Rafael Toral

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