CASSIBER
Cassiber
in Frankfurt: Walter Brussow (eng.), CC, Christoph
Anders, Alfred Harth, Heiner Goebbels
My first encounter
with the rest of Cassiber was in late 1977 through Heiner
Goebbels' Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blaseorkestra.
Then, in 1978 Stormy Six met the Goebbels/Harth duo at the
FMP festival in Berlin and were so impressed they proposed
them for RIO inclusion. A few years later, when I was
compiling the Recommended Records Sampler, I
finally contacted Heiner, and asked him for a
contribution. He sent me 'Berlin Kudamm', a fine
music/documentary/drama piece; I remember mentioning in my
letter back that I wasn't such a drum machine fan and that
if he ever wanted me to hit things just to pick up the
telephone. Soon after, he called, proposing a record
project with Alfred, Christoph and himself at Etienne
Conod's Sunrise Studio in Switzerland. We met there with
the idea to improvise 'completed pieces'. In other words,
not to 'improvise' in the familiar, abstract, 'Free
Jazz'/Darmstadt' mode, but rather to attempt spontaneously
to produce already structured and arranged material. The
double LP Man or Monkey was the result. And that
could very well have been the end of it, except that the
LP was so well received in Germany it led almost
immediately to an invitation to perform at the 1982
Frankfurt Jazz Festival. We considered how to
approach this, and decided in part to invent new pieces in
real time, as we had in the studio, and in part to
'remember' and reproduce some of the pieces from the LP,
without learning or rehearsing them. This became our
general approach to concerts for the next three years,
until Alfred left in 1986. After that we continued as a
trio, but took a more planned approach to both recording
and concerts. In the final year, we invited occasional
guests (including Hannes Bauer and Dietmar Diesner) to
join us for individual concerts. The Frankfurt festival,
then, was the prelude to a 10 year performing relationship
that saw Cassiber touring across three continents,
appearing at more or less every major festival in Europe
and releasing another three LP's, before finally bowing
out in 1992. Six years later, a concert recorded in Tokyo
in 1992, featuring guest saxophonist Shinoda Masami
appeared as half of a double CD documenting
simultaneously, Mr.Shimoda's last performance (he died,
much too young, very shortly after we left Japan), the end
of Cassiber (it turned out to be our penultimate
performance as a group) and the valedictory project of Ground
Zero (the rest of the double CD set comprises
contemporary re-workings of the concert material by Otomo
Yoshihide, who as a young musician had been in the
audience for the original shows). Although the group never
formally decided to disband, after the release of our
fourth LP, A Face we all Know, invitations more or
less dried up and we allowed the group to disappear
gracefully. Our last concert was at the Gulbenkian
Foundation in Lisbon, 13 December 1992.
WHAT'S IN A NAME-
Cassiber took its name from a slang
Slavonic word meaning a note or message smuggled out of
prison. Like 'The Beatles', we spelled it differently and
it wasn't intended to 'mean' anything.
ON RECORD:
MAN OR MONKEY? (1982) Riskant (double LP) CD ReRCCD1
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1984) Re Records CD ReRCCD2
TIME RUNNING OUT (1984) Re (7")
PERFECT WORLDS (1986) Re. CD ReRCCD3
A FACE WE ALL KNOW (1990). ReRCCD
LIVE IN JAPAN with Shinoda Masami (1998) Minus AH. ReRCGZ2
Live track on MIMI '71 (1987)
The Way it Was
ReRCCD5
The CASSIBER
Box ReRCBOX
Collaborations
ReRCCD
5,6,7
See also
DUCK AND COVER (ReR QCD1)
CASSIX (ReR QCD1)
Heiner
Goebbels' Website
DUCK & COVER
Duck
& Cover, Berlin. Tom Cora, CC, Dagmar Krause,
George Lewis.
A commission from
the Berlin Jazz Festival led to the formation of Duck and
Cover in 1983, consisting of Heiner, Alfred and myself
from Cassiber, Fred
Frith and Tom Cora from Skeleton Crew,
Dagmar Krause and George Lewis. The programme began with
many explosions and ended with a decomposition of the
Brecht/Eisler song 'Und Ich Werde Nicht Mehr Sehen..'
Between were other Brecht/Eisler pieces, some Art
Bears songs and a lot of specially composed, or
arranged material. Much of a second performance, at the
Berliner Ensemble as part of the Music and Politics
series, was released on the Re Quarterly Vol.2 No.2 and
reissued on CD on The ReR Quarterly Collection Vol 2
(ReQCD2).
WHAT'S IN A NAME -
Duck and Cover comes, of course, from the
ridiculous precautionary slogan drilled into American
schoolchildren who were told, in case of Nuclear attack,
to duck under their desks and cover their heads. The
organising principle behind this ensemble and its music
was the Europe wide protest in 1983 at the siting of
Cruise, Pershing and SS20 missiles.
