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Abul Mogard

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Abul Mogard, “Quiet Pieces” (Soft Echoes, 2025)

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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.

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Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri, “Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close” (Black Knoll, 2024)

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This collaboration has its origins in a sold-out opening night show from Madrid’s 2023 SoundSet series, as Irisarri and Guido Zen tore the roof off the Condeduque cultural center ambient-style with their encore duet. Naturally, that intense performance (“Waking Up Dizzy on a Bastion”) is included here for the benefit of hapless chumps like me who were on the wrong continent that night, but the experience inspired the two artists to keep their partnership going afterwards (albeit remotely). That continued creative union eventually resulted in a longform studio piece (“Place of Forever”) that is every bit as impressive as the Madrid performance, if not even better. Unsurprisingly, I have been a fan of both artists for quite some time and this album is one of those rare times in which an ostensible match made in heaven actually sounds as absolutely mesmerizing as I hoped it would. This album is pure blackened drone nirvana.

The album opens with the new studio piece (“Place of Forever”), which gradually fades in from silence as a subdued chord progression, a host of pops and crackles, and a bleary industrial drone that languorously pans and undulates through space. If this were a lesser album, I can guarantee that I would be frustrated that it took a full 7 or 8 minutes before the opening piece finally started to catch fire, but such a long, slow build up feels quite confident and earned here: if I know a piece will eventually blossom into something incredible, the slow, simmering ascension to that point becomes incredibly tantalizing rather than an unnecessary lull.

Articulating exactly why “Place of Forever” is so brilliant is a bit tricky, however, as it essentially just sounds like a classic Abul Mogard slow-burner: majestic and melancholy synth swells glacially intensifying over a hissing backdrop of industrial ambiance for 17 glorious minutes. In fact, I am having a hell of a time even identifying where Irisarri’s hand comes into play at all, but whatever he was doing seems to have made quite an impact, as the textures are even more tactile and detailed than usual (aside from guitar, Irisarri is credited with “treatment” and Augustus Loop delay). At its best, the piece feels like time-lapse footage of curling and billowing smoke organically expanding into dark new tendrils. Unlike smoke, however, “Place of Forever” increasingly packs a seismic power that feels damn near elemental.

That would normally be an incredibly tough act to follow, but in this case it isn’t even the main course (in theory), as the album’s very raison d’etre is the Madrid performance. Given that Abul Mogard’s aesthetic can be reasonably described as “subtly manipulating dials and sliders with superhuman patience until it sounds like the fucking earth is seismically shuddering and cracking,” it makes perfect sense that “Waking Up Dizzy” shares a very similar dynamic trajectory with its predecessor: silence steadily intensifies into a howlingly visceral maelstrom of noise-gnawed synths and industrial textures and that slow, psychotropic journey extends for an entire side of vinyl.

That said, there are some significant differences between the two pieces, however, as Irisarri’s bowed electric guitar is newly prominent and there is also a melodic hook of sorts. The album description’s claim that Irisarri’s “melting guitar patterns” recall the “most lysergic moments on Loveless” feels like a bit of a stretch, but certainly not a delusional one, as it merely feels closer to an immense-sounding remaster of Belong’s classic October Language album instead. I do think Kevin Shields would be impressed with how skillfully Zen and Irisarri ravage and submerge their melodic hook with noise and distortion, however. If not, at least they managed to impress me and a roomful of enthusiastically clapping people in Spain, as the best moments of “Waking Up Dizzy” evoke an image of timeless ruined beauty that lies somewhere between streaking comet trails over a burning city and a violent sunset of blood reds and bruised purple: immense, elemental, melancholy, and achingly beautiful all at the same time. In fact, I am genuinely having a hard time thinking of any previous Abul Mogard or Irisarri releases that can match Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close, as this album is about as perfect as heavy electronic drone music can get. Zen and Irisarri are two stone-cold killers at the height of their powers here.

Listen here.

