"I got to know visual artist musician and producer Guido Erfen and sound engineer acoustic artist and percussionist Michael Springer as part of a group of five by the name of SHM1. The members of the group organised concerts at Rhenania a disused grain silo where I performed with The Absurd in 1988 and 1989. The band was also featured on one of Erfen's tape releases. Erfen and Springer met when they were still at the same secondary school and soon became close friends and musical allies. With the other members of SHM they built an independent network for creating and distributing music beyond the mainstream in Cologne. Rent at Rhenania was incredibly low allowing a recording studio to be established there. The first traces of the Ukrainian Underground arrived at Erfen's door via a cassette tape with three bands from Kharkiv and Kyiv the package including a long essay which detailed the rock scene in the two cities by Sergey Myasoyedow. In 1986 Myasoyedow together with Sasha Panchenko had founded the “Novaya Scena“ rock club in Kharkiv presenting bands inspired by punk the avant-garde dadaism and even medieval melodies. If Erfen hadn't been part of the independent mail-art scene he wouldn't have had the chance to discover this unorthodox music. It was the summer of 1990 shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent state the following year. In 1991 singer and keyboard player Soloveyka from Kharkiv arrived in Cologne and gave Erfen half a dozen cassettes with underground bands from Ukraine and a handful with bands from the Soviet Union. Intrigued by the original music of many of the acts he visited Ukraine twice made friends there compiled a tape with his favourite tracks and finally succeeded in convincing Hamburg label boss Alfred Hilsberg to present underground music from Ukraine on the CD “Novaya Scena“ via his label What's So Funny About (the original home of Einstürzende Neubauten).