• Spectral
    Evolution on
    Best of 2024

    Spectral Evolution has appeared in several Best of 2024 list polls, most notably reaching #14 on Pitchfork, #7 in The Quietus and #2 in The Wire magazine. On Stereogum‘s 10 Best Experimental Albums it is number 1.

Photo by Vera Marmelo

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  • Upcoming live in 2025

    Upcoming live in 2025

    Spectral Evolution concerts in Quad surround are coming up into 2025.It has been intense, i could guess people would love the new album, but i wasn’t expecting the LP to…

  • Spectral Evolution Release

    Spectral Evolution Release

    Today, February 23, is Spectral Evolution’s release date. Thank you Jim O’Rourke for your choice to release this on a resurfacing Moikai.Album of the Week on The Quietus and Boomkat, available on many platforms.…

  • Spectral Evolution

    Spectral Evolution

    I am beyond happy to announce Spectral Evolution, the most difficult and ambitious record i ever did, and also quite possibly the best ever. This is a defining moment, a new…

  • Space Quartet’s Last Set

    Space Quartet’s Last Set

    The Space Quartet’s Last Set was also the best ever. Under the working conditions and possibilities of these times, the Space Quartet has reached as far as it possibly could. Going further…

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  • Born in Lisbon in 1967, Rafael Toral belongs to a generation of artists – Kevin Drumm, Jim O’Rourke, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg, Mika Vainio, Christoph Heemann, Otomo Yoshihide, Oren Ambarchi, etc. – who emerged onto the global experimental music scene during the 1990s, pioneering a new form of electronic music that often drew in equal parts from rock, jazz, ambient music, and minimalism. It was these artists, alongside the broader generation to which they belong, that deserve a great deal of the credit for reinvigorating, both through their own work and championing of the generations prior to them, the field of experimental music following a comparative lull and loss of audience during the ’80s. Of this new, rising generation, Toral was unquestionably among the most influential, via incredibly visionary albums like Sound Mind Sound Body (released by AnAnAnA in 1994 and reissued by Moikai in 1998) and 1995’s Wave Field that combined guitar and electronics to produce sheets of ambience and long tones which represented a new phase in minimal music that would be chased by a near countless number of artists following in his wake of the coming years.

    By the early 2000’s, just as the sonic landscape was catching up with him, Toral reached a sense of creative accomplishment and embarked upon a radical new trajectory of work, his “Space Program”, an ambitious long-term project that approached electronic music through the lens of silence, producing a music that is “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space”, often described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers”.

    Over the last seven years, Toral’s work has entered a new phase; a hybrid that utilizes the self-built instruments developed in the “Space Program”, as well as employing the long tones, ambience, and near static textures that defined early works like Sound Mind Sound Body and Wave Field, and encounters him returning to the guitar after more than a decade. (…) The product of three years of experimentation and recording, and arguably amounting to the total distillation of more than thirty years of musical research, Spectral Evolution is quite possibly the most striking and accomplished album we’ve encountered by Rafael Toral to date. It’s an absolute marvel that not only reminds us of the composer’s astounding impact on the sonic landscape over the decades, but also of the rich sense of possibility that lays ahead of us all.

    Bradford Bailey