Neuguitars 2024 #10: Spectral Evolution, Rafael Toral's dreamlike return to his guitar
released February 23, 2024
Guide to Discography – Rafael Toral
Music | Rafael Toral (bandcamp.com)
Portuguese musician Rafael Toral is well known in the experimental scene for creating excellent works based on music and other electronic instruments, embracing elements of ambient, minimalism and finding commonalities with post-rock and shoegaze. Over time he drastically changed his approach by starting to work only with electronic instruments, including modular synthesizers, modified amplifiers and oscillators. Toral's electronic work is characterized by a scarified and almost alien sound, but always spontaneous and sometimes surprising. Toral has worked with numerous avant-garde luminaries such as Phill Niblock, Jim O'Rourke and Rhys Chatham. He is also a member of MIMEO, an electronic orchestra whose members include Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Marcus Schmickler.
I've always loved Toral's early work, titles like "Sound Mind Sound Body"
and "Wave Field"
(both reissued by Drag City in recent years), the wonderful ambient sound he could create with the guitar and his rigorous approach to the music; now, after twenty years, he has finally found his instrument for a new work produced by Jim O'Rourke's Moikai: "Spectral Evolution".
I haven't followed his sound activity much in the past years, an activity mainly based on self-built electronic instruments, but I believe that this "Spectral Evolution" is undoubtedly one of his most sophisticated works, a work that manages to bring together many aspects of his brilliant career of sound researchers in a new powerful synthesis, which combines both experimental and emotional aspects.
“Spectral Evolution” is a fluid narrative composed of twelve different episodes, a sort of concept album where sound and its evolution reign supreme. The opening track amazes those who remember the articulate drones of Toral's early career: sparkling, clean guitar figures, followed by a duet between two feedback streams based on a muted trumpet and an ocarina. The evolution, the spectral process begins, without interruption, in the following "Changes", where a dense array of instruments generates a spatial flow on a thick carpet of chords that slowly move towards a hypnotic and, apparently, ordered chaos.
The music of the CD thus moves between moments of composed ascetic elegance and periods of hypnotic, unsettling and delirious changes. His return to guitar encompasses an enormous dynamic and textural range, from jangly chords to expansive drones, from crystalline clarity to hazy aggression. “Spectral Evolution” seems to be the perfect post-covid work, where desires, anxieties, fears and a general sense of alienation coexist in a form of compact elegance. This album is a fluid narrative, giving us the illusion of a mysterious suspension or violation of the irritating limits of time, space and natural laws that have always imprisoned us, frustrating our desire to expand the limits of our understanding. The result of a work of experimentation and recording, which effectively summarizes over thirty years of musical research, "Spectral Evolution" does not forget to speak to our emotional and dreamlike side, forcing us to listen attentively, ready to grasp its nuances, passages and connections . It's a sort of new gothic novel that takes us towards an expanded sensation of what we find in our world after Covid. I was waiting to listen to this CD with anxiety, I was rewarded: "Spectral Evolution", moving gracefully in liminal territories between ambient, ghostly sound and sound art, it is the album par excellence of Rafael Toral's guitar music. Wonderful and shocking.