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Abul Mogard, “In a Few Places Along the River” (Self-Released, 2022)

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This latest release from Mogard is something of a modest one, as he describes it as “the result of experimentation with familiar and less familiar instruments available to me in the studio between 2019 and 2022.” No further information is divulged about the album’s “less familiar” elements aside from an interesting mention of reverb borrowed from the Inchindown oil tanks, which apparently hold the world record for longest reverberation time. If In a Few Places Along the River were a Lea Bertucci or Pauline Oliveros album, that expansive reverb would no doubt be a defining feature, but it seems like Mogard harnessed it in an more unusual and inventive way. The results are admittedly not quite top-tier Mogard (this is a digital-only release, after all), as this album captures him in stark, slow-burning drone mode rather than one of his more melodic and warm moods, but it is still solid enough to be satisfying, as the two bookends are impressively nuanced and substantial.

Mogard was definitely not in a hurry to make to make an impression with this album, as the opening “Against a White Cloud” fades win with blearily smeared drones that evoke the unsettling nocturnal ambiance of David Lynch at his most darkly atmospheric. Gradually, however, it starts to blossom into something less drifting and ghostly, which is a transformation that I suspect is indebted to the oil tank-inspired reverb. At the very least, it feels like a feedback loop of some kind, as each layer of drone added lingers around to provide a frayed and dissolving backdrop for the next. In any case, it is an impressively likable and stealthily heavy piece, gradually snowballing into a smoldering and snarling roar of tightly reined elemental power. The following “In True Contemplation” takes a similar route, as it begins with a quiet, barely perceptible synth drone and steadily intensifies into an engulfing roar. It feels a bit colder and more minimal than its predecessor, which makes it less memorable, but the insistent and rhythmic bass throb is a nice enhancement.

The album’s entire second half is then devoted to the 21-minute epic “Along The River,” which can reasonably be described as both a variation of the same themes as the earlier pieces and the strongest single iteration of those themes. That success is mostly because it has more of a melodic component than the other pieces, but it is also more fluid, tender, twisting, and subtly spacy. Moreoever, the steadily intensifying arc of the piece ultimately ebbs back towards silence, which gives the piece the feel of a lunar eclipse slowing blotting out the sun, then slowly revealing its warmth and light once again. Not that much warmth and light, mind you, as the piece has the ineffable sadness of an elegy, but it feels movingly transcendent as well. A sublime 21-minute highlight is more than enough to carry the album for me, but Mogard fans less enthusiastic about his cold, minimal, and unhurried drone side should proceed with caution. Serious drone connoisseurs will find much to love here, however, as In a Few Places Along the River captures a master allowing himself plenty of room to fully indulge his gifts for elegantly controlled, slow-burning magic.

sounds can be found here.

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Abul Mogard, “In Immobile Air” (Ecstatic, 2021)

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The latest album from this enigmatic Serbian composer is a significant departure from his previous work, as these five pieces were primarily composed on an old upright piano during lockdown. While the usual synthesizers are conspicuously relegated to a background role, In Immobile Air is nevertheless still very “Mogard” in both its central theme (memory) and its meditative and melancholy mood. It admittedly took me a bit longer to warm to this side of Mogard’s artistry than usual (the piano is not my favorite instrument), but a few pieces capture him in especially inspired form and feel like significant breakthroughs in the manipulation of harmony and overtones. The other pieces are intriguingly adventurous as well, inhabiting a murky shadow realm somewhere between Harold Budd and blackened, desolate dronescapes.

Partially inspired by an unnamed Italo Calvino story, both the song titles and the general mood of In Immobile Air evoke the bleak grandeur of a rocky beach on an overcast day. For the most part, Mogard paints the album’s various somber scenes with a balance of gently rippling minor key piano melodies and deep, brooding drones, but that balance can shift quite a lot between songs. The darkly beautiful title piece is probably the most equal balance of the two elements, as a sad, tumbling piano motif lazily repeats over a gnarled and heaving backdrop of synth swells. 

