CASSIBER 1982-1992

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.