Cassiber’s approach changed as the group evolved. We began with the idea of improvising, not in the highly abstract manner of the time, but towards shaped pieces that would sound composed and arranged. That was the way we approached what eventually became Man or Monkey. There was no group then, just a plan to record — and when I was invited by Heinerto participate, one track, with drummer Peter Prochir, had already been completed[1]. I wrote a provisional text for it (Our Colourful Culture) on the evening I arrived and gave it to Christoph the next day — along with a notebook of other texts he might use, if he felt like it, as we worked. Other than that, there was no discussion or preparation or planning — we just improvised, listened back, accepted or rejected what we’d done and then moved on. With one exception: about half way through the week, after a dispiriting afternoon in which everything we’d tried had been rejected, Alfred laid out, over dinner, a set of rules for a structured improvisation — which we played once when we got back into the studio. That was the long track Man or Monkey. Everything else just emerged from the process. Without really trying, by the end of the week, we found we’d evolved a group identity, an aesthetic and just under an hour of music. And since we seemed suddenly to have become a band rather than just a project, we started to cast about for a name. After running with a few contenders — I seem to recall Risiko was popular for a while — we settled on Cassiber, which was a revised spelling of Kassiber, a slang word derived probably from the Hebrew kassaw — that means a secret message or a note smuggled out of prison.

At this point in the project our work was complete, so we all went our separate ways. Then, a few weeks later, before the record came out, we received an invitation to perform at the 18th Deutsche Jazz Festival. Of course we accepted and, since our generative method had been geared solely to studio work, swiftly reconsidered our compositional approach to suit a live performance. In the end, we decided to continue to improvise new pieces but also to play chunks of the record from memory; using the recordings as rough indications, rather than blueprints — I don’t remember there being anything much in the way of rehearsal. After that, more offers of concerts came in, and we continued to follow the same loose pattern of casual invention and recollection.

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

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

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[2], 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.

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

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.

Of course the question is not that simple: as soon as one realizes that Monk does this with his rings, another kind of aura is born that replaces the aura of his silences; there is a morphing effect of one kind of aura to another. What I am trying to say is that before I saw the original, I had the copy (the LP), and I was very happy with my aura — with Monk’s silences — but after I encountered the original, it was as if an illusionist had revealed a trick to me, or I had discovered that it’s not Santa Claus who delivers the presents on Christmas Day.

Telectu, in 1985/6, used to record on four-track cassettes and then master to normal cassette. When PCM recorders appeared, we’d copy the cassette to the PCM — the sound was still great and close to the original live sound. What was interesting was that the original tape (the cassette) seemed now to be the copy, while the copy — on the PCM — seemed to be the original. The PCM seemed to carry the aura — not the original cassette.

This introduction serves to locate a public who were informed with a sense of Cassiber’s aura before they saw the band on stage, that is, when they only knew Cassiber by their records (the copy). I will argue that — for this audience — it seems they missed their sense of aura when they actually saw the band live (the original).

Let’s think for a moment about music. Spiritual music. There’s nothing more spiritual than Indian music. Let’s think about a Raga played by a transcendental tamboura, some hypnotic tablas and the angelic voice of a female singer. Are you picturing this: an exotic rug on which the musicians sit, candlelight, incense, an audience sitting and listening in a trance. Well, the audience may be in trance but, I would argue, the musicians are not. They are completely concentrated on the technic, on their instruments, on the scale or rhythm. I have seen many videos of Indian classical concerts, and in almost all of them I’ve seen something like this: musicians speaking with one another, speaking to the sound technicians, sometime speaking to the public. They do this to make the concert better, not because of any lack of professionalism. They speak with the sound engineer in order to improve the sound, they speak with each other about what is happening at that moment or what might happen next, they speak with the public to explain what they are doing — much as Stockhausen did, whenever possible, at his concerts.

Christoph Anders

There’s a story, repeated millions of times, everywhere, about Ravi Shankar tuning his sitar. It took some time and at the end everyone applauded because they thought it was the end of a song. It’s nonsense. The fact is a stupid journalist who was watching the show, seeing everybody applaud, thought that they were applauding because they believed what they heard was music, which, obviously was not the case. Everybody knew Shankar was tuning (even those who were completely stoned); they were clapping because it took a long time, because they were anxious; because they were happy; because there were 500,000 of them. That’s the reason, not the journalistic fairytale. Everyone with any intelligence understands the difference between tuning and playing — even if they are not familiar with a particular instrument — because people identify, through intuition and good sense, the difference between the ritual of tuning and the ritual of playing.

