Product Code Database
Cassiber were a German avant-rock group founded in 1982 by German composer and saxophonist Alfred Harth, German composer, music-theatre director and keyboardist Heiner Goebbels, English drummer Chris Cutler from Henry Cow and German guitarist Christoph Anders. They recorded five albums, toured extensively across Europe, Asia and North America, and disbanded in 1992.
Cassiber's music was a blend of Punk rock, free jazz and sampling which incorporated found sounds and news broadcasts. They were best known for the "frantic intensity" of their live performances. A Time Out critic wrote, "Cassiber play as if they only have a minute left to live." They were also noted for their style of playing, which was to "improvise 'completed pieces'".
For the next ten years Cassiber toured Asia and North America and appeared at almost every major festival in Europe. Their live performances generally consisted of new pieces invented in real time, plus pieces from their albums played spontaneously without having learnt or rehearsed them. In May 1983 Cassiber (minus Anders) joined Duck and Cover, a group that Burkhard Hennen had asked Harth to put together for the Moers Festival as well as a later commission from the JazzFest Berlin, for a performance in West Berlin in October 1983, followed by another in February 1984 in East Berlin. In July 1983 Cassiber (again minus Anders) joined half of Italian progressive rock and Rock in Opposition band, Stormy Six to form Cassix (Cassiber/Stormy Six) for a public workshop and recording project in Italy. Harth left Cassiber in 1985 to found the avant-rock groups Gestalt et Jive and Vladimir Estragon; Cassiber continued as a trio. In October 1986 Cassiber performed at the 4th Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Victoriaville, Quebec, Canada. In their last year they invited guests to perform with them, including Hannes Bauer and Dietmar Diesner.
As a quartet, Cassiber recorded two albums, Man or Monkey (1982) and Beauty and the Beast (1984). After Harth left they recorded two more albums, Perfect Worlds (1986) and A Face We All Know (1990), the latter dealing with issues surrounding the collapse of the Berlin Wall and incorporating texts from Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. A 1992 concert recorded in Tokyo with guest saxophonist Masami Shinoda was released in 1998 on one disc of a double CD, Live in Tokyo. The other disc comprised 1998 re-workings of the concert material by Turntablism Otomo Yoshihide, who had been in the audience for the original concerts. The album recorded Shinoda's last performance (he died soon after Cassiber left Japan) and Cassiber's penultimate performance as a group. The material by Yoshihide was Ground Zero's valedictory project.
Cassiber's last concert was on 13 December 1992 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
|
|
