HEISS! brings together the organ music of Gerhard Stäbler, five pieces written between 1983 and 2009, played by Dominik Susteck. Stäbler studied the organ and still speaks of the instrument with enthusiasm, yet his large catalogue holds only these five works for it. The disc runs to almost eighty minutes and covers graphic notation, pedal-only writing and long sustained fantasy.

Stäbler was born in 1949 in Wilhelmsdorf near Ravensburg. He studied composition with Nicolaus A. Huber and organ with Gerd Zacher in Detmold and Essen, then lived as a freelance composer in the Ruhr area, and from 2011 in the Rhineland. His music often breaks with conventional concert situations through gesture, space, everyday props or the audience itself. Susteck, born in Bochum in 1977, was organist at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne from 2007 to 2021. The recording was made there on 7-11 January 2014, as a coproduction with Deutschlandradio.

The score of HEISS! (1988) is made of lines of varying thickness, like the barcodes printed on goods. In Susteck's reading the lines become repetitive percussive structures and very fast chordal passages with short inserts. TAP (1998) is for organ pedals alone. Arrows carry a dynamic and two numbers, one for the duration of a sound in seconds and one for the number of pedals pressed. The player may wear hard-soled shoes to add percussive effects. !? – Musikalischer Essay über die Grenzen des Möglichen (2001), first written for harpsichord, takes repetition as its subject. On the organ, with its delayed attacks and unusual registrations, extreme repetition yields a colourful, at times noise-like spectrum.

Windows (1983) was composed in connection with a film about Albania that followed the lives of three families. Stäbler later arranged it for other groupings, including organ with tom-toms ad libitum. In the score he describes windows opening in different ways, letting through hidden information, distraction, intimate matters or what happens outside. ABER … (2009), a fantasy for solo organ and the longest piece here at 29 minutes, looks simpler at first. Many passages are a single line or long held notes, but fluctuations in air pressure keep changing the colour and make the pitch tremble slightly.

CD, Wergo WER 7315 2, released in 2015, with a 24-page booklet in German and English that includes the organ specification.