When Cassiber appeared on stage at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Lisbon, talking to one another and laughing just before they began to play — and when, 30 seconds into the first piece, Heiner Goebbels stopped the music and asked the sound technicians to make some alterations to the mix — and when, once the changes had been made, the group began to play again from the beginning of the first piece, almost all of the Portuguese musicians in the auditorium thought that all this demonstrated a thoroughly unprofessional attitude. I, on the contrary, argue that unprofessional would be if a group continued to play with a bad sound. In fact, that would not only be unprofessional but also show a careless disrespect toward the public. As for the fact that musicians talk and laugh as they enter the stage, that is no more than part of the process of relaxation — and a deritualization of the social relationship to be established between the musicians and the public.

I conclude in both cases, the Indian and this Cassiber concert, that the musicians made the right decision in the moment of the event. Doing nothing, saying nothing, not trying to change things that are wrong or could be better — that would have been the unprofessional way to act.

Chris Cutler

In the proper spirit of professionalism, the aura of the group shifts away from the solely musical into wider concerns with things social, economical and political; even into small everyday details. Humour too belongs here.

Heiner Goebbles

For the heroes of progress, the early eighties in Germany are a kind of Gotterdammerung. The ‘children of Marx and Coca Cola’ have become the down-to-earth kids of the computer and the nuclear-age; left-wing criticism often indulges in an unscrupulous love of consumption; a ‘lust of futility’ dominates German youth culture; ‘failure as method’ is the new rallying cry and flirting with the apocalypse has become hip.

In England and America, punks open garbage cans to poke in the waste of society. In his art magazine New Wave, the NDW-Propagandist Jurgen Kramer from Gelsenkirchen writes ‘Punk has become a huge failure. Great! Failure is our world. In the world outside everything is evolving for the worse. OK! Who doesn’t deserve to go unsung?’

The Berlin art collective Todliche Doris mocks its own avantgarde claim in the wordplay ‘Avon Gard’. Instead it asks for a ‘genial dilettantism’… ‘that might launch a shock, and attack so-called progress — too old in its basic idea — with racket and din.’ The aesthetic programme of the Berlin group Einsturzende Neubauten too is ‘Listen with pain!’

On the other side, a new kind of criticism emerges: ‘Subversion by Affirmation’. The credo of the New-Wave-movement in rock is ‘I want to be a machine’. The reign of abstraction, the artificial, the functional is to be undermined by aggressively overstretching the inevitable: subversion by confirmation! In the early eighties, an ecologically motivated consciousness of crisis and an increasingly felt emptiness of communication, purposelessness, boredom and lethargy — the down sides of the over-stimulated affluent society — come into the light. One of the first German punk bands, S.Y.P.H. from Solingen paraphrase the paradox when they sing: ‘Back to the concrete, back to the U-Bahn, back to concrete. Here the human is still a human; disgust, disgust; nature, nature; I only love pure concrete.’

Then childishness and stylized naivety are resurrected in the German New Wave (NDW): Markus Mori from Frankfurt/Main on his debut album Kugelblitze und Raketen (1982) not only asks for a New German Happiness but his hyped hedonistic NDW-Motto ‘Gib Gas, ich will SpaB!’ (‘Step on the gas, I want Fun!’) renders the earlier subversive slogan ‘Gefiihl und Harte’ (‘emotions and toughness’) a harmless triviality. The regular Pop-cycle of opposition and disarming goes on and on.

At the same time an alternative programme of musical ricochets forms in Frankfurt: Cassiber, four multi-instrumentalists with dangerous contraband from the sound lab, where the energy of punk is fused with improvisation out of free jazz, and the more austere forms of classical music — the whole enterprise driven by a rough rock-impulse; the ‘charm of the familiar’ colliding with the strangeness of the unexpected. Since it seems impossible to create totally new music now, only deconstruction of available material can promise innovation.

