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Reviews

Cassiber — Beauty and the Beast
(ReR Megacorp CCD3, 1984/1995, CD)

by Mike Ezzo, Published 1997-10-01

Beauty and the Beast Cover art

Cassiber reminds me of a group who picked up the ball dropped by This Heat, and ran with it to greener pastures. It must have been quite an icy cold shower of an experience for those who first heard this project, and were expecting references to Cutler’s previous work. For the Art Bears (or News from Babel), this is emphatically not! Cutler should be well known to many by now; likewise, wind player Alfred Harth has many accomplishments under his belt with the ECM New Series. The other Teutonic demons of musical disguise, Heiner Goebbels (keys / bass / vocals) and Christoph Anders (keys / vocals), I have no previous knowledge of. If you have heard the American group PFS, an offshoot of Cartoon, then you’ve got about as close to a kindred spirit to Cassiber as possible. Beauty and the Beast is marked by a kind of post-modernist commentary on the human condition in our era: man’s relation with technology and the influence of media and political institutions — trying to make sense of it all. It is not easy listening. Here the skin is peeled back, revealing no attempt to kindle sympathy with the listener. But at least they really mean it.

Apparently the music was all played spontaneously without any arranging other than same-time mixing. If so, then it’s a surprise how determined it comes out sounding. There seems to be an overall arching form, however loosely managed. Perhaps they recorded a large body of pieces and then chose the best, shaping it into something giving the illusion of having been pre-planned. Whatever the case, it is certainly more potent than a simple collection of unrelated jams. Unrestricted by formulaic approaches, unmitigated by concern for popularity, Cassiber’s music goes about everywhere you imagine it won’t. Jazz, pop, free-improv, musique-concrete techniques — all styles are fodder to be sonically mutated and turned on their heads, into collage-like structures, and inventing new instrumental approaches along the way. One effort squeezes hints of Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” into a melee of noises and sounds that bear no relation to jazz at all. The result is a soundtrack for the Dante-esque descent through a metaphorical contemporary purgatory that needs no film to enhance its stark vision. For one brief moment on the “At Last I Am Free” segment, Beauty almost takes the upper hand. Harth wails and squeals on sax, depicting the will’s struggle to assert itself, suggesting that the protagonist has successfully extricated himself (albeit shaken) from the morass that is consumer-dominated society. They follow this with a reverential 16 seconds of... pure silence. It is these kinds of subtle gestures that Cassiber comes up with that defy easy assessment, and elevate this work to something that will hold formidable presence in the annals of experimental music for a long time.

Filed under: Reissues, Issue 13, 1995 releases, 1984 recordings

Related artist(s): Chris Cutler, Cassiber

More info
http://cassiber.bandcamp.com/album/beauty-the-beast

 

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