Cassiber

condition (record/cover): VG+ (light surface noise throughout created by PVC outgassing) / VG+ (tag residue on front and light ring wear)

Insert included.

Recorded at Trion Sound Studio in Frankfurt across eight days in August 1986 and issued the same year on Rē Records, Perfect Worlds is Cassiber's third album and the first as a trio. Alfred Harth had left to pursue his own composer-improviser path; Christoph Anders, Chris Cutler and Heiner Goebbels carried on without him. The absence of Harth's saxophones produced an unexpectedly focused record: instead of the quartet's layered density, Perfect Worlds operates as a sequence of compressed scenes, each piece a short narrative built from voice, treated keyboards and Cutler's electrified percussion.

The texts are largely Cutler's, with one piece ("Crusoe's Landing") credited to Daniel Defoe, and they shape the music's grammar. "Dust And Ashes" opens with Anders's voice over Goebbels's piano clusters; "Miracolo" is a vertical wall of sound and recitation; "Sleep Armed" makes a lullaby out of insomnia. Peter Blegvad's artwork and Cutler's lyric booklet frame each track as a discrete object. Subscribers received a limited 194x265mm Blegvad print, numbered from an edition of 140.

The original vintage Rē Records pressing on Ré 0000, 45 RPM, in gatefold sleeve with full text and image pamphlet. Perfect Worlds would prove to be Cassiber's last fully realised studio statement before the A Face We All Know turn of 1990. A late-career miniature, and one of the more overlooked records in the RIO post-Henry Cow constellation.