The ear-piercing cry-chant of Christoph Anders, the noise-splinters of his guitar, his martial beats on iron and steel; Heiner Goebbels’ piano clusters and sampling-injections: attempts to restrain the sound-chaos; melodic cries from Alfred Harth’s saxophone; rhythmic-disruptive actions and deliberate percussive confusions from British Art-Rock-Drummer Chris Cutler — it’s a concept that appears like a calculated explosive charge in the context of the Neue Deutsche Welle. These four visionaries use jazz only as a reservoir of energy, not as a performance style or a musical genre. Alfred Harth: ‘When I’m on the ball, a little niche opens up in my playing, where you can find very rare sound-blossoms, sharp, piercing, cutting figures.’ The indomitable Sturm und Drang attitude of Cassiber is unique in the European scene.

Christoph Anders

Simultaneously Anders and Goebbels with 'Materialausgabe' ‘an event series with musical risk’ organize a series of bold concert-happenings which function as a pool of fantasy for Cassiber; ‘Geniale dilletanten’ (‘Ingenious dilettantes’) meet an opera tenor; propagandists of the NDW come up against the serious improvising of long-serving free jazz players…

Heiner Goebbels

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.

Improvisation was defined in a radically new way: for the members of Cassiber it would no longer be an exhibition of virtuosity but a means to find forms and structures spontaneously that would communicate with an audience. The closed form of the song should be transcended: music would be an infinite process to stimulate fantasy. Cassiber approached the paradox of ‘improvised composition’: ‘we improvise with prepared texts and an intention to arrive at coherent structures’, Chris Cutler remarked, ‘which then become compositions through mixing and studio work.’ It led to the controversial phrase of ‘comprovisation’.

In the German edition of his book File Under Popular (1995) Cutler outlined another important method in the Cassiber toolbox: Plunderphonics, the purposeful plundering of records for samples. In the Cassiber context, words and phrases were used as sound-bytes and ‘fragments of cultural debris’: ‘no piece is reducible to a score, a set of instructions, a formula (…) on one Cassiber piece, there might be fragments of Schubert, Schoenberg, The Shangri-La’s, Maria Callas and Them. (…). Where House and Rap use samples to reinforce what is familiar, Goebbels and Anders use them to make the familiar strange, dislocated, more like debris — but (and this is the key) structural rather than decorative debris.’

Cassiber at Sunrise Studio — Kirchberg, Switzerland

At the beginning, Cassiber pieces sounded like experimental arrangements built to test the loading capacity of musical material; at the end their music was increasingly structured, song-like and concise. The questions were: How could streams of energy derived from the immediacy of the moment be canalized into distinctive structures? How could a chaotic bundle of intensity be transformed into coherent musical form?

Their pieces gained more density and poignancy — at the cost of improvisation. That was one of the reasons Alfred Harth left in 1985, after the second album Beauty And The Beast. He wasn’t keen anymore on the band’s new compositional strategy.

At a time when all sounds and all kinds of music are available through historical and geographical channels, Cassiber continued to work on the structural accuracy of their rearrangements. At the same time, the band provided a social framework for four — and then three — individuals trying to free their egos through constant interaction. A political claim was defined as an aesthetic attitude, not as programme music but resistant gestures of sound. Extramusical ideas — namely political ones — could force their way into music when informing about the origins, attitudes and hopes of the musicians. After thirty years Cassiber’s music is still disturbing — and untamed: the sound manifestation of permanent perturbation — according to the belief that only utopias are realistic!

Cassiber started at almost exactly the same time as Skeleton Crew, my band with Tom Cora. In the early days our paths crossed quite often. I remember staying at Christoph’s house in Frankfurt when we were on tour, and how charming I found him, a true kindred spirit. And the fact of his being a cheerfully seditious “non-singer” proved a great inspiration for us, in

fact I can credit him with helping us overcome our resistance to the idea of doing songs, i.e. singing — we figured “if he can do it, we can do it!” Later on I had the pleasure of mixing the sound for a couple of Cassiber’s concerts, which provided me the chance to get closer to the music. There hasn’t really been anything like it before or since. Collisions of raw punk energy and free jazz passion were not uncommon at the time, but to combine that with samples and beats, sophisticated song-writing, an unlikely combination of sources from Eisler to Prince to Robert Wyatt, and sheer virtuosity of performance, was really striking, especially when framed as political action. Almost a definition of “open” music.

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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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.

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[3]. 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”[4]. 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)[5]. 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[6] 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”[7], but needed always to yield something new so that “we could constantly surprise ourselves”[8]. Cassiber pursued this goal through an aesthetic of inclusivity, hybridity and fragmentation. Songs like… in einer Minute[9] 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.