ON RECORD
LP: The Re Quarterly Vol.2 No.2. CD: ReQCD2
CD: In the Cassiber Box Set
I was in Henry
Cow when we met Stormy Six and joined their
co-operative 'L'Orchestra' in 1975. They became one
of the 5 original RIO
members in 1978. Soon after, Stormy Six were playing at
the Festival of Political Songs in East Berlin
where they met the Goebbels/Harth duo (who were presenting
their Eisler programme there at the Academy of Art). In
1982, Cassiber was formed
(comprising Heiner Geobbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph
Anders and myself). And two years later, Franco Fabbri
invited three of us (Heiner, Alfred and myself) to join
three of Stormy Six
(Umberto Fiori, Pino Martini and himself) to present a
public workshop and recording project as part of Hans
Werner Henze's 1984 Montepulciano Cantiere
Internazionale D'Arte (the following year, as a
direct result of this project, I was invited back to
co-ordinate a young musicians project there). The idea was
that the six musicians would divide into all possible
pairs (15) and each duo would prepare or improvise a 3 or
4 minute piece which would then be recorded to 8 track
tape. These recordings were subsequently to be treated as
raw material for the whole ensemble to work on, using
overdubs, editing, composing and processing, the goal
being to produce from each beginning a fully fashioned
recorded composition. On the last day, we had to perform
these compositions, and others, in the town square. The
workshop took place in the open courtyard of an old
Castello where we worked for a week on the fifteen pieces.
The process and the final pieces were all recorded for
subsequent broadcast by RAI 3, Italian Radio. 7 of the
pieces later appeared on the Re Records Quarterly Vol
No.3. and 5 were reissued on the ReR Quarterly Collection,
Volume 1 CD collection (ReR QCD1).
WHAT'S IN A NAME-
CASsiber/Stormy SIX
ON RECORD
LP: The Re Records Quarterly Vol 1 No.3. CD: ReR QCD1
CD: In the Cassiber Box Set
I first met
Lindsay playing in Comus. I was working at the time on the
first series of Ottowa
concerts with Egg's Dave Stewart. Egg and Comus shared a
bill the night I saw them. A few years later, with Fred
Frith, I saw her again, this time in Ritual
Theatre. I had recently joined Henry
Cow and as I recall, an old friend of Henry Cow and
Ottawa participant, Clive Bell was also in that group.
When Geoff Leigh
quit Henry Cow, we invited Lindsay to join us. She stayed
until we disbanded in 1978. By 1982 she and I were working
together again, this time with Zeena
Parkins and Dagmar Krause in News
from Babel. In between, I had played on a couple of
her solo records (Rags
and Music for Other
Occasions). Soon after the first News From Babel
record we were both playing together again, this time in a
trio with David Thomas. This continued for many years with
various bass-players coming and going. In 1985 Lindsay put
a group together to perform her own film music: Lindsay
Cooper's Music for Films with Sally Potter, Phil Minton,
Vicky Aspinall, Georgie Born, Lindsay herself and me. Many
years later she asked me do some concerts with her Oh
Moscow project, which I also played with the
Orchestra of the Opera House, Bologna at the Angelica
Festival in 1999, one of the last concerts Lindsay was
able to attend. By this time the Multiple Sclerosis she
had lived with for two decades becames so debilitating,
she was unable any longer to work. She died, aged 62, On
18 September, 2013. In 2014 members of Henry
Cow, News From Babel and Oh
Moscow came together to perform 5 concerts of her
music Italy and the UK. Since then a CD of her
compositions, arranged for a large jazz ensemble, has been
released by the Artchipel
Orchestra, from Milan, and a mixed anglo-Japanese
group formed by Yumi Hara in 2015, Half
the Sky, has performed her compositions in Japan
and Europe.

ON RECORD
RAGS. LP. Re arc. CD ReRLCD
MUSIC FOR OTHER OCCASIONS. Reissued on CD nml 8603CD
Rarities ReRLCD2/3
- With HENRY COW
UNREST. Reissued on CD. ReR HC2
IN PRAISE OF LEARNING. Reissued on CD. ReR HC3
CONCERTS. Reissueed on CD. ESD 8082
WESTERN CULTURE. Reissued on CD ReR HC4
- ART BEARS
HOPES AND FEARS. LP Re 2188 CD: ReR ABCD2
- with DAVID THOMAS
WINTER COMES HOME. Redtlp
DIDN'T HAVE A VERY GOOD TIME 7"
VARIATIONS ON A THEME. Reissued in box HR110
MORE PLACES FOREVER Reissued in box HR110
THE LAST NIGHTINGALE LP: Re1984
(A 12" EP released to raise money to support the Miner's
during their epic strike, featuring a Henry Cow remix,
work by Adrian Mitchell and two specially composed songs,
one by Tim Hodgkinson and, the other by Lindsay and me,
both sung by Robert Wyatt.
On LP: The Re Records Quarterly Re 0101- one song,
'Education' written and performed by Lindsay and myself with
Sally Potter (singing) and Connie Bauer (trombone)
News
From Babel at Cold Storage, London: Zeena Parkins,
Dagmar Krause, CC
WHAT'S IN A
NAME-
I had been reading George Steiner's 'After
Babel' (about translation) and I liked the idea of a
record as a letter or a newscast from a doomed but hopeful
place. Some of the songs were directly related to
Steiner's books.
ON RECORD
Work resumed on the Tower. LP Re 6116. CD: ReR NFBCD
Letters Home LP: Re 1...14. CD: ReR NFBCD
Contraries 7".
OH
MOSCOW
Oh Moscow, in
Moscow: Sally Potter, Lindsay Cooper, Anon, Hugh Hopper
This was a project
initiated by Lindsay Cooper and Sally Potter. The original
group was formed in 1987 with Sally Potter, Phil Minton,
Hugh Hopper, Alfred Harth, Elvira Plenar and drummer
Marilyn Mazur. Later Charles Hayward replaced Marilyn and
in 1991 Lindsay asked me to sit in for him. I did the
remaining concerts in London, Moscow and Volgagrad, and in
1999 also participated in an orchestral version, arranged
by Veryan Weston, at the Bologna Opera House as part of
that year's Angelica festival.
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