The following “Clouds,” on the other hand, abandons any recognizable piano in favor of dense, blown-out, and downright seismic waves of drone. Nevertheless, it is an unexpectedly melodic piece, as the roiling miasma cyclically resolves into a repeating bass tone. As befits the title, “Clouds” calls to mind a sky full of dense black clouds that periodically breaks to reveal faint rays of warming light. It is quite a mesmerizing piece, but it is later eclipsed by the album’s centerpiece “Sand.” Like “In Immobile Air,” it is centered upon a tender, minor key piano melody, but the brilliant bit slowly emerges from the background, as massive, buzzing oscillations swell from the murky swirl of lingering decay to steal the spotlight. The album’s two more drone-based pieces are a bit less memorable, but In Immobile Air‘s highlights are impressive and unique enough to make it a strong album.

Samples can be found here.

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Abul Mogard, “Kimberlin” (Ecstatic, 2019)

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This has been an unusually eclectic and prolific year for Abul Mogard, as he has followed up his first ever remix album (And We Are Passing Through Silently) with his first ever soundtrack album in the form of Kimberlin. On paper, the transition from Mogard’s usual fare into soundtrack territory makes a lot more intuitive sense than turning him loose on deconstructing Aïsha Devi jams, but his innovation in bridging that stylistic gulf was a large part of why Passing was such an absolute left-field delight. The pleasures of Kimberlin are arguably bit more modest by comparison, as it falls into more expected aesthetic terrain and feels more like an EP than a full-length (by Mogard standards, anyway). In terms of quality, however, it does not fall at all short of his usual level of sublime mastery, culminating in a final slow-burning epic that can hold its own against any of his previous work.

Abul Mogard does not seem like an artist who embarks upon any project lightly, nor does he seem like someone who would feel comfortable releasing (or associating himself with) middling or uninspired material. Consequently, it is not surprising at all that his first film-related project is quite an intriguing one. Kimberlin is a 24-minute experimental film by Duncan Whitley set on the English isle of Portland. In the local dialect, “kimberlin” is term for an outsider or stranger living on the island and Whitley notes that the film was made in the wake of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, so the idea of “the other” is presumably a guiding theme.

Lamentably, I have not seen the film (it debuted at Café Oto last month), but I suspect it delves into something considerably more fascinating and mysterious than mere provincial xenophobia, as Whitley was drawn to the island by the discovery of “an underground cinema cavern” and the canisters of super 8 film inside it. Naturally, a central focus of the film is speculation about who could have been behind such a curious and secretive endeavor, but the tone of the soundtrack is largely a bleakly beautiful one that seems inspired by the island itself. The music has a haunted and majestic feel that evokes a desolate, rocky, and windswept landscape that harbors disturbing secrets: if the unearthed canisters had turned out to be full of ghosts rather than film, Mogard would not have needed to change his score much at all.

The slowly swelling opener “Flooding Tide” feels like a return to some of Mogard’s earlier work, as it unfolds as a brooding, murky, and roiling dronescape that seems to rumble up from beneath the earth. Or, based on its title, like a heavy tide rolling in to envelop a secluded path on a lonely coast. It does a fine job of setting the mood for the album (and presumably the film as well), but the three pieces that follow are the true heart of Kimberlin. The most immediately striking piece is the eerily beautiful “I Watched The See The Fields The Sky,” which unfolds as a lazily seesawing melodic figure that feels mournful, mysterious, and corroded and leaves spectral, smoldering trails in its wake. The remaining two pieces are not quite as overtly melodic, but they maintain the same feeling of smoldering and undulating in slow-motion, like a bleary red sunrise slowly burning through a thick fog.

What they lack in melody, they more than make up for in elegantly controlled and simmering tension, as Mogard allows his swaying, throbbing, and frayed drones to organically unfold and steadily accumulate impressive depth and power. The 17-minute “Playing On The Stones” is especially mesmerizing and is probably the most perfect summation of Mogard’s unique genius that I have heard to date. That does not necessarily mean that it is strongest piece that he has ever recorded (it is not, as competition is fierce). However, it is exactly the kind of piece that only he could have composed, as it displays a control, patience, and lightness of touch that verges on the supernatural. At its core, it is essentially just a single chord that lazily twists, quavers, and undergoes subtle textural transformations, yet it is nevertheless heavy as hell and so absorbing in its subtle dynamic evolution that I would happily allow it to continue increasing in power until my entire house shook and plaster rained from my ceiling.

