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LP
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ECH 001LP
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Quiet Pieces initiates Abul Mogard's personal imprint Soft Echoes with a definitive self-portrait of calm, contemplative, and discreet inner landscapes made audible. It is the first solo album on vinyl in four years. While sifting through archived material left idle from earlier projects, a chance encounter with a late uncle's trove of beloved 78rpm classical and opera records prompted the reworking and completion of what would eventually become the album. Spinning dusty records at 33 and 45rpm, Abul Mogard recombined their enduring specters with unfinished sketches from his archive. The resulting soundscape blurs distinctions between his memories and those of another, exquisitely short-circuiting the senses with its waking, dream-like lucidity. The resulting pieces hover over a threshold, a liminal space that harmonizes the old and older material. Voluminous waves of quiet and loud undulate between consonance and dissonance, conjuring imagery of a decaying grandeur that humanity's decadence has surrendered to the elements. Abul Mogard's seemingly abandoned yet vast landscapes are nevertheless intimate with timbral frissons of red-lined distortion. Elusive, yet as tangible as sea spray or smog, they affect the olfactory senses with a rarified, synesthetic quality that modestly engages one's emotional register -- a hypnotic, distinguishing feature long hailed as one of the hallmarks of his work. Looking back, Mogard notes an unexpected influence: "I realize being inspired by Phill Niblock, whose work I had barely known at the time but explored after his passing in 2024. His album Boston Tenor Index changed the way I approached dissonance. It encouraged me to push my sound further, to the edge of a space where I began to feel uncomfortable." The album artwork, created by longtime collaborator Marja de Sanctis, features a photograph taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, an archaeological site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Captured with an iPhone, the image traces the residual presence of construction techniques and architectural forms of the Romans, where material history is transcribed through contemporary tools. The convergence of ancient and modern technology aims to reverberate the site's lasting spiritual presence -- an echo persisting in what is now perceived as a quiet, emptied space. The spiral gestures towards infinity and light. Past and present dissolve into one another, reflecting Quiet Pieces meditation on sound, memory, and time. RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker.
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LP
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ELP 049LP
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Visionary synthesist Abul Mogard renders a darkly sublime soundtrack for Duncan Whitley's Kimberlin, an experimental film about the Isle of Portland on the English south coast, which coincidentally doubles up as metaphor for the mood of an increasingly inward-looking UK. Taking its name from the local word for an outsider or "foreigner", the short film Kimberlin was filmed on location during the months following the advisory referendum of 2016 which lead to the current, purgatory state of "Brexit". Combining mostly wordless, lingering shots of the Isle of Portland's bleak and rugged landscape with Abul Mogard's washed-out but richly evocative music, made with manipulated field recordings, modular synth and layered Farfisa organ, the project came to reflect a sense of (be)longing, loneliness, and outsiderness that also perhaps uncannily mirrors the putative collective feeling since that darkly historic vote, over three years ago. Taking cues from the evocative poetry of lifelong islander, stonemason and poet Cecil "Skylark" Durston (1910-1996), as well as a news report on the discovery of a mysterious cinema found interred by foliage in the Isle's cave systems, the merging of image and sound speak to their subject in an organic, impressionistic manner that leaves billowing room for imagination. Mogard's soundtrack opens out with a slow-burning, greyscale iridescence, tenderly manipulating the sound of fog horns and bird calls in briny modular spray and gloaming Farfisa organ swells that, when combined with song titles such as "Flooding Tide" and "Playing On The Stones", serve to evocatively connote the film's subject matter. The results can be heard as echoes in the digital future of an England that's now difficult to grasp, most hauntingly transposing the meaning of Cecil "Skylark" Durston's description of the Isle of Portland as a place where "quarry bells no longer ring, except in old men's dreams" to the ever-present, never-ending riddle of Brexit and its generationally devastating bleakness. RIYL: Thomas Köner, My Bloody Valentine, William Basinski. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.
