"Crossing the garden" is a selection of demo tracks and songs from the early years, or if you will, from the adolescence of our musical progress. This selection documents the search for an individual sound, an individual style: the effort to safeguard a degree of creative independence and musical distinctiveness while approaching the set patterns of popular music.

It documents the effort to create an alternative to the endlessly self-referential process that is commonly called ‘song-writing’: an alternative that enables writers and listeners to face each other without any cultural defeatism, and without a shared sense of embarrassment.

It also documents a change of personnel : a turn away from solo vocals in the monochrome fashion of pop bands, towards dialogic and polyphonic singing; a change of guitarist from Mirek Snaidr to Christian Pauli and later, a change of drummer from Johann Bengen to Werner Voigt; and finally, a general widening of the range of instruments, partly influenced by the ever-present ideas and broad musical imagination of our respected teacher Valentin Schmitt.

Above all, however, “Crossing the garden” documents the apparently coincidental, but essentially magical meeting of the composer Stefan Karpati and the lyricist Manfred Malzahn.

The result was an artistic union of two well-attuned minds that tailor the finest material into pieces made to measure. Their first master-work was the full-length musical drama "Station Intensiv", written in German for a singing and acting protagonist with piano accompaniment.
“Sanctuary” can be called the journeyman’s piece of "Puzzlepie music", and the subsequent CD "Sink or swim" represents the debut album of the Karpati-Malzahn partnership.