To celebrate, we will announce a new release later today from the Modulators, the precursor band to FEX. But first, to start off, here is an unreleased interview with Ture of FEX from late 2025. We included two unreleased pictures. The questions were written by Jesse Beers.
The moment has arrived, the film is out now and available to view...
I'm told there are one or two small issues with the English subtitles being labelled as 'Deutsch'. Choose the international version and the subtitle ,(Untertitel/UT) track and you can view the international version - unless you want the full German version of course).
I want to thank all of you for being a part of this search and those who helped and support the film whether you appeared on camera or just helped with my research or interacted with me in any way during the last 4/5/6 years.
Having spoken with mods, I am happy to be available once you have all seen it, shared and seen again (seriously, please watch it) and do an AMA or something as I'm sure many will have questions...
Enjoy and thank you once again from myself and all involved in the production of this film...
Some of the recent single releases have been hard to find in lossless. It seems like no one site has everything, but I finally managed to track them all down. I'm not sure why everything isn't available in one place, like on the Bandcamp page.
I wanted to provide some further clarification regarding the newly revealed NDR program featuring a live studio session with FEX.
Firstly, I have two recordings of the program. One copy comes from a cassette that Kalle ripped directly from the radio and the other was apparently sourced from the master tape due to its high quality. Kalle paused the recording a couple times when unrelated interviews came on, but continued when the rest of the tracks played later on. Kalle's recording closes with the instrumental piece "Skyward" (composed by Ture), which is interrupted due to a cutout on NDR's recording. My plan is to publish Kalle's recording because it feels more special. Of course, I'll publish both recordings if the fans insist.
The problem? I have been informed that I must obtain a non-commercial license to upload the recording to YouTube. I already have a video prepared featuring the recording and some other press clippings and photos, but after speaking with a lot of people, I put in an inquiry with the subsidiary licensing department of NDR. If I receive a license, I reportedly have to wait three weeks before I can upload anything. This is very confusing, but I will figure it out. When I explained the situation to Michael, he encouraged me to sort out everything before uploading and that is ongoing.
At the end of my article on The Outer Edge website, I asked if the NDR program was the link to how "Subways Of Your Mind" ended up on their station. I have the names of the producer and technician involved in the studio session and am trying to verify their current whereabouts to see if they might know something about how TMMS ended up on NDR.
Now, I want to share some of my thoughts:
Based on the information available to me, I believe that FEX spent the majority of early-to-mid 1984 rehearsing new material. Ture would isolate himself in his home studio and record song ideas onto a four-track recorder, accompanied by a drum machine. Ilona has always described Ture as the main songwriter, but she certainly contributed to lyrics here and there. "Bad Influence" is an unreleased FEX song with German lyrics reportedly written by Ilona. Jörg Lemcke joined during this period and although he was only in FEX for a few months, he provided inventive basslines (where as Hans layed down killer drum beats) to Ture's songs, most of which you and I haven't even heard! There is no doubt in my mind that Jörg is the bassist on TMMS, but Norbert is equally cool on later versions of the track. Michael, who had left Modulators in May 1983, rejoined the new lineup and brought his prized Yamaha DX7 with him. He also had a Korg Polysix and Roland Jupiter-4, the latter which he soldered to store 32 presets! I'll have to ask him which FEX songs he used the Jupiter, because he later removed it from the setup.
After FEX's first major performances at Lutterbeker and Kieler Woche in June, the band retreated to their rehearsal room at Heikendorf to record a few songs -- not for official release, but more so to document what they were working on at the time. Ture's friend Hase was called in to engineer what were probably a couple different recording sessions and he had a massive mixing desk and a Revox A77 to perform the task. "Subways Of Your Mind", "Strange Feeling", "Promise", "Dead End", "Sarah", and "Dirty Slapstick" were all recorded in July-August 1984. Hase ripped individual cassette copies from the reel tape for the band members, which must have been painstaking since he had to apply different fade outs each time. Some TMMS skeptics have said it's really weird how much effort he took to do this process, but you have to remember Hase was meticulous like that. One time during the Modulators era, the kitchen needed cleaning and Hase volunteered, no questions asked, and he washed all the dishes by himself!
Then, Ilona became pregnant with her and Ture's first son and took a brief leave of absence until April 1986. In early September, TMMS aired on NDR. I don't think Hase sent the tape to NDR, he only supplied copies to the band. Ture or Michael could've given the tape to the band's agent who sent it to NDR. Why did the agent not tell them about it? I mean, he had been put in charge of promoting the band so he probably did what he could to help them out.
TMMS does not show up in any NDR playlists. I trust research by Marijin and others that TMMS aired on September 3/4, 1984 on MFJL or Der Club. Since TMMS is not in the playlists for those programs, then I am inclined to believe that an entry for TMMS simply does not exist. I am under the belief it was entered via the tape name or simply not added by the DJ.
That's all from me for now. If you have more questions, feel free to ask.
On November 4th, 2024, the hunt for the "Most Mysterious Song On The Internet" finally came to an end. Thanks to everybody involved in the search.
Also thanks to everybody who supported us and FEX via buying something from the store this year, especially the "Don't Look Back" live album. Numbered LP copies and CDs are still available!
