Cassiber

condition (record/cover): VG+ (light surface noise throughout created by PVC outgassing as in most copies) / EX+

Insert included.

Cassiber's second album, Beauty & The Beast (1984), is the record where the German-English quartet found its language. The line-up was the same as on the 1982 debut Man Or Monkey: Christoph Anders on vocals, keyboards and guitar; Alfred Harth on reeds and lyric texts; Heiner Goebbels on keyboards, piano and violin; Chris Cutler on drums and electrified percussion. But where the debut had felt like a series of separate improvisations, Beauty & The Beast is composed, layered, structurally rigorous, with texts drawn from Brecht, Heiner Müller, the Bible, Mishima and Anders himself.

The record opens with "Helldark" (text from Heiner Müller), Anders intoning over a piano figure that decays into noise. "Robert", "Bonjour Tristesse", "Last Call" build on the same instinct: each piece is musical theatre as much as song. Cutler's drumming is unmetrical, almost narrative. Goebbels (who would shortly become one of European new music's leading composers in his own right) provides the harmonic gravity. Harth's saxophone scrapes against the song forms. The result is closer to Hanns Eisler filtered through Captain Beefheart than to anything in the rock canon.

The original vintage Rē Records pressing on Re 0110, gatefold with full text booklet. A pivotal Cassiber record, the one that opened doors to Recommended Records distribution across Europe and to the long collaboration with Cutler's News from Babel. A core RIO document and a notable record of the German underground 1980s.