Chris Cutler - CASSIBER 1982-1992

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

Peter Kemper was a music Journalist und radio host when in 1982 he invited Cassiber for their first public appearance at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt.

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.