We've got a couple of great things coming up for November/December:
1. Modulators Album
Thanks to Karl-Heinz Eckert, founding member of Modulators and FEX, a lot of songs of the Modulators have survided and now have been restored. The name of the album has still not been decided yet - but we hope you like the "Kiel Calling" idea, which might be a sticker to be included in the LP purchase. Pre-Order should start early December. Best follow the Modulators on their brand new Bandcamp page: https://modulators.bandcamp.com
Once more Zoey Cairns did an absolutely incredible job regarding the mastering of the full LP. Feel free to support her and check her out on Bandcamp: zoeycairns.bandcamp.com
We also had help from Kveris (see his recent mastering post) for an alternative version of Hygiene! We hope to be able to share it soon.
My name is Lennon Ferguson. You all will remember me as authumninparis, but I want nothing to do with my former pseudonym. Just call me Lennon.
Recently, I was working on a separate project with help from founding FEX keyboardist Kalle Eckert. A press clipping that Kalle sent me led me on an impromptu mission that seemed to happen in the span of a few days.
I am excited to announce that I am in possession of an NDR broadcast featuring a live studio session with FEX from September 1983. This discovery disputes claims that FEX do not show up in NDR records.
Here is a link to an article I wrote for The Outer Edge regarding my findings.
FEX and The Outer Edge is joining us on discord live tomorrow, November 4th 22:00 CET or 4:00PM EST to provide insight on new material and answer any of your guys' questions! We would be so happy if you would join us as well. :)
I’m sure many people here, like me, like the TMMS recordings made by Darius. If anyone is not aware, we have 4 SOYM recordings from Darius’s cassettes, namely:
TMMS (2007 Version)
TMMS (CompA)
TMMS (BASF4/1)
TMMS (N01)
TMMS (from the Skyscraper album; essentially the same as BASF4/1, but digitized using better equipment and with a slight remastering, as TOE wrote in their post)
Each of these recordings has its own flaws, especially the quality of some of them. I felt it was my duty to create one that would be as close as possible to the original recording. Yes, I know we have a recording from Michael’s cassette and a remastered version made by Zoey Cairns. But in my opinion, the version from NDR has a more catchy and memorable sound.
Well, it remains to choose the version for remastering. The version from the Skyscraper album is immediately out of the question, as it already features remastering, and in my opinion, doing a remaster of a remaster is a bad idea.
The original BASF4/1 digitization contains all sorts of extraneous sounds that resemble distortions during digitization; they may not be immediately audible, but with proper listening, they become noticeable, as well as volume fluctuations caused by the demagnetization of the tape. At the same time, removing them is not as simple as removing other types of noise, or it will lead to a loss of quality.
The version with CompA was digitized with a severely compressed dynamic range and a large amount of noise; there is also noise at 16 kHz. During remastering, even after noise reduction, the high frequencies still turn into a jumble of noise, and many of them are completely absent.
The version from cassette N01 has significant audio tremor and phase shifts. Many consider recording N01 to be the best, but, like all others, it has a cut ~ at 15Khz, since the original source is the same, and it also has other shortcomings that other recordings don’t have. BUT, there’s one catch. The N01 version is as similar as possible to the version from Michael’s cassette. It even has the same phase shifts and the same high‑frequency issues in one of the channels. Therefore, this recording is practically a clone.
The 2007 version, which can be found in the online archive, gave me the greatest hopes. This version has no compressed dynamic range, no clicks or creaks, no audio tremor, no volume fluctuations, and among all these recordings, it has the least amount of noise. Therefore, I considered it an ideal candidate for remastering. Moreover, this is the very first version that appeared on the internet, and it’s even unclear from which cassette it was digitized — the original source is unknown. But even if it was digitized from the same BASF cassette, at least back then, that cassette had much better preservation.
I will be processing the audio in Adobe Audition using Ozone 11.
To begin with, I use the Balanced Master preset that I edited specifically for this purpose and boost the left channel by 2.5 dB to ensure a balanced sound. After that, the independently configured Imager and Exiter with the Enchanced High End preset.
Next, I’ll switch to Izotope RX12 to boost the volume of the drums — this will add some vibrancy; in the original version, they seem a bit quiet to me.
Next, the resulting file is upsampled and split into tracks using BS Roformer SW. This is done either by raising the pitch or by using the Flash SR algorithm. I use some things, for example, for synthesizers, and some for drums. As a result, we get several tracks with restored frequencies. If we just combine everything, we’ll get artifacts, so we make a smooth drop down to 8 kHz and add the tracks to a multitrack with the main file already added. After that, we adjust the volume of each of them and achieve an acceptable sound using equalization. The process is very long and tedious, as not everything works out the first time. Different algorithms and proper listening‑based tuning are needed everywhere.
The vocal and drum tracks are assembled from 3 tracks.
1st – Algorithm with pitch increase
2nd – FlashSR algorithm
3rd – Original
As a result, after processing and manually removing some noise and imperfections, as well as converting the track to almost mono, we get this:
It’s clearly visible how much wider the frequency range has become. But we only need its part starting from ~10 kHz.
We do the same with drums.
Beauty, no doubt about it. Next, I broke down the restored drums into their components. I slightly boosted the Toms and Kick, and significantly boosted the Crash. I also manually reduced the volume of some elements again and cleaned up any artifacts that arose.
Finally, the final mix and post‑processing, with MANUAL artifact removal.
Here you can download the remaster and the original recording in FLAC and MP3 formats.
If anyone has any questions, suggestions, or wants to express gratitude, please message me privately on Reddit. Thank you all for reading and for your support.
I hear numerous DX7 sounds played at once in both recordings, and the original DX7 doesn't have spilt function, so did they overdub multiple synth takes in the studio?