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2LP
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ELP 037LP
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2019 repress. Above All Dreams is Abul Mogard's beautifully absorbing new album for Ecstatic -- his first since the Circular Forms (ELP 013LP, 2015) and his popular Works compilation (ELP 020LP, 2016). Counting six original pieces in its 66-minute wingspan, there's no mistaking that Above All Dreams is the most expansive solo release by Mogard to date. Taking into account its intangible divinity and cinematic quality -- the result of no less than three years diligent work -- it is arguably elevated to the level of his master opus; presenting a modular distillation of Mogard's most intoxicating strain of hauntology. Consistent with Mogard's music since the sought-after VCO tapes, c. 2012-2013, the allure to Above All Dreams lies in his ability to evoke and render feelings which are perhaps purposefully avoided in more academic echelons of drone music. Rather than a purist expression of physics through maths and geometry, Mogard voices his soul, improvising on modular synth for hours, days, months, and years in the same way a more conventional "band" develops group intuition. While hands-on, the intuitive evolution of process locates a newfound freedom in his music that implies a recognition of the metaphysical or post-physical, while Mogard explicitly points to influence from the Brazilian music of Tom Zé, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Chico Buarque, whose approach to shape and density, or perceptions of light and delicacy, also go some way to explaining the ephemeral intangibility of Above All Dreams. The results are best considered as the ephemera of non-verbal communications. From the gaseous bloom of "Quiet Dreams" to the opiated depth of "Where Not Even" to the starlit awn of "Upon The Smallish Circulation", and through the B side's keeling, 16 minute+ panoramas of "Above All Dreams" and "The Roof Falls", the power of Abul Mogard's dreams above all transcends sound, feeling, and physics in a truly remarkable way that evades words or concrete notation. RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, early Oneohtrix Point Never, Coil, Brian Eno. Master and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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2LP
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ELP 020LP
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2019 repress. Ecstatic offer a deeply arresting and definitive collection of Works by erstwhile Serbian factory worker-turned-synthesist Abul Mogard; containing selections from two cassettes released in 2012 and 2013 on Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra's VCO Recordings, as well as a cassette only release on Ecstatic, never before available on vinyl. Abul Mogard's relatively unusual path to releasing music is well documented, but bears repeating here. Upon taking retirement from a job at a factory which he held for decades, Mogard craved the mechanical noise and complex harmonics of the industrial workplace, and found that the best way to fulfil that need was through electronic music - using a limited set-up of Farfisa organs, voices, samplers and a self-built modular system to realize a peaceful yet haunting, sweetly coruscating sound that resonates uncommonly with music from Leyland Kirby to Alessandro Cortini, or Fennesz and Tim Hecker. The nine tracks on Works are soused in an emotional richness that's hard to forget once experienced. Broad daubs of distorted bass and naturally glorious harmonic progressions paint panoramas of wide open, grey-scaled skies whilst equally conveying the intimate feel of a person with their nose to the machine, toiling for a sound or feeling that really means something to them, and by turns, us. The fact that Mogard hails from an area hardly well-known for its synth music, and that he's of an age where most people take up gardening or lawn bowls, rather than synth music, only helps to aid the enigma and magic surrounding this remarkable artist and his layered, emotional music. RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, The Caretaker, Fennesz, Tangerine Dream, Brain Eno, Tim Hecker.
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LP
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ELP 013LP
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2019 repress. Abul Mogard presents his debut LP, a suite of four analog synth pieces. Mogard was born in Belgrade, Serbia, and spent most of his life working in a metal factory, only beginning to approach music after his retirement. Following two highly regarded cassette releases on Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra's VCO label and a series of compilations and split releases, Mogard makes a surprising departure on this debut album for Ecstatic Recordings. Circular Forms channels a wealth of soulful modular explorations and shadowy white-noise clouds. The end result is evocative, unsettling, and beguiling modern synth music. There's a real emotive essence to his almost lyrical arrangements that is very much removed from the contemporary modular revival. Composed and recorded in solitude using a limited equipment array of Farfisa organs in conjunction with a self-built modular synthesizer, the album's intoxicating distortions and extreme low frequencies translate into personal space and beautifully restrained impressions. Abul Mogard: "Lately I have been reading and appreciating visual art and paintings and this has informed my work on this album. Compared to my previous albums, this was the first time that I had a clear visual representation of my music, as geometrical forms -- each element of a track suggested a form that intertwined with the other elements."
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