At concerts, a playful musicianship and enjoyment radiated from the stage, which never failed to engage; certainly after many years it continued to fascinate me. Here was Cassiber’s first line of contact, allowing the band to cross the boundaries between high- and low-brow audiences: Christoph's angular punk movements and fierce shouting; Alfred's unsurpassed emotional expressivity; Heiner's enigmatic, rock’n’roll keyboard assaults and Chris's elegant lightness, shifting seamlessly between free-style noise and controlled rock rhythms.

Much of what Cassiber did on stage was dramatic, even theatrical (“It’s all theatre!”)[10]. And this is where Christoph played a central role. His powerful and expressive voice which, with a single word, could bring tears to your eyes or make your heart jump — combined with a cool demeanour influenced by ‘80’s New Wave dance moves — was perfect for projecting that mixture of intensity, despair, hope, longing and gentleness that summed up the sensibility of the group.

Alfred Harth

No matter how grave the topics tackled in their songs (dictatorship, starvation, fascism, capitalism), Cassiber never seem tempted to indoctrinate or make didactic statements. Instead they worked with bizarre associative collisions, contradictory connotations and discordant messages. Coming from the left, they never shied away from difficult political and cultural issues; however they did approach them in unorthodox ways — using documentary fragments without revealing their contexts or sources, or repeating single words or phrases over and over again, in the manner of the Ingenious Dilettantes[11], inviting listeners to draw their own meanings. Text, music, samples, delivery and context often pulled in different directions, causing confusion and opening associative fields through which listeners could roam. Songs such as I was old when I was young[12] exemplify this perfectly. And although they adamantly refused to speak for political movements — “Kein Stellvertreterhaltung, bitte!”[13], they constantly used their well-known political orientations as a backdrop against which to pitch a piece: for instance when, in the middle of a concert, Christoph read a text by the leader of the German Neo-fascists, giving no indication of its origin or voicing an opinion; or when two neutral words “gut — wenn schon”, through repetition and the use of a documentary voice-recording, begin slowly to reveal a disturbing meaning[14]. In fact, nothing the band did could be taken at face value; everything was ambiguous and constantly challenged. Even when, at the end of a concert, Heiner broke emphatically into At last I am free, it was impossible to embrace this happy ending.

Cassiber in Germany

In 1985, after almost four years of touring and the release of two albums, Alfred left. Without its improvising centre, Cassiber’s aesthetic inevitably changed. “We did not improvise from nothing or develop pieces from improvisation anymore”[15]. Constructed around Chris’s — and occasionally other authors’ — texts, the compositions grew tighter and were more carefully pre-arranged. Openness and fragmentation, however, still remained central to their practice, now augmented and realised through the added flexibility of two state-of-the-art Mirage samplers — acquired in February 1985. One replaced Christoph’s analogue cassette archive, while the other now allowed Heiner too to work with pre-fabricated fragments. Cassiber’s seven years as a trio (1985-92) and their last two albums (Perfect Worlds, 1986 and A Face We All Know, 1989) were deeply marked by this new technology.

True to their communicative intent, the group continued to tour across Europe, Russia, North America, Canada and Japan — every now and then returning to East Germany, where their connections gradually grew stronger. Heiner and Chris developed close relationships with the two academics who had first introduced them into the country: Gunter Mayer and Peter Wicke. Heiner began to work with Heiner Muller, and Chris became my Western contact during the years I was curating and organising the concert series Music & Politics (1984-88) — a series that combined experimental musics from various genres in a single event. Over these five years, a number of alternative Western groups and artists — Duck and Cover[16], Music for Films[17], Dagmar Krause[18], Grubenklang Orchestra[19] and Kalahari Surfers[20], as well as Cassiber — appeared on the same bill as experimental ensembles and composers from the East, who presented Contemporary music, electroacoustic and acousmatic compositions or Performance pieces. It was at one of these concerts that Cassiber met the East German composer Georg Katzer, who arranged for the group to record their fourth album A Face We All Know at the studio of the Academy of Art, in the heart of East Berlin — the first time, I am sure, that an album had been recorded by a Western Rock band in an East German state studio. The album’s topic — the ramblings of a beleaguered and deranged dictator — was apt, even prophetic, at a time of growing social and political upheaval in the East Block. The short eccentric film footage in this box[21] — the work of three East Berlin fans — reflects this bizarre situation.

