CASSIBER 1982-1992

British Art Rock influences - that span Caravan, Soft Machine, Henry Cow, Art Bears, Slapp Happy to This Heat, Rip Rig + Panic and Robert Wyatt - are noticeable in Cassiber too; Chris Cutler’s philosophy of drumming has its roots in this tradition. We are in the years of great demonstrations against nuclear power plants: in February, 1981 over 100,000 people demonstrate in Brokdorf, and in January, 1982 more than 30,000 protesters gather at Whyl. The struggle at Frankfurt airport against the building of the Startbahn West (Western Runway) escalates and, in November 1981, there is a massive police operation against the runway-demonstrators in the Bornheim-quarter of Frankfurt, in which many protesters are injured.

Heiner Goebbles had been one of the co-founders of the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester (So-Called Left-Radical Brass Band) in 1976, a group that provided the soundtrack for the sponti-movement in Frankfurt, and participated in the Rock gegen Rechts festival. Now he discovers that ‘the fight against lack of imagination and taste is the prime political duty’. The lack of abrasive rhythms in the music of the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester was compensated by hard core-members beating empty oil drums and chasing them thundering through the streets as they confront the progressing colonization of the ‘life world’ (Jiirgen Habermas) with new subversive forms of fantasy: “German din” - a rough but structured expulsion of energy. Symbolic relations between new electronic communications media, advances in knowledge and loss of experience, are all identified as social compulsions. The enticing and, at the same time, threatening ‘machine soul’ will have to be sabotaged by frictions and fractions.

Alfred Harth

The digitalization of music production for domestic use began in the early eighties, when programmable synthesizers and samplers sank to budget prices, inspiring the power of imagination. It is not only by chance that Christoph Anders’ sprechgesang sounds as if Chuck Berry has to sing teleprompter-texts. Ander’s voice is frequently infused with panic - German Angst. In the midst of all the technological promises, he relies on the ‘roughness of the voice’, on the intensity of verbal articulation.

Chris Cutler

In 1982 Heiner Goebbels describes the dilemma of subversive pop-politics: ‘when founding a new group now (with Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders and Chris Cutler), I have no words anymore. Confessionally devoted moralism (as in the peace-movement) is not my aim, neither is contemporary cynicism. I’m too young for that. And another thing about language: It is hard to keep up with the speed with which the New German Wave made the German language first possible and then, a little later, hollowed it out again. “The politics of music decides not with propaganda but with construction.” A foreshadowing of this concept was realized by the Goebbels/Harth Duo, formed in 1975 and working to alienate the songs and compositions of Hanns Eisler. This duo tried to avoid all left sentiment and chased the music through a purgatory of free jazz, giving it a contemporary sound-design and using electronics as well as acoustic instruments. In the dialogue of keyboards (piano, accordion) and saxophones, all folkloristic elements are broken open and stripped of pathos; fragmented melodies and vague memories become political statements. Goebbels and Harth try to actualise Eisler’s compositional principle of ‘Progress & retraction.’ The communicative skills of progressive elements in New Music could only be enabled by the retraction of some difficult musical elements: a sort of dialectical composition. The ideal of beauty in sound is just possible as a fleeting, precious moment. The unfinished turns the openness of a work of art into an aesthetic principle of progress.

Alfred Harth

Harth and Goebbels first met in a practice-bunker in Frankfurt/Main in 1975, where Goebbels was playing in a jazzrock-band called Rauhreif. Soon after that the two, with Christoph Anders, found themselves playing saxophone in the Sogenanntes Linksradikalen Blasorchester. Along the way Heiner became acquainted with Chris Cutler through Franco Fabbri and Umberto Fiori of the group Stormy Six, and contributed to Cutler’s Recommended Records Sampler. Two years later Christoph Anders founded a punk-jazz-band Toto Lotto - a kind of role-model for the forthcoming Cassiber project. And in 1980 another plank was laid when Alfred Harth produced the album Es herrscht Uhu im Land with both Anders and Goebbels - in an attempt to combine Punk, Rock, Free Jazz, Dada and New Music in a single musical formula.