CASSIBER 1982-1992

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!

FRED FRITH

Since You Ask

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.