By now, Cassiber was well known by both alternative-minded musicians and audiences in East Germany, and they flocked from all over the country to attend the annual Music & Politics events, leading eventually to the series being placed under a media ban. Despite this, the group’s unconventional musical style influenced a number of alternative East German over- and under-ground bands, notably Der Expander des Fortschritts[22]. In the midst of this growing social turmoil, the time was ripe for more unprecedented action, so we embarked on another adventure: organising a six concert tour for Cassiber across East Germany, just days before the wall came down (13–22 October 1989)[23]. The atmosphere at these concerts was explosive and had a truly empowering effect on us.

For me, Cassiber will always be linked to these exciting times, this short period of hope, in which alternative social change actually seemed possible. It gave me the liberating experience of discovering a different understanding of music — and of art in general: my personal gateway into a new aesthetics.

Until recently, I was sure I knew the exact date when I met Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth. I thought it was February 3rd, 1979, in Munich, at the Olympiakantine, an almost deserted pub in the Olympic Village, where Trikont (the label that published records by the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester, and distributed Stormy Six records in Germany) had organized a concert. I had a memory of us (the Stormy Six) being amazed by the SLB’s joyful and messy (but very competent) musicality, and their fantastic mixture of Zappa, Rota, Eislerand GDR pop songs. But I was wrong: I spoke with Heiner Goebbels last year, and he had no recollection at all of that concert. It must have happened somewhere else. It did happen, definitely, because we became friends, and our cooperative, I'Orchestra, released one of the SLB’s albums in Italy — I remember proof-reading its liner notes while recording Macchina Maccheronica in Kirchberg, Switzerland, in September 1979 — and we organised concerts, both for the big band and for the Goebbels/Harth duo. There are solid proofs, including a number of photos taken in Frankfurt, in Heiner’s flat or walking around with Peter Lieser, another member of the band. The SLB’s concert in Milan was an important event in our history (both for Stormy Six and I’Orchestra). The local government had promised support for the concert, and then suddenly retired it after rumours were circulated that the Blasorchester was related to German “terrorists”. The SLB had taken part in a rally supporting the Baader-Meinhof group’s lawyers, who had been arrested, and that was enough for right wing Milanese politicians to qualify the concert as a ‘danger to democracy’. In the wake of the big political change that affected Italy in the early Eighties, it was the beginning of the end for I’Orchestra as a cultural institution in Milan, and for Stormy Six as a group that could survive without the support of a commercial record company. But, as a concert, it was a great success.

Top to bottom; Heiner Goebbels, Christoph Anders, and Cassiber

I am also almost sure that I attended at least one concert by Cassiber. No entry in my diaries, though. But at some point at the beginning of 1983, when Stormy Six had ceased regular operations, my composition teacher and neighbour Luca Lombardi, who was in charge of the programme at the Cantiere internazionaie d’Arte di Montepulciano that year, called me to ask if I had anything to suggest for the incoming edition. I proposed a laboratory on studio recording, as a context for music composition. Since I had recently collaborated — in 1981 — with the Italian radio in a series of similar laboratories (involving Robert Wyatt, Fred Frith, Throbbing Gristle, Luigi Cinque, and myself), I made the suggestion that RAI bring a mobile studio to Montepulciano, and that a group of musicians would create a recorded work using that equipment for a week. The Festival organizers then extorted the promise that the group would also perform the material live at a closing concert. I spoke about this idea with Chris Cutler, initially suggesting that the group be formed by him, Fred Frith, Umberto Fiori, and myself, a kind of Italianate Art Bears (what I had in mind initially was probably closer to Winter Songs than to the actual final result of the project). But very soon we agreed on another line-up, involving Heiner and Alfred, as well as Stormy Six bass player and composer, Pino Martini — and without Fred, who wasn’t available. The whole project was named after the individuals taking part (Goebbels, Harth, Cutler, Fiori, Fabbri, Martini). The name Cassix (half Cassiber and half Stormy Six) was created posthumously by Chris when some of the masters were released on the ReR Quarterly (Vol. 1 No. 3) in January 1986.

