A cassette tape and a 42-year-old mystery
Somewhere in the mid-1980s, someone in Ontario pressed record on a cassette deck while a Toronto radio station played a song. Decades later, that recording is the only surviving trace of a track known online only by its working title: CIA. No album, no artist name, no label — just a few minutes of audio and a static-laced broadcast in the background.
The clip has become one of Canada's most talked-about "lostwave" cases — a term used by online music archivists for songs that circulate without any confirmed origin. These mysteries have built dedicated communities on Reddit and elsewhere, where users pool audio analysis, half-remembered radio schedules, and pure detective instinct to try to identify a forgotten track before it's lost for good.
Why Waterloo keeps coming up
What's pulled CIA back into the spotlight is a fresh theory connecting the song to Ontario's Waterloo region. Reddit users digging through the track's few identifiable details — including hints in the recording quality and secondhand accounts tied to the broadcast — have floated the idea that the band responsible may have been based in or around Kitchener-Waterloo rather than Toronto itself, even though the tape was recorded off a Toronto radio signal.
It's a plausible lead: Waterloo region had an active, if under-documented, local music scene in the 1980s, and Toronto stations regularly played tracks from acts across southern Ontario. But without a name, label credit, or surviving master recording, the connection remains circumstantial — the kind of thread lostwave communities are used to chasing for years before (if ever) getting a confirmed answer.
How these mysteries actually get solved
Lostwave cases rarely crack open through a single discovery. More often, they're solved the way this one is being worked — a slow accumulation of tips from people who happened to be listening to the right station at the right time, local musicians who remember playing similar sets, or archivists who stumble on a matching entry in an old radio station's playlist logs. Canadian station archives from the era are notoriously incomplete, which is part of why so many of these musical ghosts stay unsolved for decades.
For now, CIA remains unclaimed. But the Waterloo theory has given the search a more specific direction than it's had in years, and it's exactly the kind of lead that has cracked other lostwave cases wide open — a regional detail that jogs the memory of someone who was actually there in 1984.
Anyone with information — old setlists, station logs, or a memory of a band that might match — is being encouraged to join the discussion already underway on Reddit, where the search for CIA's origins continues.
Source: CBC News