It is no secret that I almost invariably find soundtrack albums to be exasperating and underwhelming regardless of how much I love the artist responsible, but I am delighted to report that Kimberlin has managed to transcend its intended purpose so seamlessly that all of my usual soundtrack caveats do not apply. In fact, I never would have guessed that Kimberlin even was a soundtrack if it had not been billed as such: it feels like a complete and fully formed work that stands on its own. Admittedly, a large part of that success is probably due to both Mogard’s usual aesthetic and the fact that Whitley’s film is an experimental/art film rather than a narrative one (which would have required drama and a wider palette of moods), but plenty of art films have forgettable soundtracks too. This one does not.

The only real difference between Kimberlin and A Characteristically Great New Abul Mogard Album is essentially just the duration. The album is actually longer than the film it scores, yet it still ends too soon to feel like an entirely satisfying meal (though that probably could have been remedied by simply expanding “I Watched The Sea” to three times its current length). Given that, I would probably rank Kimberlin with the Maurizio Bianchi split as “not quite among the most crucial Mogard releases, yet disproportionately wonderful for an ostensibly minor release.” Everything that I love about Abul Mogard’s work is here, even if there is slightly less of it than I would have deemed optimal. No one can wring aching beauty and deep emotion from quiet simplicity like Mogard can and Kimberlin emphatically reaffirms that.

Samples can be found here.

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Abul Mogard, “And We Are Passing Through Silently” (Houndstooth, 2019)

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Hot on the heels of his appearance on last year’s In Death’s Dream Kingdom, Abul Mogard returns to Houndstooth with a collection of his work as an unlikely remix artist. Of these five lengthy pieces, I was only familiar with the one from Fovea Hex’s The Salt Garden II, as his reworkings of songs by Nick Nicely and a pair of Houndstooth artists (Aïsha Devi Devi and Penelope Trappes) somehow eluded me. The beguiling centerpiece of the album, however, is an entirely new work that reimagines Cindytalk/Massimo Pupillo’s sublime Becoming Animal project. All of the chosen pieces suit Mogard’s aesthetic beautifully though, adding up to an album that is more like an unexpectedly strong and song-based follow-up to Above All Dreams than a collection of one-off works that were never intended to coexist. Naturally, this is easily Abul Mogard’s most accessible release to date, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is also one of his best too.

I would love to someday hear an Abul Mogard remix that enlivens a beautiful Fovea Hex song with frenetic breakbeats and party horns, but Mogard in remix mode is almost indistinguishable from Mogard performing his own work at this stage of his career: everything he touches is elegantly stretched into a warmly languorous reverie of blurred and frayed chord swells. For the most part, nearly all of these songs fell quite close to that territory before Mogard even started working his signature magic, so his sorcery largely lies in transforming traits that already existed into something a bit more expansive, radiant, and subtly hallucinatory. The sole exception to that trend is the unexpected opener, which is a somewhat radical overhaul of a piece from Aïsha Devi’s 2015 debut album.

Notably, Devi’s DNA Feelings was all over “best of 2018” lists last year, but Mogard was apparently into her years before that, which is very amusing and endearing if his purported identity as a retired Serbian factory worker is true. The original version of “O.M.A” is a warped, distinctive, and fairly experimental twist on soulful and seductive dance music. The remixed version, on the other hand, is almost unrecognizable, as Devi’s voice melodically floats through lush, billowing chords like a beckoning Siren’s song. Also, Devi’s voice is arguably not even the focal point of the piece, as it drifts in and out while a slow-moving and spacey synth motif establishes itself as the heart of it all. It is a truly lovely piece of music, but so is everything else on the album.”O.M.A” just happened to travel a bit further to get to its final destination than the rest of its peers.

Penelope Trappes’ brooding “Carry Me” winds up in roughly similar aesthetic territory, but Mogard skillfully manipulates the textures to evoke a slow-burning and ghostly melancholy, emphasizing the ominous throb of the bass notes and imbuing the chords with a colder, more corroded edge. As great as first two songs are, however, the album’s most impressive stretch does not come until the one-two punch of Nick Nicely’s “London South” and Becoming Animal’s “The Sky Is Ever Falling. “Both seem like such a perfect fit that it almost seems like it was predestined for them to wind up here.

