CASSIBER 1982-1992

Inevitably we collaborated, joining forces as Duck and Cover with the addition of Dagmar Krause and George Lewis. My memories of this are more hazy, fitting generally into the same mould as the memories I have of Orkestra, Henry Cow’s collaboration with the Mike Westbrook Brass Band and Frankie Armstrong. My thoughts run along the lines of: “how great that could have been if we’d kept on developing it”. There are so few chances at our economic end of the spectrum to present material using large forces, and so little time to rehearse properly and develop a coherent program. Having said that, these concerts were powerful and intense, and above all suggestive of a certain way of making “political” music that, in the context of a divided city, made perfect sense at that moment; an opportunity seized and then left dangling. I do have vivid memories of trying to stop Heiner from slipping extra notes into the keyboard parts of Art Bears songs, and him saying things like “but it’s just major and minor”, and me saying “exactly!” And of course, having just completed three Art Bears records with Chris, both the exhilaration I felt on hearing his lyrics set by somebody else, and a tinge of jealousy as well. But when I heard Christoph’s laughing voice belting out “we will fight in the mountains” in Our Colourful Culture, my hair stood on end...

Top and bottom, Tom Cora and Chris Cutler; Middle, Dagmar Krause

Photos by Michael Schroedter

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KERSTEN GLANDIEN

Cassiber Recalled

Kersten Glandien was an East-German academic who organised concerts for Cassiber in East Germany in the ‘80s, and wrote about the group's work.

My first encounter with Cassiber rendered me speechless for days. Nothing had prepared me for this. The music impacted like lightning on my placid East-German life. One cold winter’s night in February 1983 I attended, by accident, the group’s first concert in East Berlin - at Brecht’s old theatre, the Berliner Ensemble. After just a few songs, I knew that this music expressed exactly my own current state of being. It eclipsed all the music I had heard up to that moment. But how could it be that my sensibility was aligned so closely with that of four male musicians from the West? And it wasn’t just the music that struck me but the energy the band generated, the freshness and intensity of their performance and their stage presence. What was this music, I wondered, that so easily crossed borders of gender, culture and society - this stranger that seemed so familiar?

After some shock recovery - and, yes, there were tears - I decided to get to the bottom of it; to understand the impact this music had had on me, and others around me. So I contacted the musicians, to find out more about them, about their cultural context, and what their music was made of.