Release Notes
Label: Black Knoll Editions
Release: Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun
Date: June 26th, 2026
Mastered By: Stephan Mathieu
Artwork By: Marja de Sanctis
About two years ago, two of my favorite composers got together after a live performance and recorded a fantastic album. This timeline feels strangely like it was just yesterday, and also like a long time ago. Even the cover of the follow-up is like an echo of colors, although I assure you, that’s an entirely different image featuring a newly glazed vessel. The music, revisited and refired, marks a brand-new progression in the sonic object that these two artists sculpt. It is at once more polished, radiant, and softer. It’s fully organic, with the strings and the voice, courtesy of the two new collaborators appearing on the record: Martina Bertoni and Andrea Burelli, who will perform along with Abul and Rafael as an ensemble in the duo’s forthcoming three-day residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin. The recording was captured through a 1970’s mixing console and microphones placed in this open space, and then further refined, reshaped, and remolded back in their respective studios, as Rafael and Guido exchanged the stems. The result is a gorgeous requiem, worthy of a cathedral’s elegy, elegant and divine, and its beauty spreads the warmth of its heavenly sound from the duo’s minds to mine. And in this increasingly synthetic world, where even others’ words appear to be too difficult to write out without some artificial assistance, it’s nice to be part of something genuinely unique, humanely authentic, and ultimately real. And these are my honest words, on this honest music. Enjoy the exclusive quotes on this album below.
When looking back at the original recordings from the Morphine Raum residency last year, I found this guitar loop played by Rafael, which sounded particularly luminous and uplifting. I began to play a few parts over it, keeping the loop at the forefront and adding only small embellishments. As I worked, I started to imagine a voice above it and immediately thought of Andrea’s timbre. From that idea, Rafael proposed adding violin as well, and then cello, which we of course asked Martina to play, as she was already involved. It’s a track that simply developed naturally, responding to what was already there. I like the way it unfolds.
— Abul Mogard
It felt like standing at the edge of something vast and still, trying to find a way inside it. I approached the cello as a point of entry into that slow-burning melancholia, placing it within the space Abul and Rafael had built as a quiet presence that could draw the listener closer without disturbing the surface.
— Martina Bertoni
I built a series of violin loops around repetition and subtle variation, where the same notes return with small shifts in dynamics and expression shaped by the gesture of the acoustic instrument. I approached the voice in the same way, and Abul and Rafael expanded that material into the larger world of the piece through their own sensibility.
— Andrea Burelli
The album is out on June 26th via Rafael’s Black Knoll Editions, available in three limited-edition bio-vinyls: clear, white, and black, and then, of course, digitally, via your favorite streaming platforms. It is beautifully mastered by Stephan Mathieu at his Schwebung studio in Bonn, with the cover art, once again, by Marja de Sanctis.