The original “London South” is a beautifully droning and dreamlike bit of bittersweet pop brilliance and Mogard wisely leaves that structure and mood almost entirely intact, opting to merely transform the scale, building it into a gorgeously ragged, warmly enveloping, and achingly dreamlike epic three times as long as its source material. Becoming Animal’s aesthetic is perhaps even more fundamentally aligned with Mogard’s, as he merely excised the samples from their “Doorway to the Sky,” replaced the simmering guitar noise with billowing dark clouds of synth chords and allowed Gordon Sharp’s tenderly gorgeous vocals unfold exactly as intended. One could definitely argue that Mogard’s remix is merely polishing up a diamond a bit, but it does benefit from the polishing, as the slow-building intensity is a bit more effective and nuanced here (not surprising, given that the original was recorded live at Café Oto).

Amusingly, the one piece that I already knew and liked quite a bit before hearing the album (a reworking of Fovea Hex’s “All Those Signs”) turned out to be the least of his remix achievements, though it is an appealingly understated and intimate performance. At its core, “We Dream All The Dark Away” is a fundamentally rapturous piece of music, as Mogard marries Clodagh Simonds’ simple, lovely vocal melody to a similarly simple and lovely organ motif, elevating the piece into an even more sublime work of tender beauty. Unfortunately, the piece then sprawls out and meanders for over twenty minutes, greatly diluting its impact. Hopefully someone will someday do a remix of the remix, isolating and expanding upon its early brilliance (though it would admittedly take some serious guts to leave Brian Eno’s choral contribution on the cutting room floor). That said, it is still an intermittently gorgeous piece—I just did not expect to be blindsided by so many pieces that were even better.

Aside from the remarkably high standard of quality, And We Are Passing Through Silently is also a bit of a revelation for so seamlessly transforming Mogard’s heavenly drones into something approaching pop music. The addition of vocals to his vision feels perfectly natural, organic, and right and absolutely none of the crucial essence is sacrificed in the process. With pieces like “London South” and “The Sky is Ever Falling,” Mogard makes it seem like he has been doing remixes forever and that it is exactly what he was supposed to be doing all along.

Samples can be found here.

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Abul Mogard, “Above All Dreams” (Ecstatic, 2010)

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It was quite an unexpected and delightful surprise to get a new Abul Mogard full-length, as the unprolific Serbian composer seems to only record one or two new pieces each year (ones that get released, anyway). Apparently, Above All Dreams took three years to make though, so I guess that fits with Mogard’s extremely considered approach and rigorous quality control. Characteristically, Dreams is yet another absolutely wonderful release, but it is a bit of a departure from what I expected in some ways and it took me several listens to fully warm to it: Dreams feels more like an immersive, slow-burning epic than a batch of instantly gratifying individual highlights. As such, this release is probably not the ideal entry point to Mogard’s vision for newcomers, but devotees will find a lot to love about these transcendent reveries, as this album packs a lot of quiet intensity once its depths are fully revealed.

It feels weird to bring up hooks when describing Abul Mogard’s work, yet I am hard-pressed to think of a better or more inclusive term for the rhythmic, textural, and melodic elements that pervaded his earlier releases.There are not many of those elements to be found on Above All Dreams, which is a crucial point to address in understanding and appreciating how Mogard has evolved since his early days of trying replicate the sounds of a factory (according to lore, anyway). Since those oft-brilliant industrial beginnings, Mogard’s vision has slowly blossomed into something almost rapturous and divine, at times more closely resembling a spontaneous natural phenomenon than painstakingly crafted human compositions.

