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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, “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, “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.