ABUL MOGARD 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: Ambient masters Grand River and Abul Mogard team up for the first time ever on In uno spazio immenso (In A Huge Space), titularly touching on the often gargantuan feeling evoked by space ambient, a befitting name to say the least. Here the pair work in and through the genre to produce a full-circle rainbow's worth of expanse and breadth, successfully contrasting a sense of largesse with another, counterintuitive feeling of a world stood still, time having stopped. The six-track album is an impressive, but subtle grand tour of an unblemished, alpine sublime, with the opening intenso-ambience of 'Dissolvi' recalling the work of Ben Frost, and the near-closing 'Sulle barcane' serving as the album's unique denouement, made up of cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads.

Review: Serbia's Abul Mogard inaugurates his Soft Echoes imprint - after many a career-spanning stopover with Ecstatic, VCO and Light-years - with Quiet Pieces, an inward-looking suite unearthing stillness and submerged emotions scraped from the edges of memory. Assembled from archival sketches and fragments inspired by a late uncle's collection of 78rpm classical and opera records, the album reimagines faded moments through manipulated samples played at altered speeds, filtered through effects, and folded into new compositions. The result is a dream-static fusion of past and present, where Mogard's own recollections blur with an avuncular other's. The pieces shimmer with spectral density and tactile distortion, edging into abstractions influenced in part by Phill Niblock's Boston Tenor Index; Mogard pushes into rawer and rawer dissonances over the record's course. Marja de Sanctis's cover photograph, taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, captures that same interplay of decay, reverence, and resonance.

Review: Ambient legends Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri team up for new album Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close. Unfolding naturally after being booked to play at the same show in Madrid in 2023, the two ambient artists' dazzlingly warm, slow-progressing approaches to ambience fuse neatly together here. Just two long pieces, 'Piece Of Forever' and 'Waking Up Dizzy On A Bastion', titularly grasp at the theme of eternity, determinism, historical peaks and troughs: the supporting atmosphere is equally as impressively arresting, seeming to urge the listener to 'give over' and move with the flow of time, less than the flow of will. Such a paradigm shift can indeed serve to make distance and closeness seem irrelevant.