CLUSTER
Lostwave Archeology
by Pierluigi Fantozzi
Cluster explores the new senses that gather around musical currents of the past and present, their aesthetics and practices. Like the dissonant chord from which it takes its name, Cluster will highlight contrasts and connections in the relationship between sound and the communities built around it.
Imagine how it must have felt to the archaeologist who, at Oxyrhynchus in the early 1900s, realised he had in his hands a fragment of Menander’s work, an author whose name and a few brief quotations were all that was left.
Today it is a sensation within everyone’s reach. All it takes is to be a lostwaver.
Lostwave is a term for a piece of pop music about which one has very little or no information at all. There is the song, or a fragment, but there is no data on the author, band or year of publication.
The search for such information has become an obsession involving thousands of users who only find peace when they have discovered everything and can put it back in the web archive.
It is a game, but there is a great sense of community behind it, and for some it might be life-changing.
A song that Canadian Christopher Saint Booth had recorded in 1986 began circulating on the internet in 2021. A post on reddit containing a 17-second snippet had started a real treasure hunt. Booth, unaware that his Ulterior Motives was the subject of this search, remained in the dark until a few months ago, when a user found the track. Where?
In a porn film from ‘86. Not exactly a papyrus of Oxyrhynchus.In a flash, Booth’s social media blew up, and he saw fit to take advantage of that unexpected success to record his eighties repertoire all over again.
The quality of the album, alas, fell well short of everyone’s expectations.
But the lostwavers continue to engage in media archaeology unabated, even beyond the music. A few weeks ago it was discovered who celebrity number six was, a model depicted on a set of curtains: the hunt had been going on since 2020.
A few days ago it was the turn of Most Mysterious Song (sic), a dark wave song broadcast on a Hamburg radio station in 1984, whose collective search had begun in 2004. Now the community is waiting to find out whose turn it will be.
LISTENING SELECTION
Pierluigi Fantozzi
Pierluigi Fantozzi, 1995, is a musician. He graduated from the National Academy of Jazz in Siena and obtained his master’s degree at the Conservatory of Bologna. A clarinet player, he has played in jazz ensembles, but has cultivated an interest in electronic music, also collaborating with Tempo Reale. Since 2023, he has been part of the Controradio team, for which he has conducted interviews with important figures on the international music scene. As a radio speaker, he leads his own programme ‘Passabanda’.
