The idea of place is related to our individual ways of perceiving, creating and remembering. There is often ambiguity in how we perceive a place if, for instance, we are physically present or if we try to remember or perceive and feel it from a distance. And here is perhaps an important realisation about how we go about in our everyday environments, making places, inhabiting spaces and the role of imagination in many of the things and events in our lives. Bachelard, insisted that imagination is not limited to the level of images [but]… the level of ideas too… there are ideas that dream.
Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri’s Impossibly distant, impossibly close creates an arch between a place physically and remotely encountered by the artists. Consisting of two long pieces titled “Place of Forever” and “Waking Up Dizzy on a Bastion”, the album creates an auditory place of ambiguity. Starting from the finale of the second piece, we become aware that this all about spatial and improvised exchanges. A recording of a live performance the artists did in 2023 as part of the SoundSet Series at Madrid’s Condeduque cultural center, this initial exchange instigated the two artists to further collaborate and remotely create the companion track “Place of Forever”. The two pieces sound beautiful together, creating a portrait of a place (a Bastion maybe) both physically experienced and imagined from a distance.
In “Waking Up Dizzy on a Bastion,” a repetitive synth motif performed by Guido Zen (aka Abul Mogard) becomes a palimpsest where each individual contribution is enmeshed to create a bigger collective sonic place. As the piece progresses the call and response between Bogard’s modular lines and Irisarri’s bowed guitar loops becomes a perpetual wall of sound. Even though some listeners will be familiar with Irisarri’s or Mogard’s signature sound, in the end the two become indiscernible and unified as one voice echoing in the space until an audience’s applause acts as an abrupt awakening to here and now.
In the companion piece and opening track “ Place Of Forever”, the artists perpetuate the energy and intimacy created through their joint performance, but this time over distance, using bowed guitar loops, synthesizers, a Farfisa organ and other looping techniques. The imagining of the place begins with a suspended spiralling modular tone that gradually unfolds and builds up into a thick and visceral movement, a lament for a place to be found and finally a wall of (forever) sound. Here perhaps we witness anew the unified voice encountered in the second piece but somehow more developed and formed into a way of imagining and creating where both artists share (and dream) intimately and respond to each other intuitively, yet from a distance.
Impossibly distant, impossibly close shares with the listener the fruit of a collaboration in which impossibility becomes a method of restraint and expansion. Despite their relative distance, the two artists have created an intimate, mesmerizing and shared sonic place. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
a closer listen 