At Morphine Raum, in Berlin, the usual hierarchy of performance had been quietly dismantled. There was no stage, no riser, no architectural cue separating the artist from the audience. Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri stood on the same plane as the listeners, shaping the early material for Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun over three evenings in spring 2025, letting each set evolve in public while multitrack machines preserved the evidence. The conditions seem central to the album’s character: rotary speakers turning like weather systems, modular synths breathing in long spans, bowed guitar moving through the mix with the grain of something physical and perishable. You can hear the room in the record, in which sound loses the hard edge of authorship and becomes a communal atmosphere.
Back in Rome, Mogard took those live recordings apart and reassembled them with a patience bordering on architectural. Passages were lengthened, fragments lifted out of context, pulse surrendered to duration. Irisarri deepened and sculpted the drone work; Martina Bertoni and Andrea Burelli gave the music a bodily grain that grounded it from floating away into abstraction.
In the Eastern Wild is the album’s most immediate revelation. It begins with a sparse harmonic figure and gradually enlarges, gathering density and force until it feels immense without ever becoming blunt. The rotary motion of the speaker system gives the piece a slow-turning mass, as though the music were circling an unseen center. The acoustic and electronic elements lean into one another until distinction starts to feel secondary.
“At moments I genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from me or from Abul,” says Irisarri. “It stopped feeling like two people making decisions and began to feel like we were inside a system moving on its own.”
Alessio Pizzicannella’s video, filmed during rehearsal rather than performance, appears to understand this instinctively. “One of the perks of my job is having been able to witness private performances made just for me, whether backstage before a show or during soundcheck,” he says. “This is one I was able to film. It all happened very quickly. I was supposed to film the concert itself, but I soon realised that I wouldn’t have been able to move, as the crowd would have surrounded Abul and Rafael. So instead I filmed the rehearsal, which gave me the freedom to move around and get close to them. It made all the difference, because it meant I could capture both their performance and the atmosphere of the place. Albeit without the crowd, I believe it now gives those who weren’t lucky enough to be there the chance to experience it.”
Watch the video for In the Eastern Wild below:
That last sentiment of experiencing the music feels true of the whole of the forthcoming album, Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun, as well. It carries the trace of an occasion, but not as documentation. Rather, it offers the afterimage of a shared encounter, preserved, refined, and made strange again.
The curious sensation continues in Over the Domes, whose broad acoustic reach gives the album one of its grandest vistas. Sustained modular tones hover while bowed textures pass through them in long, solemn arcs. A Blue Descent, centered on Bertoni’s cello, introduces a coarser texture, a grainier vocal register within the album’s otherwise smooth surfaces. The instrument seems to speak from the sternum outward, producing a low, rough force that brings the music closer to the body. At the center of the record sits In a Quiet Radiance, where Burelli’s violin loops and Bertoni’s cello converge beneath looped vocal textures. The effect is almost liturgical, it proceeds with such grave assurance.
The latter part of the album is especially strong. Of Blessed Ages suspends motion so delicately that each minute shift in pitch seems consequential, and Among Shadows closes the record with a deep, steady draw downward, as if the music were returning to the mineral state from which it had briefly risen. Even Marja de Sanctis’ cover art participates in this sense of transformation. The vessel sculpture that appeared on the duo’s earlier album, raw and unfired, returns here glazed and kiln-finished, its surface now smooth enough to catch and cast light.
“I wanted to convey the idea of continuity within the duo, and the vessel became a kind of container for that idea,” she explains. “However, their music felt different this time, and with the collaboration of Martina and Andrea I felt it should have a sleeker, softer, more glamorous look, very distant from the first raw appearance.” It is an unusually precise description of what the album achieves. The earlier work suggested matter in formation; this one presents form after ordeal, burnished by heat.
Listen to In The Eastern Wild below and pre-order Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun here.
Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton IrisarriRafael Anton Irisarri and Abul Mogar are currently on tour, with Irisarri appearing solo at Sonica Spring Edition in Ljubljana on 8 April and The Judgement Hall Festival in London on 11 April. Abul Mogard and Irisarri then perform together at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris on 23 April, before Irisarri returns to solo appearances at Miceli Festival in Barcelona on 29 April and LEV Festival in Gijón on 1 May. The pair reunite for Dig That Treasure! Festival in London on 4 May, followed by a three-night run at Berlin’s Morphine Raum on 6, 7, and 8 May, with the latter two dates already sold out. From there, Irisarri heads to Dabadaba in San Sebastián-Donostia on 14 May, before the tour closes with a final duo performance at Concerto Su Invito in San Vito, Italy, on 30 May. The Berlin performances will also feature special ensemble appearances with Martina Bertoni and Andrea Burelli.
See the poster below for the full list of tour dates.
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*Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri Photo by lulia Alexandra Magheru
The post Ambient Artists Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri Share Morphine Raum Performance Video for “In The Eastern Wild” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
