Rafael Toral is back to guitar. Spectral Evolution
releases February 23, 2024
The Portuguese musician Rafael Toral is well known in the experimental scene for having made excellent works based on drone music played with his electric guitar, embracing elements of ambient, minimalism and finding common ground with post-rock and shoegaze. Over time he has drastically changed his approach by starting to work with electronic instruments only, 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’s also a member of MIMEO, an electronic orchestra whose members include Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Marcus Schmickler.
After a two-decade interlude Rafael Toral is back with a major new work, “Spectral Evolution”, for guitar. Making his name in the mid-1990s with influential guitar drone platters like "Sound Mind Sound Body"
Sound Mind Sound Body is the result of the use of some methods of composition, such as repeated patterns of different lengths, over-dubbed to achieve unpredictable harmonic changes. A method somehow inspired by those used by Brian Eno, whose work had been a great inspiration for Toral. The basic idea was to create a process that, once started, would produce unexpected results compared to those theorized by the composer.
And "Wave Field" (both reissued by Drag City in recent years).
“The wave field is located somewhere in a far away region of the ambient territory, close to the frontier with a swampy area where abstract vibrations from liquid rock are solved under noise-charged clouds echoing some electrical irradiation.”
Interview on Transmission 002 by Chuck Johnson for Transmissions Festival, Apr 1999 (Chapel Hill, NC, USA), 04/22/1999 http://rafaeltoral.net/press/interviews/transmissions-002
In the early years of the 21st century, Toral laid the guitar aside, along with the focus on extended tones that had defined much of his music until that point. He began his ‘Space Program’, a thirteen-year investigation of the performance possibilities of an ever-expanding set of custom electronic instruments, played with a fluid phrasing and rhythmic flexibility inspired by jazz. Dedicated to honing his skills on these idiosyncratic instruments, Toral has performed with them extensively both solo and in many collaborations, including in his Space Quartet, where his mini-amplifier feedback integrates seamlessly into the frontline of a classic post-free jazz quartet rounded out with saxophone, double bass, and drums.
Since 2017, Toral’s work has been entering a new phase, often still centred around the arsenal of self-built instruments developed in the Space Program, but with a renewed interest in the long tones and almost static textures of his earlier work.
Now he has, after more than a decade, returned to the electric guitar. Spectral Evolution is undoubtedly Toral’s most sophisticated work to date, bringing together seemingly incompatible threads from his entire career into a powerful new synthesis, both wildly experimental and emotionally affecting.
I will buy this new record for sure, so I will talk about this new work as soon as possible.