Chris Cutler - CASSIBER 1982-1992

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!

In 1993, Fred Frith was working with Tom Cora in Skeleton Crew . Both were part of Duck and Cover . Fred also mixed the live concert at MIMI some of which appears on The Way it Was .

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…