So. In the hottest week of one of the hottest summers in decades, we all worked in the town Fortress — which was also the venue for the local high-school students’ final exams, so we had to be very quiet, at least in the mornings. We decided to proceed with a standardized production method, a compromise between Cassiber’s instant song composition and Stormy Six’s more traditional composing process. We’d lay down ‘basic tracks’ in couples, in every possible combination within the sextet: fifteen recordings, to which the remaining members (not necessary all of them) would then add their own material. Of course, the ‘basic tracks’ were influenced in their mood and structure by the characters of the pair involved: for example, the first piece we recorded was based on a 13/8 riff performed by myself on guitar and Chris on drums, and was obviously more rock oriented than pieces laid down by Alfred, improvising on his saxophone with Heiner or Pino. In general, when we added more material to the original ‘basic track’, we would work against the grain of its original character: Heiner superimposed on the hectic 13/8 riff a slowly evolving melody, which Umberto used as the song line when he wrote his lyrics (Coste). Although the mobile studio was pretty outdated for the early Eighties (a Studer 8-track, and a rather limited mixing desk, but very good microphones), at some point we realized we could take advantage of the variety of results we could obtain with that recording method, especially when we realized that we didn’t need (and, because of time limitations, actually couldn’t) fill up all available tracks. Probably the ‘emptiest’ pieces turned out to be the best sounding. However, as time went on, we became increasingly preoccupied with the final concert, as it became clear that our fifteen miniatures wouldn’t be enough for the advertised big event. At some point, we would have to leave the recordings as they were to rehearse for the concert, adding pieces like On Suicide and Piazza degli affari (sung by Umberto), and At Last I Am Free (sung by Heiner). In a way, the organisers’ urge to show the results of our work (which should have been open to public, but actually and luckily never was) partly spoilt the project’s main objective. For sure, we all felt liberated when we encored At Last I Am Free in Montepulciano’s main square.

Radio Tre made an extensive broadcast (Laboratorio rock di Montepulciano) later in the year, which included all the initial ‘basic tracks’, the final masters, and a complete recording of the final concert.

The last years of the Soviet Union, a brief period in the late 1980s, known by its catchwords glasnost and perestroika, were a very special time; a blissful limbo into which the old Soviet ideological and political censorship had vanished leaving its social, organisational and financial structures still in place. Though permitted to ignore the heavy guiding hand of a decaying and dissipating Communist Party, bureaucrats still had control of their budget allotments — but were free, not only of political and ideological conditions, but market pressures too. It was a time of freedom unthinkable a few years earlier, and impossible a few years later.

It was into this limbo, in May 1989, that Cassiber and Keep the Dog flew. I will never forget the incredulous looks on their faces when they saw the huge Oktyabrsky — a 4000 seat concert hall in the centre of Leningrad — where they were due to perform. Not only was it huge — they all admitted they had never played in a hall so vast — but it was also the city’s most prestigious auditorium, built in 1967 for the 50th anniversary of the 1917 October revolution; a place of pompous official celebrations and events by approved artists with sufficient drawing power to feed the box office — from kitschy Soviet pop to kitschy Elton John.

Cassiber and Keep the Dog were a somewhat different proposition. The fact that they were appearing in the USSR at all bordered on the miraculous, and was made possible in large part by the inclusion of a third band which, for reasons I can no longer recall, didn’t make it to Leningrad in this otherwise three-band-three-city tour. This was the Kalahari Surfers — a significant, indeed indispensable, part of the package, since everything had been organised through the KMO (Committee of Youth Organisations), itself a subsidiary of the omnipotent Komsomol (Youth Communist Union). For Komsomol, the Kalahari Surfers had been the clincher. Coming from apartheid-torn South Africa, they were one of the most politically radical musical forces in that country — so troublesome that there was no South African pressing plant that would press their albums (EMI declared them “too political”) and it was this clearly progressive status that allowed the tour be advertised as ‘Independent Musicians for South Africa’ and therefore legitimate the KMO’s initiative to support it in the name of Soviet bureaucracy’s pet formula: ‘political expediency’ — allowing them to release a considerable chunk of their budget to a little known bunch of musicians playing weird and not very user-friendly music.

That said, the other musicians had their own political credentials; both Chris Cutler, the drummer with Cassiber (and, on this tour, the Kalahari Surfers) and Fred Frith, guitarist and leader of Keep the Dog, had been founding members of Henry Cow — a rare example of a British rock band that had been favourably mentioned in the official Soviet press, back in the 1970s, as ‘a group of the British Komsomol’. This fact had been largely forgotten by 1989, but once brought out of the archives, it became a potent weapon: Komsomolskaya Pravda, the newspaper that had published the original article was the official organ of the Komsomol Central Committee, and proudly wore six of the highest government awards on its title page. It was a force to be reckoned with.

