Quite how these gizmos function, or how they’re played, I couldn’t say, but he’s clearly mastered them, and is able to control their pale shuddering beauty with exemplary precision and enormous delicacy.

Ganz so elementar klingt Torals Musik vielleicht nicht, dafür ist es umso spannender, ihm zuzuhören, wie er ganz allmählich eine neue Syntax der elektronischen Musik entwirft.

Der Portugiese Rafael Toral bezeichnet seine Musik als “post-free jazz electronic music”, was zwar ein verwirrender Begriff ist, aber Sinn macht, wenn man sich sein neues Album “Space Elements Vol. II” anhört. “Der Körper spielt die Musik,” ist sein Credo.

It’s quite a bold project, and an undoubtedly radical and necessary one. Whether or not the album succeeds, “Space Elements Vol. II” produces an aural environment that is an absolute joy to be within.

The pieces have clear musical structures full of subtleties. Toral shows a very personal style and power, and paints beautiful and unusual panoramas.

His sound world is both grounded, burrowed deep into the loam and silt, and filled with flights and flares of satellite sparks, calls from the deep in all directions.

Peut-être parce qu’on ne l’attendait pas vraiment, alors, Rafael Toral réussira à surprendre les plus blasés d’entre les blasés de sonorités uniques.

The instrumentation here (vibraphone, trumpet, percussion, Fender Rhodes) isn’t too far away from what you’d expect to find at any Miles Davis session recorded after 1970, and perhaps it isn’t too fanciful to suggest Toral is attempting a contemporary update on electric free jazz.

Esfíngico has been on high rotation since it arrived and has egged me on to try and dig up more of Sei Miguel’s earlier work.

The music is, of course, not random, but the product of artfulness, the hardest kind of all – the art that doesn’t sound like art. This is brilliant, idiosyncratic music from an independent minded composer-instrumentalist.