In fact, his career can almost be read as an endless march towards self-erasure. The opening “Quiet Dreams” is a particularly fine example of that, as is the following “Where Not Even,” thought the two take very different forms. On “Quiet Dreams,” it feels like a blood red sunrise is slowly burning through a mass of dark and brooding clouds. “Where Not Even,” on the other hand, resembles a woozily swooping and distorted deep space transmission that seems to feed back on itself and distort into something quite sinister (and also quite heavy in an understated way). In neither case is there much evidence of Mogard’s hand, though “Quiet Dreams” features a few well-placed sliding synth tones. Instead, both pieces feel like strange and vivid dreams that a machine might have (particularly “Where Not Even”). If they feel like compositions at all, they certainly do not seem like ones that were created on a human time scale.

It is not until the third piece, “Upon The Smallish Circulation,” that Mogard starts to creep into more musical territory (in this case, burbling deep space synth psychedelia a la prime Tangerine Dream). I suppose that makes it the closest thing the album has to a single, as there is structure and melody in its trance-inducing central theme, but it does not otherwise diverge from the album’s aesthetic in any kind of significant way: the arpeggio pattern is cool, but it is still just a backdrop for alternately hollow and sizzling rumbles from the cosmic void. While the slow-moving and elegiac “Over My Head” briefly continues that melodic trend, the two lengthy pieces that close the album return to more dreamily languorous drone territory.

The title piece captures Mogard at his most elegantly sublime, as his sustained synth tones feel like steadily massing and intertwining tendrils of smoke. Gradually, the piece builds to a somewhat conventional bit of whooshing, spacey ambient-drone, but Mogard displays some truly remarkable lightness of touch and harmonic ingenuity on the way, weaving a gorgeously swaying, fluttering, and oscillating cloud of overtones as the piece slowly coheres into its final shape.

Mogard saves his finest moment for last, however. The foundation of “The Roof Falls” is a lazily winding and heavenly organ-like melody that drifts through a haze of drones. As the title suggests, however, that lushly beautiful idyll seems like it is taking place inside a vast building that is slowly collapsing, though the creeping ruin stays just far enough away to remain an omnipresent and threatening undercurrent rather than the focus. Still, some of the textures definitely take on a fried, corroded, and gnarled character as the piece unfolds, which adds some welcome visceral bite.

While no single piece quite recaptures the aching beauty or churning, mechanized heaviness of Mogard’s best work, Above All Dreams nevertheless feels like a legitimate creative breakthrough of sorts (or at least an inspired lateral move—he certainly is not repeating himself). There has not been a change in quality so much as a change in compositional approach: Mogard’s earlier work sought to distill his vision to glittering perfection while this release stretches and slows that vision into infinity (or at least an approximation of it). As a result, I am not floored, but I am entranced. There is a sense of total immersion and steadily building cumulative power here that makes this Dreams a unique entry within Mogard’s oft-stellar canon: he casts a beguiling spell and sustains that dream state masterfully.

Samples can be found here.

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Abul Mogard, “Circular Forms” (Ecstatic, 2018)

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Recently given an much-needed reissue by Ecstatic, Circular Forms (2015) is Abul Mogard’s lone proper full-length album amidst a slow trickle of cassettes, splits, and compilation appearances. When I first heard it, I was admittedly a bit disappointed as it felt considerably less unique and revelatory than the earlier, more industrial-influenced pieces collected on Works. I have since warmed to it quite a bit, however, as “The Half-Light of Dawn” is an achingly beautiful masterpiece of simmering and haunted-sounding post-apocalyptic drone. Mogard also does a stellar job at channeling the cosmic dread of prime Tangerine Dream at one point. The rest of the album is quite enjoyable as well, but it sometimes has a bit of an uneven and transitional feel that reveals Mogard’s influences and occupies more well-established aesthetic terrain than some of his iconoclastic earlier releases.

The album opens in somber and understated fashion with “Slate-Colored Storm,” which is essentially just a murky and submerged-sounding melodic loop that languorously unfolds beneath a series of slow-motion washes of bleak synth chords. Naturally, that elegant simplicity suits the piece quite well, establishing a glacial momentum and darkly soulful foundation for Mogard’s peripheral activities. In that regard, he proves to be an absolute sorcerer at controlling tension and ingeniously transforming textures, effectively erasing all trace of himself to create a vivid, powerful, and organically unfolding scene. “Slate-Colored Storm” feels like time has slowed to an absolute crawl and a mournful and decayed tape loop is obsessively playing and re-playing the same broken melody as geysers of scorching lava erupt from the earth around it.There is nothing that feels like a man playing a synthesizer in that tableau at all, as everything feels ruined, corroded, decayed, and unreal in a profound way, as if the scene is playing out as a vision of the future that occurs long after Mogard has been reduced to dust.

