Soft Echoes Italy Vinilo y CD

Review: Serbia's Abul Mogard inaugurates his Soft Echoes imprint - after many a career-spanning stopover with Ecstatic, VCO and Light-years - with Quiet Pieces, an inward-looking suite unearthing stillness and submerged emotions scraped from the edges of memory. Assembled from archival sketches and fragments inspired by a late uncle's collection of 78rpm classical and opera records, the album reimagines faded moments through manipulated samples played at altered speeds, filtered through effects, and folded into new compositions. The result is a dream-static fusion of past and present, where Mogard's own recollections blur with an avuncular other's. The pieces shimmer with spectral density and tactile distortion, edging into abstractions influenced in part by Phill Niblock's Boston Tenor Index; Mogard pushes into rawer and rawer dissonances over the record's course. Marja de Sanctis's cover photograph, taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, captures that same interplay of decay, reverence, and resonance.