p2p programs. But no, it wasn't new technology that brought down our time-tested tradition. Just laziness.

I came into possession of 2 or 3 of the tapes by the end, which I continued to listen to for a few years' time before either losing them during a move or throwing them out during some furious cleaning session. Oh, how I wish I could find them again! I'm forever lost, trying to find some of the songs that I heard on those, and without anything more than a few fragments of melody in my mind to go on. It's a really terrible situation to be in, trying so hard to recall what was written on the back of one cassette in particular, remembering about half of the tracks, which included:

A Tribe Called Quest - Electric Relaxation
The Fall - Kurious Oranj
Barbara Manning - Mark E. Smith & Brix
Flowchart - New Radiolab Rip-off
McCarthy - Should The Bible Be Banned
Stereolab - Heavy Denim
Flin Flon - Upper Ferry

Towards the end of side two, there was a real dreamy, mellow track that was primarily instrumental, aside from some voices fading in and out of the mix, cooing and humming like some kind of male Cocteau Twins or something. There were keyboards and a nice beat; altogether, it sounded like Tarwater or Seefeel or some other Rough Trade-ish group, but despite all my research into this and other possibilities (To Roccoco Rot? Moonshake?) I still haven't been able to track it down. I remember enjoying it immensely during all the times I would play the tape in my room, in the car, and on the stereo in the bathroom while I'd shower, but either the tape was labeled incorrectly or it just never occurred to me to clearly look it over to see who the artist or artists behind this fantastic track were. Even if I had figured it out, the Internet was still years away from making this information very useful. Downloading music was still a huge pain and if there were lots of helpful mailorder sites out there, I wasn't able to find them.

At one point, I know there was a page (under construction?) designed to catalog and list all the songs on everyone's mixes. That was surely lost to time at least 5 or 6 years ago, if it was ever finshed at all. It's not linked to or mentioned in the archived pages of the forum, though my earliest attempts at boarding are faithfully preserved in all their incomprehensible and painful glory. The art at the top of this post shows off the misspelling that ran on all the board's banners for the first year or so before it was corrected. Whether or not this was an intentional pun is something I've always wondered but will now never know.

Anyway, I've tried my best to retrace my steps, to get in contact with members of that board who may remember the tape, should it have passed through their hands on the way to mine. I forget that most people out there, even the ones on music message boards, eventually find themselves with real lives and probably won't remember the tracklisting of a mixtape they may have heard in passing more than 8 years before. At least I remembered, or at least I strongly suspected, the screenname of the person who made the tape. She was the moderator of the discussion board, and after some creative cyber-sleuthing on my part, I was able to track her down.

She died more than two years ago. Looks like she was also part of a Belle and Sebastian mailing list/forum that's also long since passed. Hard to believe there was a time when fans actually made websites for the bands they like. Almost all of these have gone offline or been abandoned in recent years, replaced by cookie-cutter Myspace pages populated by manically-friending camerawhore kids. Yes, I understand that the spirit of an age is something to which one cannot return, but I can't help but mourn the past when I look at the state that we're in now. And I can't help but wonder if feelings like this are a good sign that I'm reaching the end of my Internet existence as I know it. As I try to keep up with the changing face of things, I feel a kind of cultural fatigue setting in and start to wonder if my ideals in the shadow world of the Internet are really worth pursuing any longer.

The Barbara Manning song that was on her tape is really good, and worth sharing here even though I have nothing to say about it. Now if only I could find the rest of the songs in the mix! Oh, if only I could whistle or hum the melody that's in my head, maybe then some helpful soul out there could point me in the right direction. The problem is, there are two or three melodies in this song going on at once, and faithfully reproducing just one of them is almost too much of a challenge in itself. Should I grow more desperate, I may attempt this, despite the promise that I'd look like an utter fool in doing so. This seems to be a quest that's going to take a lifetime for me to complete. I'm far from giving up my search, but how long can I keep on?

How long can I keep on? Much longer than I ever thought I would!

Because I heard this song somewhere between 2000 and 2002, obviously it's not going to be any more recent than that. I'm very confident that this song was released sometime between 1995 and 2002 (probably between 1995 and 2000 but I don't have proof and I don't want to place false restrictions on this search). It's got a very electronic shoegaze vibe, not very "post-rock" in any way that the term is used today or back then. I'm forever associating it with this song by Tarwater because it probably came out around the same time and had a similarly warm feeling to it. This song is quite the outlier in Tarwater's catalog so I'm confident that it is not a song by Tarwater.