The following “Bound Universe,” on the other hand, feels like a sincere homage to Tangerine Dream at their heaviest and most inhumanly futuristic, unfolding as a churning and dense synth juggernaut that surges relentlessly forward amidst a gnarled storm of rumbling drones and sizzling noise. Both pieces are legitimately wonderful.

The following “Half Light at Dawn” is the album’s achingly gorgeous heart though, resembling a lush elegy for humanity composed by a heartbroken robot. I am truly awe-struck by the intensity of emotion that Mogard is able to wring out of circuits and wires, as “Dawn” is a moaning, whimpering, and undulating feast of bleary melodies and deep, sizzling washes of chords amidst an otherworldly haze of ghostly afterimages and flickering spectres. It is absolutely pitch-perfect in every way, slowly and wearily accumulating immense power through slow-burning repetition before quietly disappearing once more into silence.

I would be hard-pressed to imagine anything that could satisfyingly follow such a sublime and crushingly beautiful piece, but Mogard gamely tries by closing the album with the epic “House on the River” (at nearly 17-minutes, it is roughly as long as everything that came before it combined). Lamentably, it is my least favorite piece on the album, yet Mogard is still operating on quite a high plane—even his less-inspired work offers some understated and singular delights. For the most part though, “House on the River” is merely a decent bit of slow-moving synth drone, as a succession of billowing chords steadily flows forward with minimal variation or evolution. Buried in the depths, however, lies a single nagging note that keeps endlessly (if faintly) pulsing beneath it all, imbuing an otherwise straightforward piece with the sense that it is merely a veil concealing something more elemental and mysterious. Sadly, that veil never lifts, but it is significant that even Mogard’s rare forays into well-traveled territory hint at being something far more than that.

It would certainly be reasonable to describe Circular Forms as Mogard’s ambient album, but it represents more of a shift and expansion in focus than a radical transformation. This vein has always run through Mogard’s work, so the most significant advance was merely that he decided to release an entire album devoted to his more slow-moving and meditative side. At this stage in his career, however, Mogard’s meditative side was still quite an eerily bleak and haunting place to be, evoking the Zen-like calm of the last human gazing sadly at a scorched and ravaged landscape (he has brightened his tone considerably since). There is a lonely beauty mingled with deep sadness here, yet the best moments of Circular Forms burrow deep enough to achieve something of a transcendent rapture. That latter part is crucial, as Mogard’s work is not oppressively sad at all—the path to heaven just happens to be unexpectedly dark one.

Listen here.
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Abul Mogard, “Works” (Ecstatic, 2018)

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According to legend, this enigmatic Serbian composer became deeply interested in music as a means of trying to recapture the sounds of the metal factory that he had worked at in Belgrade. If this 2016 collection of his early cassette releases succeeded in that aesthetic objective, that factory must have quite a terrifying edifice, as the best pieces evoke a relentless and pummeling mechanized horror akin to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. More importantly, some of these songs are absolutely mesmerizing and Mogard intersperses his lengthy industrial trance spells with some unexpectedly tender and melancholy glimpses of light. Bittersweetly, Mogard has since left this revelatory phase behind to devote himself to more overtly beautiful and transcendent fare, yet every time I put this album on, I am sucked deeper and deeper into its complex evocation of mercilessly inhuman machinery poignantly mingled with soul and bleak radiance. To some degree, I wish I had covered Works back when it came out, but I suspect it needed some time to grow on me before I could fully appreciate it for what it is: one of the true masterpieces of the last decade.

