Abul Mogard
Works

THE REVIEW

Lyrical is the word that comes to mind when attempting to circumscribe the scope of this work; melancholic like the nostalgia for something that has never happened, or that will never happen. You feel the nostalgia of an absent future and a heart-wrenching past that never happened, the gaze wide open on a front of storm clouds that passes over and through, something enormous, looming, the rust that corrodes the metal. It is music that one watches, capable of evoking like a hallucination and deceiving like a crossroads, it is the nostalgia of the life of something that has never had it.

The work collects the author's first compositions originally released on cassette and CD-R, but the maturity of the pieces is such that not even the apocryphal nature of the collection can undermine its compactness, its majestic beauty, its complexity.

The hagiography imagines the author as a self-taught old man, a worker from some obscure post-Yugoslav kombinat, who upon reaching retirement began composing to reproduce the sounds and sensations of the factory. I don't believe it. Such vastness and scope cannot have been conceived through the assembly line, cannot have been assembled; it seems to me rather something pre-existing, inherent to the life of the composer, that accompanied him and was used to find relief and perfect fulfillment, as perfectly accomplished, this art must have been since the day of its birth.

Listening to “The Sky Has Vanished,” “Drooping Off,” “Tumbling Relentless Heaps,” “Despite Faith” means being crushed, suspended, sitting in padmasana on top of a column while all around swirls the sand of time. It means feeling understanding and dismay, walking down the street conscious that the very same place we are crossing has been traversed over the years, over millennia, by countless creatures with different histories and realities, and letting oneself sink into this multitude.