CASSIBER 1982-1992

At concerts, a playful musicianship and enjoyment radiated from the stage, which never failed to engage; certainly after many years it continued to fascinate me. Here was Cassiber’s first line of contact, allowing the band to cross the boundaries between high- and low-brow audiences: Christoph's angular punk movements and fierce shouting; Alfred's unsurpassed emotional expressivity; Heiner's enigmatic, rock’n’roll keyboard assaults and Chris's elegant lightness, shifting seamlessly between free-style noise and controlled rock rhythms.

Much of what Cassiber did on stage was dramatic, even theatrical (“It’s all theatre!”)[A line by Thomas Pynchon used in Cassiber’s fourth album A Face We All Know, ReR London, 1989.]. And this is where Christoph played a central role. His powerful and expressive voice which, with a single word, could bring tears to your eyes or make your heart jump - combined with a cool demeanour influenced by ‘80’s New Wave dance moves - was perfect for projecting that mixture of intensity, despair, hope, longing and gentleness that summed up the sensibility of the group.

Alfred Harth

No matter how grave the topics tackled in their songs (dictatorship, starvation, fascism, capitalism), Cassiber never seem tempted to indoctrinate or make didactic statements. Instead they worked with bizarre associative collisions, contradictory connotations and discordant messages. Coming from the left, they never shied away from difficult political and cultural issues; however they did approach them in unorthodox ways - using documentary fragments without revealing their contexts or sources, or repeating single words or phrases over and over again, in the manner of the Ingenious Dilettantes[Geniale Dilettanten (Ingenious Dilettantes) - 1980s German musical subculture that included, amongst others, Einstiirzende Neubauten, Todliche Doris and Nachdenkliche Wehrpflichtige.], inviting listeners to draw their own meanings. Text, music, samples, delivery and context often pulled in different directions, causing confusion and opening associative fields through which listeners could roam. Songs such as I was old when I was young[Cassiber, A Face We All Know.] exemplify this perfectly. And although they adamantly refused to speak for political movements - “Kein Stellvertreterhaltung, bitte!”[“No political proxi posture, please!” A. Harth, Interview with author, Leipzig Jazzfestival, September 1984.], they constantly used their well-known political orientations as a backdrop against which to pitch a piece: for instance when, in the middle of a concert, Christoph read a text by the leader of the German Neo-fascists, giving no indication of its origin or voicing an opinion; or when two neutral words “gut - wenn schon”, through repetition and the use of a documentary voice-recording, begin slowly to reveal a disturbing meaning[Cassiber, Gut, in A Face We All Know.]. In fact, nothing the band did could be taken at face value; everything was ambiguous and constantly challenged. Even when, at the end of a concert, Heiner broke emphatically into At last I am free, it was impossible to embrace this happy ending.

Cassiber in Germany

In 1985, after almost four years of touring and the release of two albums, Alfred left. Without its improvising centre, Cassiber’s aesthetic inevitably changed. “We did not improvise from nothing or develop pieces from improvisation anymore”[Cutler, Interview.]. Constructed around Chris’s - and occasionally other authors’ - texts, the compositions grew tighter and were more carefully pre-arranged. Openness and fragmentation, however, still remained central to their practice, now augmented and realised through the added flexibility of two state-of-the-art Mirage samplers - acquired in February 1985. One replaced Christoph’s analogue cassette archive, while the other now allowed Heiner too to work with pre-fabricated fragments. Cassiber’s seven years as a trio (1985-92) and their last two albums (Perfect Worlds, 1986 and A Face We All Know, 1989) were deeply marked by this new technology.