Abul Mogard’s self-titled debut initially appeared as a self-released CDr back in 2012 before being more formally reissued later that year as a cassette on Zombi’s VCO Records. Looking back, it is remarkable how fully formed, varied, and powerful his vision was even from that modest first step, as the relentlessly churning and seething “Drooping Off” remains one of the most stunning and heavy pieces in the Mogard oeuvre. The sizzling and corroded beauty of “The Purpose of Peace” is yet another essential piece, while the murky, forlorn psychedelia of Works‘ opening “Despite Faith” is not all that far behind. 

Notably, however, there are a few songs from that release that did not make it Works. The same is true of 2013’s Drifted Heaven: only three songs from each release appear here. As a result, Works is not exactly a comprehensive retrospective of Mogard’s earliest work, so much as an idealized history—here is almost no need to delve into the full cassettes because all of the strongest pieces are collected here and the less dazzling fare was culled with fairly unerring judgment. There is one notable exception, however, as the epic “Android Manouvres” did not make the cut, presumably due to its somewhat extreme length.

The three pieces from Drifted Vision wisely do not depart much from the bold aesthetic vision of Mogard’s debut, yet they do exhibit some significant advancement in his execution and compositional approach.My personal favorite is “Tumbling Relentless Heaps,” a mercilessly propulsive mechanized march of fried electronics, fluttering psychedelic flourishes, and brooding menace. The other two pieces from Drifted showcase Mogard’s more meditative side, however. “Post Crisis Remembrance” initially takes shape as a blurrily elegiac ambient reverie, but gradually darkens in tone as a rumbling undercurrent slowly swells and increasingly gnarled and distressed tones bubble up from its depths. Elsewhere, the slow-burning and achingly beautiful “Airless Linger” sounds like a lovelorn android from the future trying to replicate a great Tim Hecker album.

The final three pieces are taken from Mogard’s 2015 The Sky Had Vanished cassette, which appears in its entirety here. It is a bit more varied than the previous releases, acting as something of a bridge between Mogard’s darkly mantric factory-inspired beginnings and the more radiant, melodic fare to come. “The Sky Had Vanished,” for example, is a prime example of the former, steadily building in roiling intensity to a heavily pulsing thrum spewing forth metallic harmonics. The following “Desires Are Reminiscences By Now,” however, takes quite a different tone altogether. It is quite a quietly lovely and meditative piece, but its warmly languorous chord progression eschews all of the industrial throb and heft of the earlier work. Some corroded textures remain, thankfully, but the piece still feels like a curious anomaly—like a cloudy and regret-infused Eno pastiche.

It is still quite good, of course—it just seems like a slightly awkward first step towards crafting more nakedly beautiful and unambiguously human fare (a direction he eventually perfected with 2017’s “All This Has Passed Forever”). In any case, the true centerpiece of Sky is the 18-minute “Staring at the Sweeps of the Desert. “Stylistically, it feels like the blurring together of the other two pieces, as a deep, throbbing bass pattern provides a sense of weary forward momentum beneath a bittersweet haze of smeared and blurry synth chords. It also marks a more ambitious compositional approach, as the original theme eventually dissolves to make way for bleakly shuddering coda.

I suppose it would be overreaching a bit to say that Works is a flawless collection, but the minor flaws are irrelevant in the face of how many truly stellar pieces are assembled in just one place. Each of the individual tapes is certainly excellent, but experiencing the distillation of several years of Mogard’s best work at once is like being hit by a goddamn meteor. Songs like “Drooping Off” and “Tumbling Relentless Heaps” struck me just as profoundly as any of the previous masterpieces that have knocked me sideways over the years (Soundtracks for the Blind, All The Pretty Horses, etc.), which is an experience that has become increasingly rare as I grow older and more jaded. It is nice to know that I still have the capacity for wonder and awe, even if I do not get to use it much. Rapturous praise of the content aside, I also love the scope of this collection, as it completely encapsulates a glorious and ephemeral window in Mogard’s evolution before he moved onto newer frontiers. I love that later work as well, but the era covered here remains Mogard’s most distinctive and magical phase for me, as the “ghost in the machine” mingling of relentless industrial dread and human warmth is heavy, deep, and emotionally affecting all at once. Works is an absolutely canonical collection from an absolutely canonical artist.

Listen here.