CASSIBER 1982-1992

Cassiber in the studio. Frankfurt. Germany

CHRIS CUTLER

An Introductory Note on Cassiber’s Work Methods

Cassiber’s approach changed as the group evolved. We began with the idea of improvising, not in the highly abstract manner of the time, but towards shaped pieces that would sound composed and arranged. That was the way we approached what eventually became Man or Monkey

. There was no group then, just a plan to record - and when I was invited by Heinerto participate, one track, with drummer Peter Prochir, had already been completed[I’d made contact with Heiner through Franco Fabbri and Umberto Fiori of Stormy Six, and when I was commissioning work for the Recommended Records Sampler, in 1982, he sent me an orchestrated street riot: Berlin Q-Damm

. I wrote to him suggesting that next time, instead of using a drum machine he should use the telephone. CC]. I wrote a provisional text for it (Our Colourful Culture) on the evening I arrived and gave it to Christoph the next day - along with a notebook of other texts he might use, if he felt like it, as we worked. Other than that, there was no discussion or preparation or planning - we just improvised, listened back, accepted or rejected what we’d done and then moved on. With one exception: about half way through the week, after a dispiriting afternoon in which everything we’d tried had been rejected, Alfred laid out, over dinner, a set of rules for a structured improvisation - which we played once when we got back into the studio. That was the long track Man or Monkey. Everything else just emerged from the process. Without really trying, by the end of the week, we found we’d evolved a group identity, an aesthetic and just under an hour of music. And since we seemed suddenly to have become a band rather than just a project, we started to cast about for a name. After running with a few contenders - I seem to recall Risiko

was popular for a while - we settled on Cassiber, which was a revised spelling of Kassiber, a slang word derived probably from the Hebrew kassaw - that means a secret message or a note smuggled out of prison.

At this point in the project our work was complete, so we all went our separate ways. Then, a few weeks later, before the record came out, we received an invitation to perform at the 18th Deutsche Jazz Festival. Of course we accepted and, since our generative method had been geared solely to studio work, swiftly reconsidered our compositional approach to suit a live performance. In the end, we decided to continue to improvise new pieces but also to play chunks of the record from memory; using the recordings as rough indications, rather than blueprints - I don’t remember there being anything much in the way of rehearsal. After that, more offers of concerts came in, and we continued to follow the same loose pattern of casual invention and recollection.

Beauty and the Beast