Thomas Demenga, Heinz Reber

Cellorganics is a set of four pieces for cello and pipe organ by the Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga and the organist and composer Heinz Reber, both of whom play on the record. Recorded in a Bern church in 1980 and issued by ECM in 1981, it places the cello against the organ rather than beside the piano, its usual partner. The result is an unusual meeting of written music, improvisation and a resonant acoustic space.

The music was recorded digitally in October 1980 at the Pauluskirche in Bern, with Martin Wieland as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. The four Cellorganics are credited jointly to Demenga and Reber. Demenga, born in Bern in 1954, had begun teaching at the Basel music academy the same year, and he went on to record Bach, Carter, Hosokawa and Holliger for ECM. Reber (1952-2007) returned to the label as a composer with Mnaomai, mnomai, a project that brought in Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen alongside Demenga.

Cellorganic # 1 fills more than sixteen minutes, almost half of the album. It begins with the cello alone before the organ enters, and the dialogue swings from quiet exchange to dense, agitated passages over sustained organ chords. Scraped sounds, harmonic glissandi and pointillist organ figures recur across the cycle. The two central pieces are shorter and lighter on their feet, with a rhythmic buoyancy that contrasts with the opening. The final piece starts with plucked cello lines, steady as footsteps, against the slow breathing of the organ pipes.

The record has had little press attention beyond ECM's own circles. Writing on Between Sound and Space, the blog that reviews the ECM catalogue album by album, Tyran Grillo heard in it "the dialectic possibilities of seemingly disparate instrumental voices" and stressed how much the lofty church acoustic adds. He also notes the reversal at its centre, with the cello no longer subordinate to the organ.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1196, first released in 1981. Although the album predates the launch of the ECM New Series in 1984, the CD carries the New Series imprint, where ECM placed its composed and contemporary music.