Abul Mogard has had a very prolific past couple years, and it wasn’t missed on our radar. Aside from remarkable duos (‘In Uno Spazio Immenso’, ‘Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close’), live shows recordings (with Rafael Anton Irisarri at Le Guess Who or ‘Live At The Athens Conservatoire’), and collaborations or remixes for KMRU, CoH and Joachim Spieth, he’s started his own imprint Soft Echoes with the release of his new album ‘Quiet Pieces’. We managed to have an interview before his show with Grand River a month ago in Barcelona, to talk about different types of venues influence on performance, the physical qualities of sound, finding source material in a collection of very old records in his family, the influence of Phil Niblock in his latest work, and more.
Cyclic Defrost: Have you ever been to Sónar Spain?
Abul Mogard: Yes, 25 years ago, as a visitor. It was a great edition. I saw Coil at a church playing ‘Time Machines’, although I’d seen them a few months earlier at the Royal Festival Hall, and that was a life changing experience. I also saw Autechre, Marc Almond, Hecker, Mego Laptop Orchestra, Francisco López, V/VM.
Cyclic Defrost: V/VM! I love his work as The Caretaker.
Abul Mogard: Actually, we met with James over there! He’s a good friend of mine. We’ve been friends since that festival. I used to live in London back then and came to Sónar after a good friend of mine, Lee Grainge from the Smallfish electronic shop, recommended it to me. So we came together and made a lot of friends there.
Cyclic Defrost: You’ll be performing at a very big stage tonight, with a great sound system. Since your work with Grand River has a lot of contrast between little details and very loud, grandiose momentums, do you balance this at all when performing in churches, theatres, big festivals?
Abul Mogard: We’ve played all of these settings. We played in two churches over the past year, also in smaller venues and big ones like Atonal. Seated performances too. I like the impact of a big sound system. It makes everything more visceral, you can hear the details clearly, and there’s a physical aspect to it which works well with the music we make. So I like the idea of performing on a stage like this. In a way it’s similar to Atonal. Of course it’s a different venue, but with a similar kind of sound system, this one being a bit easier because of less reverb in the room. Reverb is good, but for the music that we make, which is very dense, sometimes it gets difficult to manage in a live situation. I think reverb works really well with sets that are more minimal. In fact the last time we played in a church was in Nantes in France, and for that particular set we ended up playing more minimal, mixing the elements more subtly and maybe using less at the same time.
So yes, it changes depending on the room, the sound system, and the way the sound waves move in the space. It makes you adapt a little bit. It also depends on the energy you get from the audience. You definitely feel a kind of energy or vibe that influences your set.
Cyclic Defrost: It can get quite complicated to handle the acoustics for church performances.
Abul Mogard: It’s very complicated. For very dense material, where you have almost a wall of sound, it can work, but it can also be tricky. It really depends on the sound system. For example, when we performed at Le Guess Who with Rafael Anton Irisarri in a church, the sound was incredible. The system was very powerful, and there weren’t the usual limitations you often get in churches to protect antique glass or artworks. The volume was very loud, and we didn’t have any acoustic issues. We actually played with the natural decay of the reverb in the church. Everything was shaking, and you can hear it on the recording. It gave a kind of energy to the performance.
Cyclic Defrost: Any best memories from performing live?
Abul Mogard: Some of the ones I just mentioned, like Atonal with Grand River or Le Guess Who with Rafael. But if I think about shows I did on my own, the first Atonal stands out for sure, in 2017, with Marja de Sanctis doing the visuals. Another one I really liked was in Milan, at the Auditorium San Fedele, for a festival called Inner Spaces. It had a fantastic atmosphere and a very peculiar sound system based on the Acousmonium, with more than 50 speakers of different heights and placements. With the sound engineer, Massimo Colombo, we made a plan to have the sound come from my stereo sources, and he gradually started placing it across different groups of speakers, so in the end it was very immersive.
Cyclic Defrost: Is there anything you can tell me about the physical qualities of sound? When did that topic start calling your attention?
Abul Mogard: I think it’s a slow process that developed over a long time. Probably something I pushed more when I started the Abul Mogard project in 2010. I was using music in a more therapeutic way, although I wasn’t aware of it then. I realised it later. I was going through a difficult period in my life, working on music alone, finding my way after many years, and I tried to push the sound as far as I could. I had new equipment and worked heavily with distortion, and this created unexpected harmonics. I always tried to keep it a little on the edge. Same with the amount of bass. I’ve been trying to push that further too. With the new album, ‘Quiet Pieces’, I worked more with dissonance. The idea was to find a place at the edge of dissonance, and that’s why there’s a reference to Phill Niblock. I didn’t know his music before, so I investigated and bought ‘Boston Tenor Index’. He uses long notes that sit right on the edge. For me it was a little too much, but I started listening and playing it loud as he suggested, to see what would happen. Without realising it, that influenced me a lot. My music is very different to his, but I tried to push it toward that kind of edge. There’s something in those long notes that’s hypnotic. You start to feel the waves.
