CASSIBER

As on their previous outing the album featured a mixture of instrumental and vocal tracks, although on this occasion Chris Cutler's texts were not used as extensively as before. The use of electronics was also more prominent this time around, with cassette recorded voices woven into the fabric of several tracks. Robert, the second track, features a brief snippet of Captain Beefheart reciting The Dust Blows Forward, while elsewhere the vocals seem to have been recorded from German news broadcasts, and for the most part this technique is very effective; on later albums Cassiber would use samplers and electronics even more prominently. Two cover versions are included: Und Ich Werde Nicht Mehr Sehen is a Hans Eisler piece, while At Last I Am Free is a song by Chic that was also covered by Robert Wyatt on Nothing Can Stop Us. At Last I Am Free is one of the album's highlights and manages to be faithful to the spirit of the original but also has the same uncompromising RIO sound as the rest of the album. The more 'free' improvisations veer into some decidedly abstract territory, but the album is sequenced so that they are contrasted with more accessible pieces and many of the tracks segue into each other, creating a constantly shifting mood. There are also moments of real beauty, particularly from Goebell's piano and Harth's saxophone, although any lyrical passages are brief and there is usually something loud, discordant or disturbing to provide contrast.

Beauty & the Beast is an uncompromising piece of work, but it has stood the test of time rather better than Man or Monkey. It's interesting to compare it with Skeleton Crew's debut album, which was released at around the same time and which also made extensive use of taped vocals. Both are very much products of their time, RIO meeting post punk experimentalism, and both see former members of Henry Cow engaging with new developments in music and remaining progressive in the truest sense of the word. If you like one, you'll probably like the other; Beauty & the Beast can be recommended to anybody who likes 80s avant rock and indeed to anybody inclined to try something adventurous for a change.

The instrumentation on this occasion was largely acoustic and relatively conventional; guitar/vocal, piano/violin, sax/trombone and drums with only occasional bursts of the electronics which would be a more prominent feature of their later albums. Tracks 1 - 6, which took up disc 1, are relatively accessible and feature most of the album's vocals. Christoph Anders does not sing the lyrics so much as declaim them, and in some cases it sounds like he's reading them aloud for the first time, although somehow this fits quite nicely with the general aesthetic of the music. As Sean Trane mentioned in his review the stand out is probably Our Colourful Culture, which was set to music which had already been composed. It tears along at a frantic pace and is oddly reminiscent of some of Robert Wyatt's more uptempo numbers - perhaps it's the jazzy piano and feverish drumming. The second half of the album is mostly instrumental (none of Cutler's lyrics are used) and moves deep into the free improvisation side of RIO that Henry Cow and Zammla Mammaz Manna explored a few years previously. These pieces are sometimes hard work, especially the 16 minute title track, but there are moments which make it worth persevering with, especially Django vergibt and Die Verunreinigung des Flusses ist gerade noch ertraeglich which were on side 4 of the vinyl original; Die Verunreinigung... in particular features some wonderfully expressive sax from Harth.

Man or Monkey ultimately promises a little more than it actually delivers, but even without the dense and difficult title track there is still a vinyl album's worth of good and occasionally inspired 80s RIO with some superb playing. The unorthodox, improvisation based approach was always going to be risky, and it's a testimony to the skill of all concerned that so much of the resulting music worked so well. Good, but non essential - newcomers would be better advised to start with Beauty & the Beast.

The idea behind this record was to enter the studio with only a handful ofv text and lyrics ready and it was up to singer's Ander's discretion or needs to use them, with only one set of lyrics being adapted to an already-established music, the Carribean-laced Colourful Culture, which happens to be one of the better tracks on the album along with Red Shadow. A good deal of tracks are pure free-jazz improves, most of which can be quite indigestible (Gangelangen or the title track). Sticking out a bit awkwardly is a Bach adaptation (O Cure Me) which can sound like some Kraftwerk with added improvised violin and sax lines, but this a real welcome sweetie after some real inaccessible tracks. While you can see where Cassiber is heading in tracks like Django (as in Reinhardt if you judge Frith's guitars completely imbedded in other instruments), it is still quite difficult to grasp how the musicians could actually be really satisfied with some of those takes. Another fairly accessible track is the second last Verungreiningun track where Cutler's drumming takes the show, but he is well assisted by bassist and keyboardist Goebbels .

Since I discovered their respective paths in the early 90's (some 10 years after the releases of these albums), I always wondered if FF and CC were not in competition to make or participate in the weirdest and most obtuse albums. It would appear to me that in regard with Frith's massacre album, Cutler's Cassiber won this round easily.

Well, the whole album is telling a more or less coherent story, on the borderline between spoken words (partially German) with sound effects and music. It is done in a very artsy way, very avant-garde ... it reminds me of obscure Zappa tracks like "you call this music?", which are really probing how much tolerance the audience has.

Let me quote Kevin Gilbert: "Fuck 'em all, this is art". This is a really great - yet quite short - sound collage, recommended to fans of Henry Cow, Frank Zappa and anyone with a high tolerance level ...