With their unpredictable live performances and songs such as ‘Zurück zum Beton’ and ‘Industriemädchen’, S.Y.P.H. caused a ruckus at the end of the 70s - as one of the bands that began to write lyrics in German around Düsseldorf's Ratinger Hof. Right from the start, the band broke with genre-conformist expectations and borrowed from rock, punk and kraut just as much as from Dadaism and the reality of everyday life.
After the first album and several singles (re-issued on Tapete Records in December 2024), the band produced two more albums - Pst and S.Y.P.H. (album 4) - together with CAN's Holger Czukay. Tapete Records is now releasing both albums and a collection of previously unreleased rarities - Punkraut 1978-1981.
In the mid-seventies, Uwe Jahnke and Harry Rag had probably founded the first CAN fan club in Germany and, among other things, conducted an interview with Holger Czukay for Harry Rag's school newspaper in 1976. Four years later, fandom made way for collaboration when the band asked the legendary CAN multi-instrumentalist whether he’d be willing to produce the next S.Y.P.H. album. To their astonishment, he accepted. Thus it came about that in 1980, S.Y.P.H. was recording with Czukay in the fabled Innerspace Studio in Weilerswist, where the iconic CAN albums had been created years earlier. Czukay also performed on several tracks, for instance horn, percussion, bass and harmonica on ‘Do the Fleischwurst’. These sessions resulted in the two albums Pst and the untitled 4th album.
We stumbled into the ‘Innerspace’, a raucous and shrill punk band in CAN's private recording room. We wanted to develop our musical style, change it, discover new territory, improvise. We wanted to move away from the punk belters and towards something new. Jojo on bass, Uli on drums, Uwe on guitar - and myself on whatever we could find. Holger would send the signals through the loudspeakers distributed around the room and recorded a lot with several room mics. Most of the recordings were therefore live, only a few overdubs were recorded separately. We probably didn't know exactly what we were doing at the time. After 5 days, the studio days were over and we went home. (Harry Rag, S.Y.P.H.)
