Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri Return With Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun

Above Photographer: Alessio Pizzicannella

Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri are returning with a second full-length album, Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun, due June 26 via Black Knoll Editions. If their first collaboration established a shared vocabulary, this new record looks like the point where that language becomes more settled, more precise, and more fully formed. The album grew out of a three-day residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin during spring 2025, where the two artists developed the source material in a setting that blurred performance and recording in a very direct way.

That starting point matters because it tells you a lot about how this record was built. These were not isolated studio sketches assembled later into an album sequence. The material began in a room where musicians and listeners occupied the same level, with no stage separating process from reception.

The duo recorded live to multitrack across several evenings, shaping the material in real time before carrying it into a much longer studio process. From there, the record was further developed in Rome by Mogard and in New York by Irisarri, with added contributions from Martina Bertoni on cello and Andrea Burelli on violin and voice.

A record shaped by process, space, and restraint

The equipment at the center of those Berlin sessions also gives the album a clearer identity.

Rotary speakers, modular synthesizers, bowed guitar, and a 1970s mixing console formed the core setup, which suggests a record built around texture, pacing, and gradual development instead of obvious structural markers. That lines up with the duo’s larger aesthetic, where patience tends to carry as much force as density.

Irisarri’s comments on the sessions are especially revealing. He describes moments where authorship started to blur, where it no longer felt like two people making separate decisions, but a single system moving on its own. That idea gets close to what makes this partnership work. Mogard and Irisarri each have a very distinct identity on their own, but together they seem interested in dissolving the line between individual gesture and shared form.

That is a difficult balance to reach, and it usually only happens when two artists trust space, repetition, and gradual change enough to let the work unfold at its own pace.

A second chapter that feels more settled

The artwork by Marja de Sanctis reinforces that sense of continuity.

She returns to the vessel form introduced in the duo’s first collaboration, Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close, but this time the object appears fired and glazed rather than raw. It is a simple visual move, but an effective one. It suggests development through process, where something first shaped in a loose state has now been carried through heat, pressure, and time into a more finished condition.

That same logic appears to guide the album itself. Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is described as music that moves slowly and lingers near the edge of silence, which feels completely in line with what these two artists do well. This is music built to hold attention through pacing, tone, and accumulation.

There is no need to force the point beyond that. The premise is already clear, and the path into it feels fully considered.