Heiner Goebbels

The initial planning was done in Moscow and I only entered the picture when the local organisers in St. Petersburg asked me to write notes for the concert programme — and an article for a local newspaper. Leningrad was then the centre of New Jazz, Free Improvisation and “Classical” avant-garde, while Riga — the third stop on the tour — was the centre of Rock-In-Opposition. In fact, it had been through Nick Sudnik, founder and leader of the Rigan group Zga that I had first heard recordings of Cassiber, Art Bears, The Work, Etron Fou Leloublan, Universe Zero and other bands that worked along similar lines: a music that seemed to merge the best of all worlds: the passion and energy of rock, the improvisational freedom of jazz and the compositional complexity of the avant-garde. I immediately fell in love with it. So the idea that some of these musicians would actually be playing in Leningrad seemed otherworldly. However, those who had even a vague idea of what these bands stood for constituted a tiny group of connoisseurs, and the novelty of Western bands appearing in the USSR was already on the wane: a few months earlier poor organisation and zero promotion had attracted no audience at all for the then still largely unknown Sugarcubes, with Bjork, and the concert had to be cancelled. So I put all my enthusiasm and conviction into the newspaper article in the hope of luring in anyone with even the faintest interest in serious rock (the prog-rock audience was substantial in Leningrad at this time). In the event, although the venue was not full, neither was it embarrassingly empty.

Come the day, I had no idea how a largely unprepared audience would react to these strange sounds. But when I watched a group of gopniki (our local term for what in England are known as yobs or chavs) in the back rows, they were sipping beers — but listening intently without booing or giggling. The Moscow concert (which unfortunately I missed) was in a smaller venue, and included Soviet bands Ne Zhdali, from Tallinn, Dzhungli, from Leningrad and both Zvuki Mu and Vezhlivy Otkaz from Moscow, which helped put the music into a more familiar context.

Chris Cutler

What I remember most is the feeling of stunning musicianship, incredible energy, freshness, inventiveness — and extraordinary conviction emanating from that stage. We were happy. Three of us: pianist and composer Sergei Kuryokhin, cellist and producer Seva Gakkel and myself, spent most of the day with the bands, talking, exchanging ideas and arguing. In particular I remember a wonderful cruise along the Neva on that beautiful May day — when St. Petersburg is at its best.

Epilogue: Chris Cutler and his wife Kersten stayed with me and my wife in Leningrad, and I remember clearly a heated argument we had with him and Christoph Anders, Cassiber’s vocalist. Of course I was aware of my new friends’ leftist political views, and sympathised with their opposition to their own Western establishments, but I could by no means acquiesce to their predilection for socialism. We knew better, we had lived our lives under this socialism, and thanks, but no thanks. But in spite — or perhaps because — of such political arguments, those few days marked the beginning of long friendships. A few months later I was in London, visiting Chris Cutler in the empty school in which he lived in Clapham Old Town, and it was there that I met Amy Denio, a saxophonist from Seattle. This contact, in turn, allowed me a year later to take two Russian jazz bands to the Good Will Games Festival in Seattle. And when, in the following year, the Frankfurt based Ensemble Modern came to Russia with a programme featuring Stravinsky, Ligeti and Kagel (with Kagel conducting) they included a piece in the programme by Heiner Goebbels — and Heiner came along. We got together, of course, and Sergei Kuryokhin could think of no better entertainment than to take Heiner to a wedding party. The guitarist of Sergei’s band, Popular Mechanics, was going through a heavy metal phase at the time and was celebrating his (fifth) marriage in full black leather gear: jeans, jacket and cap — all picked out with chains and studs. His new wife, a tiny Oriental woman from Eastern Siberia had, as her only guests, her parents and a couple of brothers who had traveled thousands of miles with a supply of the local moonshine (alcohol was hard to come by in St, Petersburg then), meanwhile, the only guests from the groom’s side were Kuryokhin, myself and poor Heiner who didn’t have a word of Russian. I was petrified, but Heiner drank exotic beverages and ate no less exotic food, seeming especially to enjoy it when the Siberians started singing their ethnic songs. It’s been more than twenty years now, but every time I see Heiner, he invariably, and warmly, reminds me of that evening.

Christoph Anders