CASSIBER 1982-1992

When Alfred left in 1986, Heiner, Christoph and I adopted a very different approach to composition: more considered and more dramaturgical. I still wrote texts, but now I sent them to Heiner and Christoph early, so that they could sketch settings before we began to record. Nothing was improvised from scratch any more, and some pieces, like Sleep Armed were fully written out so that, by the time we’d finished with it, Perfect Worlds was a more or less coherent set of compositions - thought through, stripped down and augmented with overdubs. At concerts too, the trio no longer improvised new pieces but only performed from the recorded repertoire so that, by the time we were ready to make our fourth (and last) LP, the decks were clear to start from scratch. A Face We All Know was conceived from the beginning as a dramaturgical unity. The initial story and text I wrote over three days in Newfoundland (we were playing at the annual Sound Symposium in St. John’s), after which Christoph and Heiner worked on the settings back in Frankfurt[With the exceptions of Gut - a composition by Rene Lussier that Christoph and I had added to as guests of the Frith/Lussier duo at the Victoriaville Festival, and Cassiber had later rearranged and kept in the repertoire - and Start the Show, which Christoph had set alone.], adding the texts by Thomas Pynchon, which take a different perspective on the same scenario. A Face was a far cry from the serendipity of Man or Monkey. Wholly pre-written, it was based on a unified (but exploded) narrative, carefully sequenced and assembled to read more like a movie than a rock album. Where Man or Monkey had been the product of immediate human interaction - exploring random paths - Face was a work of sustained commentary, accommodating itself to materials already in the world. It was also recorded, though no one noticed, in old-style stereo: each sound was either only in the left channel, or the right channel, or in both; so there was no panning and no artful stereo picture. It was a nightmare to cut, but well worth it for the subtle but distinctive psycho-acoustical affect it imparted to the album as an experiential whole.

DS al Coda

In concert, the trio continued to work loosely around its recorded pieces - as the live recordings show. Immediacy, invention, flexibility and intensity remained our main concerns, and always took precedence over interpretation or reproduction. By this time we were also using non-musical sounds as structure, and building dramaturgically as much as musically - in part facilitated by the appearance of an affordable sampling keyboard - Ensoniq’s Mirage. As soon as this little miracle arrived in Europe - at a Frankfurt trade fair - Heiner bought one; Christoph followed immediately. And Christoph, after all, had been sampling from the start - the hard way - so now he could finally retire his tottering piles of pre-recorded cassettes in favour of a more flexible technology. I too, by then, had much extended and refined the electrification of my kit, adding more processors, channels, contact microphones and secondary objects (chains, frying pan, tambours) to its armoury. So while we were still thinking Rock, that orientation was increasingly offset by, and interspersed with, something more like foley-thinking: using cultural debris, stark juxtapositions and incongruence as its basic affective vocabulary. We had just started to invite guests to play with us - hoping to shake up the material a bit (Dietmar Diesner and Hannes Bauer were the first) - when invitations to play began to fall away. After the Lisbon concerts in December 1992, no more offers came in. So we stopped.

Alfred Harth and Chris Cutler

VITOR RUA

The Final Concert

Vitor Rua was half of the duo Telectu when he came to our last concert; at the time we didn’t know him and he didn’t know us.

Walter Benjamin speaks about the loss of aura in a copy of an original. I’d like to tell a personal story about that: whenever I heard Thelonius Monk, I always felt a sense of unworldliness. He is so wonderful, so advanced - and the ‘silences’ in his solos: simply amazing! Well, it happens that I had created an “aura” around Monk's playing, around those silences between the notes and chords: ‘How the hell does he get to these silences?’... and the aura follows. Then, at last, I saw Monk playing, and I saw he has rings on every finger, and they are loose. When he plays, they slip and he stops to adjust them. That’s the cause of those mysterious silences: he’s adjusting his rings. What a disappointment; it’s not intellectual or rational, it’s a matter of... fashion.