Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is…
Tag Archive: Abul Mogard
Using fictional characters as alter egos is nothing new among musicians. From Gorillaz to the late MF DOOM, many have adopted fictional personas, sometimes fully fleshed-out characters, to perform live or create within the studio. Once, Ghost Bath, a North Dakotan black metal project, even claimed to hail from China. Guido Zen, aka Abul Mogard, belongs to this tradition, too. For years, he released ambient drone material under the guise of a retired Serbian factory worker, a man with formal musical training who, in the silence that followed retirement, found himself longing for the clunk and clatter of the factory floor, and so began sculpting his own electronic soundworld.
But Mogard’s productions are far removed from what we associate with electronic…