When Datedness is Contemporary
S.Y.P.H.
By Charlie Bertsch
The reissue of the eponymous 1980 debut album by the German band S.Y.P.H. is reason to rejoice for anyone who loves the experimental music-making that followed in the wake of punk.
Not only is S.Y.P.H. an excellent album in its own right, mining a seam that runs from Gang of Four to The Ex, it opens the door to the band’s superb follow-up records Pst, Harbeitslose, and Wieleicht.
Long hard to come by, S.Y.P.H.’s impressive early output demands that we revise histories of that era.
How could a minor band, neglected or even forgotten by people who knew them well, feel so major now?
The A-side features direct, propulsive numbers like “Industrie Mädchen” and “Lachleute & Nettmenschen”, while the B-side includes longer tracks like “Kein Ziel” and “Kisuaheli” that explain why Can mastermind Holger Czukay fell in love with the band.
Athough most of their songs are in German, S.Y.P.H. sound very international, calling London, New York, and San Francisco to mind.
Because even this debut album is musically peripatetic, resisting the impulse to find a formula and stick with it, the band most resembles early Wire, but with a funkier bottom end.
Although S.Y.P.H. richly deserves whatever attention it attracts, we must recognise that the record’s reception will vary depending upon people’s prior knowledge of the group.
For some, such as those who frequented Düsseldorf’s Ratinger Hof in the late 1970s and early 1980s, S.Y.P.H. will help them reconnect with their past.
The biggest artists from its era, such as The Clash, have been in heavy rotation ever since, at home, on the radio, and more recently on streaming services.
Although their music evokes nostalgia, all the times it has been heard in the decades since softens its impact.
Even an individual who takes pains to maintain precise chronology will inevitably find that an album that they first heard in 1980 will also remind them, if less forcefully, of more recent listening, blurring the distinction between their experience of discovery and all the subsequent occasions when they reacquainted themselves with its contents.
On the one hand, repeated exposure solidifies the music in memory; on the other, each iteration threatens to make their first memories indistinguishable from more recent memories of remembrance.
By contrast, S.Y.P.H. was extremely hard to locate prior to this reissue. Nor was it being played by DJs, apart from a few rare instances.
As a consequence, the album is able to bypass paths worn smooth through overuse, hurling people who knew the music way back when into the mind’s thorny undergrowth, where forgotten pleasures and fears are lying in wait.
Considering how much time has passed since its release, however, and that discovering new music was a lot harder in 1980 than it is today, most of the people who listen to the music of S.Y.P.H. in 2025 will be hearing it for the first time.
While this does not prevent the music from serving a nostalgic function, it alters the nature of that nostalgia.
Because S.Y.P.H. sounds enough like better-known post-punk bands from its time to stand in for them, it can still evoke 1980 for older listeners who had never heard of the band until this year. But this is a decidedly uncanny process, since a new experience becomes the means of recollecting old ones.
And then there are the individuals who are too young to have experienced any of the post-punk music of the late 1970s and early 1980s first-hand, for whom access to famous artists from that time is just as indirect as access to comparatively obscure ones like S.Y.P.H.
Or ones like me, technically old enough to have known about the band in the early 1980s, but too mainstream back then to comprehend their aesthetic.
These days, I’m different.
Indeed, I don’t think it would be possible to engineer a band in a lab that was better suited to my grown-up taste than S.Y.P.H, which makes it sadly ironic that I only discovered their music in 2024.
The datedness of their sound is also what makes it contemporary.
Like the “Krautrock” bands that preceded them, such as Can, Neu!, and Faust, not to mention Kraftwerk, S.Y.P.H. give the impression that they decided to reinvent the wheel, arriving at an upside-down brand of rock and roll that doesn’t derive from tradition. But their obvious indebtedness to those forebears complicates that perception.
Perhaps a better description of S.Y.P.H.’s approach to music-making is that it is unapologetically abstract, rearranging the building blocks of prog and funk to create something that paradoxically works best when it doesn’t seem to work.
It’s that slightly off vibe that imparts an insouciant aura to the tracks on S.Y.P.H., warding off the ossification that beset better-known artists.
With any luck, proper reissues of the band’s subsequent work will follow soon.
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Photograph courtesy of Julian Kuklich. Published under a Creative Commons license.