In fact, I think ‘Quiet Pieces’ is best if played loud. I still wonder if I should have added a liner note about it. But I didn’t, partly because I didn’t want to give too many indications. I must say I worked on it a lot while playing it at loud volume.
Cyclic Defrost: Tell me a bit about Soft Echoes.
Abul Mogard: I’d been thinking about it for a while, creating a platform where I could release music when I wanted. It’s great to work with labels, but sometimes you have to wait because there are a lot of releases ahead of yours. There’s also a practical side to it, which is to retain all the rights by releasing on my own label. I think that’s going to be important in the future. I control the rights for most of my solo work and thought it would be good to continue that way. In the future, if I have the time and resources, I’d also like to curate the label, releasing music from other artists.
I started thinking about it a couple of years ago, while working on ‘Quiet Pieces’, which took a long time as it was based on archival material.
Cyclic Defrost: I’ve read the story about a late uncle of yours and their vinyl collection.
Abul Mogard: It was the older brother of my father. My father is 91 now, and his brother was 20 years older. He died many years ago. When I came back from London in 2019 with my family and moved back to Rome, we started reorganising our place, cleaning up, and I found a box of 78RPM records. I asked my father and he told me they belonged to my uncle, and some were my grandfather’s too. So those albums were about 80 years old.
Cyclic Defrost: The ones that break easily, right?
Abul Mogard: Exactly. Some of them broke when I moved them. I kept those records in a box for a while with the idea of making a project around them. My idea was to take small loops, process them, and create new compositions. I started doing that and also tried to revive some old archival pieces I had. At some point I realised that some samples from the records fit well with the archival compositions, so the whole thing merged. For example, in a couple of pieces, something in the texture or the string sound gave me what was missing. Some pieces even started from the samples. It became one project.
The funny thing is that I had a previous version of the album that I thought was finished. I was happy with it. It was before I released the collaborations with Grand River and Rafael. I received good feedback from friends, except one who said: ‘I love it, but I don’t like that track’.
Cyclic Defrost: Brutally honest!
Abul Mogard: Very honest and appreciated. It was my friend Duncan Whitley, an artist I worked with on two of his films. I trust his judgement. There was something in that particular track he didn’t like, and I also had doubts about it. That comment, together with my feeling, and with some other work that I had already finished, made me pause the project. Also, the summer before that I played a work-in-progress version for some friends in northern Italy during a private concert event, and they gave me helpful feedback. I wrote down some notes as guidelines. In the end I worked on a second draft of the album, very different from the first. Two pieces stayed the same, but the other three are quite new.
Cyclic Defrost: I loved ‘In A Studded Procession.’
Abul Mogard: That’s the oldest track in this project. I started it in 2013. It was actually released with a slightly different title, ‘A Studded Procession’, on a compilation back then. I always thought the track had more potential, so I kept working on it. In 2015 I did a week-long residency at EMS Studio in Stockholm. I brought the file and recorded it using their large Serge modular system. But I still wasn’t happy. Many years later I returned to it, added more layers with my own synthesisers, and kept changing it. So this version includes original elements from the first session, as well as sounds from all the later phases.
Cyclic Defrost: I’ve got a kind of deep question to end. What was the hardest thing to overcome to dedicate yourself to the arts?
Abul Mogard: I’ve been making music seriously since 1997, with various groups and projects. The thing is, I never made a living from my own music until recently, maybe four or five years ago. So I was never really confident I could do it. I’ve done many other things, and probably the hardest part was balancing my own work while also doing other jobs. For years I worked in the music industry, first as an engineer, then producing and mixing for other artists, arranging, and working as an arranger and producer for a TV show in Italy. I worked on that show for a long time. It was very far from my comfort zone. I had to figure out quickly how to make music that was completely different from what I would normally listen to. But I had to do it. The good part is that I learned a lot about the craft. Although it was hard, I’m now glad I did it. It was my way to make a living, and I also learned a lot musically through that work.
Quiet Pieces is out now via Soft Echoes. You can find it here.
