Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri, "Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun"

This latest collaboration between Irisarri and Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alias is billed as the duo’s second album, which admittedly makes sense from a “new material” standpoint, but gets a bit murky given that the duo’s previous releases were a hybrid live/studio album and a live album that featured two previously unreleased pieces. Much like 2024’s Impossibly distant, impossibly close , Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is again something of a hybrid release, as the raw material was recorded live over a three-day residency at Berlin’s Morphine Raum. Some additional recordings were later made by Irisarri back at his studio in New York, but the more captivating bit is what emerged after Zen layered, subtracted, and reassembled the final recordings at his own studio back in Rome. The result is not what I would have expected, as Irisarri and Zen’s individual styles largely dissolve into a series of unusually minimal and understated mood pieces.

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The duo’s palette for these recordings were the expected modular synths and bowed guitars, but there were some unexpected twists this time around as well. The biggest one is that cellist Martina Bertoni and violinist Andrea Burelli share composing credit for a couple of pieces, but I was also a bit surprised to discover that Irisarri’s characteristic veil of frayed and corroded textures is mostly absent. The duo also note that rotary speakers played a central role, as did Morphine Raum’s 1970s mixing console and an array of microphones stationed throughout the room. According to Irisarri, “At moments I genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from me or from Abul. It stopped feeling like two people making decisions and began to feel like we were inside a system moving on its own." While I have absolutely no idea how much Abul/Zen later reshaped those performances, I certainly share Irisarri’s sentiment, as the lines between the duo’s synth sounds and processed guitar sounds has never been blurrier. Also, I could have sworn that there was a saxophone in “Blue Descent,” so I may also actually be losing my mind altogether.