CASSIBER 1982-1992

When I first saw Cassiber in 1983, they had only been playing together for half a year. Three musicians from Frankfurt/Main - Christoph Anders, Alfred Harth and Heiner Goebbels, and one from England - Chris Cutler. All four were engaged in left-field activities: Christoph, Alfred and Heiner were associated with the Frankfurt Sponti scene and Chris with Rock in Opposition[Chris was a member of the, left-wing alternative rock group Henry Cow (1968-78), who worked independently in the context of various left-field movements and founded Rock In Opposition (1978), a collective of self-organising, oppositional European bands.]. Perhaps this might account for the intensity I experienced in concert; an intensity that sprang from an active engagement in resistance, and an oppositional attitude toward commercial Western culture and the Anglo-American mainstream-music it spun. Their particular anti-establishment position manifested itself in a desire to find alternatives, a music guided by an intention “to produce spaces for imagination against the imperialism of the occupation of imagination, and the mortification of imagination, through the prefabricated cliches and standards of the media”[H. Goebbels, ‘Der Kampf gegen die Phantasie- und Geschmacklosigkeit als primare politische Aufgabe’, in Rock Session 7. Das Magazin der popularen Musik, K. Frederking & K. Humann (eds), Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1983, (103-111), p.103.]. These words, quoted by Heiner Goebbels from East Germany’s acclaimed playwright Heiner Miiller in 1983, reveal a commonality between the artistic oppositions in both East and West - a determination to open up mental spaces and sensibilities in their respective intellectually suffocating “states of order” (Ordnungsstaaten)[ibid.]. The oppositional tenor of Cassiber’s music appealed strongly to its Eastern audience, and facilitated our engagement, since we had plenty of opposition smouldering in us too, glasnost[Гласность и Перестройка (glasnost and perestroika / openness & reconstruction) - the slogan under which Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced political reforms in the USSR (1985), which eventually lead to the collapse of the East block.] being one of our main concerns.

In the Arts, openness assumed new forms in the postmodern 1980s. And for Cassiber openness seemed incompatible with submission to a single unified style. Rather the group made use of the musical differences each musician brought to its work: Alfred's considerable improvising experience; Heiner's passion for Hanns Eisler, Classical Music and Rock; Christoph's New Wave and Punk intensity and Chris's radical Avantgarde-Rock aesthetic. So Cassiber developed a musical practice that allowed these different voices to fuse into a hybrid style, and would make the group’s continuing aesthetic evolution possible. Of course, for such differences to remain productive over many years, a fair amount of tolerance is required, as well as a mutual respect, for each other’s differing skills. This is not easy to achieve, especially in a group of highly distinctive personalities.

In order to explore differences, the music could not be “slick and complete”[Goebbels, p.110.], but needed always to yield something new so that “we could constantly surprise ourselves”[С. Cutler, Interview with author, 2012.]. Cassiber pursued this goal through an aesthetic of inclusivity, hybridity and fragmentation. Songs like ... in einer Minute[Cassiber, Beauty And The Beast, Eigelstein, Cologne / ReR London, 1984.] highlight this approach. Here we find excerpts from Schonberg’s Verklarte Nacht (op.4, 1899) and A Survivor From Warsaw (op.46, 1947) alongside raw noise collages; a saxophone phrase from Albert Ayler’s Ghost next to Brecht and Eisler’s And I Shall Never See Again; chains smashing against metal sheets; the din of grinding buzz saws, pounding steam hammers and fragments of both live and recorded text. All this was held together with a hefty dose of improvisation - a technique characteristic of the group in its first incarnation as a quartet. The band assembled musical fragments, sounds and noises in an intuitive, flexible way, eschewing one-dimensional interpretations and leaving listeners space in which to develop their own associations. Such perceptive openness lets the listener in and, almost certainly, accounts for the fact that I was able to hear it as MY music.