Also, it is not a song by Stereolab or any related projects. It is not a song by Broadcast. It's very much a shoegaze(-ish) song, but I don't remember if there were any guitars on it. It is not a song by My Bloody Valentine. Having heard 99% of the music made by Mouse on Mars during this time period, I am very certain that it is probably not a song by Mouse on Mars. Just getting some of those suggestions out of the way here. This is certainly online somewhere but the Internet is completely worthless in trying to find it (Discogs will recommend you the same 20 albums over and over, Pitchfork has nothing to say about this era of music, anyone who wasn't "there" just inherits the same narrative and a knowledge of "important" artists whose work has never been hard to find). It is not a song by Slowdive.

This is not a song by Seefeel but I'd be surprised if people who heard this and loved it weren't also into Seefeel a lot. I have not heard everything from Cocteau Twins but I definitely don't hear Elizabeth Fraser on this song at all (I don't want to get too hung on up CT, they're not prime suspects here). And again, I don't really remember how guitars figure into this song (if at all), it was very synthesizer and sample-driven. I was excited to find that there's actually a Cocteau Twins EP where Mark Clifford of Seefeel remixes their songs, but of course it's not from that recording at all.

Here's a recording of me playing the melody of this song, as I remember it, on a used keyboard I bought at Goodwill a few years ago and had in a box in the garage ever since we moved in here five years ago. I have no musical training and have never played this instrument before, this is really sloppy (I am not a musician!). It's also the first time I've recorded myself doing anything for the Internet. I recall this being the main melody of the track, there is surely more to it but this is all I can try to recreate:



I have no idea what tone to use for the notes, they all sound terrible and I can't pick one that evokes the actual sound of this melody. Ignore the beat, I was just trying to play along with something, there's no thump to this song at all.

Playing "below" that melody, there's a second melody that's made up of wordless male and female vocals combined into a single sound. In my memory, it is very reminiscent of what's happening on this track (focus on the vocals and definitely ignore the beats):



I had never heard this song until very recently and I was really taken aback because I'd never heard anyone make music like this before! I've listened to everything else that Sweet Trip made in the late 90s and very early 2000s. The song I'm looking for is not at song by Sweet Trip. But noticing that this release was part of the Darla Records "Bliss Out" series really piqued my interest. Do I need to listen to everything that was released under that "series" (again, I don't really understand what this series was but nevertheless, it's still a Thing that bares investigation). With that in mind, I knew I ought to due my diligence and dig into all that music... but that's been my attitude for the past dozen-plus years here. I'm not going to find this on my own and that glorious moment of just suddenly stumbling across it is nothing but a pipe dream. I am going to check out more of these records, but I am sure that this is not a song by Windy & Carl. If you have heard any of these albums or other albums by these artists, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

I don't know if this is an original song or a remix of something. There was a lot of stuff coming out around this time that sounded like this:



Again, I don't remember any lyrics to this song but there were definitely vocals. It's possible they were wholly synthesized, or perhaps a blend of "real" and synthesized vocals. I only ever heard this on a mixtape that had already been played quite a bit by the time it landed in my mailbox, so I was never listening to an ideal version of it.

It means a lot to me to find this, maybe I can't put a price tag on it, maybe what I offered above is actually really cheap given how much this means to me. Maybe I'll find this song and I'll still feel empty inside? I don't know, someone help me!

I will answer any question you have about this, don't hold back. Maybe you think know nothing about this niche of music that I'm describing (and hopefully not painting us too far into a corner with), but your ideas could still bear fruit, you never know!

This is a long shot but I really don't know where else to turn anymore.

I mean... I guess I just love you and hope that you figure this out.

Not sure

Does it go, ‘Mmmhmm him?’

Elizabeth Fraser singing on someone else's record has been ruled out? Someone like Beth Orton (a William Orbit / Andrew Weatherall mix)? The kind of singing in the Sweet Trip song makes me think of a mid/late-period Future Sound of London or Orbital b-side. Or did it sound more like something that would have come out on Kranky? Just tossing out some ideas.

On the Seefeel end of things, have all of things like Spectrum, Spacemen 3, Flying Saucer Attack been ruled out? Is this something that feels more like Warp or more like Sub Pop?

I think Raj's suggestions are promising. Like maybe this was one of the myriad remixes of late Milk and Kisses-era Cocteau Twins, or one of the early William Orbit/ Orbital/ FSOL remixes (FSOL frequently sampled disembodied vocals from 4AD female singers, as in Lisa Gerrard in "Papua New Guinea"). Flying Saucer Attack? Loveliescrushing?

techno raj wrote:On the Seefeel end of things, have all of things like Spectrum, Spacemen 3, Flying Saucer Attack been ruled out?

Do any of these groups have songs that don't sound like"people playing guitars"? (Don't assume I know much about them, they're weird blind spots for me for some reason.)

I'm listening to a Spectrum complication, some of this is not at all what I'm looking for but they seem like a band that could definitely do it if they tried or something.

I will respond to other things mentioned in these posts sporadically as I'm able to.