Abul Mogard, “Quiet Pieces” (Soft Echoes, 2025)
This latest album from Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alter ego marks both the debut of his Soft Echoes label and an interesting detour from his usual working methods, as he reworked unreleased material from past projects and texturally enhanced it with sounds from his late uncle’s collection of classical 78s.
As far as I can tell, little of the actual music from those dusty shellac platters made it onto the album, but Mogard certainly worked wonders from that rich palette of hiss and crackle. The opening “Following a dream” is an especially strong example of that alchemy, as the dreamy melancholia of the central synth motif is quite lovely, but it is the cyclically crashing, slow-motion waves of static that provide both the rhythm and sense of raw elemental intensity.
The closing “Like a bird” achieves a similarly elemental feat, as its magic lies primarily in the way the way moody, groaning undercurrent steadily intensifies beneath the hazy minimalist sadness of its simple synth drones.The overall effect feels akin to experiencing a lonely dark red sunrise on a desolate moon that steadily intensifies until everything is consumed and obliterated by the inexorable expansion of that burning star’s death spasm.
In between the immensity of those bookends, there are a couple fine examples of more traditional Mogard fare, as well as a more menacing and aquatic-sounding outlier. The latter is “Constantly slipping away,” which weaves together a dragging throb and a steadily intensifying roar of noise to evoke the glacial approach of a massive submarine creeping through the impenetrable darkness of the ocean floor. Elsewhere, “In a studded procession” feels like a subtly spacy elegy for a lost civilization that leaves a howling and snarling wake of blackened wreckage in its wake, while “Through whispers” initially resembles a shimmering celestial fog concealing a slow-motion orchestra before it intensifies into an engulfing roar.
The best moments of the album, such as “Following a dream,” achieve a dreamlike, hypnotic beauty akin to that of grayscale time-lapse footage of blooming flowers. That said, it admittedly took longer than usual for the full majesty of Quiet Pieces to hit me, as the de-emphasis on melody means that these songs do not reveal their full character through casual listening. That belatedly strikes me as an amusing bit of irony, as the only way to truly appreciate the textural richness and visceral intensity of these “quiet pieces” is to experience them at extreme volume or via headphones. Thankfully, I realized that eventually and now view this album as one of the stronger releases in Mogard’s discography, as almost every piece ultimately attains a wonderfully immersively slow-burning immensity from just a hyperminimal palette of bleary synth drones and surface noise from 78s.
Listen here.
