CASSIBER 1982-1992

We approached our second LP much as we had our first, except that by this time we knew each other better, and we knew what ‘Cassiber’ sounded like. Moreover, in the course of our many concerts - though without any discussion - certain themes and materials had organically drifted together to form embryonic compositional...fields. In Einer Minute, for instance, had accreted around Christoph’s frequent use of a fragment from Schoenberg’s 'A Survivor from Warsaw.' At some point Alfred added a phrase from Albert Ayler’s 'Ghosts' and Heiner began introducing snatches of the Brecht/Eisler song 'And I shall Never See Again', played at first on the piano and then echoed in fragments from a recording Heiner had done with the opera tenor Walter Raffeiner. Running water appeared next, and a hail of broken glass - until all these obliquely related elements quietly coalesced into half-intentional narrative shape. When we arrived at the studio, we sat down and recorded it. Other associations too had been - mostly unconsciously - preformed, so that all in all, Beauty and the Beast was less spontaneous than Man or Monkey - though still collectively shaped in the unfolding of an unprepared performance. However, our goal had changed: on the first LP we had been working toward a collective vocabulary, on the second we were extrapolating from one. And there were other departures: at concerts we had slipped into performing written pieces composed by other people, Nile Rodgers’ At Last I am Free. For instance - which we even recorded for Beauty and the Beast -and Sun Ra’s Enlightment. Last Call was also anomalous. For this, we had prepared a ground - rather than simply improvising - building the track from many layers of overdubs. When it was done, Heiner arranged for the actor Ernst Stoetzner to call the studio with his side of an imagined phone conversation - which we copied straight to the track.

A real Kassiber from 1941, written with pencil on the inside (hidden) of his laundry with thanks to Andreas Maria Jacobs, son of the it’s author

Collaborations

While Alfred was in the group, Cassiber was involved in two large-scale collaborations, both closely bound to improvisation, but otherwise quite methodologically distinct. Cassix was a project brokered by Stormy Six for the Montepulciano Cantiere Intemazionale D'Arte - a contemporary music festival in Tuscany founded by Hans Werner Henze which, until we appeared, had never had any connection with the profane world of rock. Franco describes our work method there in his essay below, so I won’t duplicate it here.

Duck And Cover was different again. The central idea was fragmentation: a thousand explosions - an idea reflective of an untypically overt and overarching theme: the insanity of siting new generations of nuclear warheads in both Eastern and Western Germany. Duck and Cover was made up of all three members of Art Bears (Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Dagmar Krause), three of Cassiber and two invitees: Tom Cora and George Lewis. Heiner and Alfred prepared a graphic score: explosions, a grand speech and other events interpolated between a loose chain of set-piece songs (written variously by Art Bears, Cassiber and Hans Eisler) all of which were themselves subjected to interruption, fragmentation and dramaturgical distractions. This programme was both more composed and more radically deconstructed than anything we had attempted so far.

Duck and Cover - L: Chris Cutler, George Lewis, Alfred Harth; R: George Lewis

Photos by Michael Schroedter

Trio