Moon Field (2017)

On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, marks the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase.
Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Moon Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chosen musical elements.
“Moon Field was originally written for live performance by a configuration of the Space Collective 3,” Toral explains, “It was with Ricardo Webbens on modular synths, Riccardo Dillon Wanke on electric piano and myself on electronic instruments. While working on it, the piece revealed a strange hovering quality, a kind of stasis. It’s alive and awake, like all the recent Space Program music, but doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere. The music wanted to be something very peculiar and I changed it a lot in response to that. It also revealed what I find a kind of nocturnal mood, as if we were listening to alien signals with satellites crossing the sky under the moonlight.”
Moon Field’s middle section, The Horizon, sees Toral entering a broader acoustic field. The piece weaves a fresh examination of the ambient music he worked on between 1987 and 2003 with the fabric of post-free jazz-inspired phrasing with electronic instruments. The results extend the free roaming aspects of the Space Program and mark out a distinctive and deeply personal approach to sonic atmospherics. This is the first step into a much larger, richer universe.

REVIEWS

Boomkat
Moon Field is a brilliant suite of electro-acoustic jazz abstraction by eminent Portuguese guitarist and electronic composer Rafael Toral.
A relatively rare solo release – his 2nd of 2017, following a five year hiatus – Moon Field looks beyond Toral’s Space Elements series to a stranger sonic state of hovering stasis, with carefully nipped guitar gestures framed against a shapeshifting mass of modular synth crackle, eliciting the sensation of music beamed in from another star system. Followers of Oren Ambarchi or Jim O’Rourke need apply right away.
“On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, marks the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase.
Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Mood Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chosen musical elements.
“Moon Field was originally written for live performance by a configuration of the Space Collective 3,” Toral explains, “It was with Ricardo Webbens on modular synths, Riccardo Dillon Wanke on electric piano and myself on electronic instruments. While working on it, the piece revealed a strange hovering quality, a kind of stasis. It’s alive and awake, like all the recent Space Program music, but doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere. The music wanted to be something very peculiar and I changed it a lot in response to that. It also revealed what I find a kind of nocturnal mood, as if we were listening to alien signals with satellites crossing the sky under the moonlight.”
Moon Field’s middle section, The Horizon, sees Toral entering a broader acoustic field. The piece weaves a fresh examination of the ambient music he worked on between 1987 and 2003 with the fabric of post-free jazz-inspired phrasing with electronic instruments. The results extend the free roaming aspects of the Space Program and mark out a distinctive and deeply personal approach to sonic atmospherics. This is the first step into a much larger, richer universe.”

Tiny Mixtapes
“You start something, and then you listen to it and ask it to tell you what it wants to be next, and you just keep working that way until I don’t know what, because no one had actually done that before.”
– Morton Subotnick, on Silver Apples of the Moon
“The music wanted to be something very peculiar and I changed it a lot in response to that.”
– Rafael Toral, on Moon Field
In 2003, the Portuguese experimental musician Rafael Toral shifted his attention from ambient guitar works to spacey electronic music. “Spacey” in several senses, in that it was far-out, unaccountable music, about outer space, and conceptualized on spatial terms. His Space Program explored the intersections of these ideas through solo and collaborative concerts, workshops, and records. The project resulted in six albums, including Space, Space Solo 1 and 2, and Space Elements Vol. I, II, and III. Moon Field is purportedly Toral’s first album in 14 years outside of the Space Program series, but the distinction is merely nominal. His concern with space in all its overlapping connotations is manifested here as much as ever.
Moon Field is thematically and conceptually similar to Morton Subotnick’s astronomically-minded experimental work Silver Apples of the Moon. In conceiving of early electronic music, Subotnick composed largely by responding to his newly invented Buchla 100 synthesizer, shaping the output according to the apparent dictates of the machine. He collapsed the processes of composition, performance, and recording into a recursive loop, improvising with the Buchla until the piece achieved an intrinsic logic. Perhaps the result couldn’t help but sound cosmic in 1967, when technological progress went hand in hand with the space race. Fifty years later, Toral has arrived at the same destination via a different path. He began writing Moon Field for live performance by the Space Collective 3, until he realized that the piece stayed stubbornly and resolutely inert, floating without forward momentum but with an evocative sense of extraterrestrial movement. He listened to the piece, and to what the piece wanted to be, and recorded it instead as a three-part suite of explorations into uncharted auditory space.
A hum undergirds Moon Field’s tracks, atop which modular synths wail and keen. In previous works, Toral created compositional space by using extended silences, but here an incessant static fills the same role. Electronic flourishes drop as if vertically, in slow motion, into this space. The effect is of tuning an interstellar radio, intercepting satellite transmissions from alien sources. Functionally, this is neither ambient music — it refuses to recede into the background — nor purely academic conceptual music. It has a thesis statement, similar to that of the proper Space Program releases, concerning the range of possible decisions a musician can make within a given instrumental context. For this reason, Toral calls it “post-free jazz.” But for the listener, the effect is closer to “pre-computer music,” reminiscent of a time when analog electronic music was so unfathomable as to be intimately linked with the stars.
Matthew Blackwell

Jazz.pt
Lançado pela mesma editora que tem no seu catálogo discos de Lawrence English, Janek Schaefer, David Toop e Tim Hecker, a australiana Room40, o novo álbum de Rafael Toral é uma obra de transição, transportando a música que o português vinha criando, há década e meia, com o Space Program para outra fase que ainda não é possível perceber como se concretizará. O que se verifica, com este “Moon Field”, é que há uma parcial reconciliação com o passado ambientalista de Toral, se bem que tal “regresso” já não evidencie as influências cruzadas de Brian Eno, Phill Niblock e My Bloody Valentine. O que aqui vem é uma tomada de testemunho do clássico da electrónica “Silver Apples of the Moon”, de Morton Subotnick, ainda que o carácter retro e pré-“computer era” adoptado, uma derivação da fórmula “free jazz electrónico” da série Space ainda com a discursividade-tipo de Sei Miguel (trompetista com quem o músico colaborou longamente), mostre também as marcas da tendência kosmische do rock alemão da década de 1970 – o que, de resto, explica o melodismo de algumas passagens.
O CD foi gravado pelo Space Collective 3 (Toral em vários dispositivos com Riccardo Dillon Wanke num piano eléctrico muito processado e Ricardo Webbens em sintetizadores modulares e analógicos) porque este era para ser mais um episódio do conceito que vinha explorando. Só que a música parou, preferindo o não-desenvolvimentismo das obras de Toral no período em que o seu instrumento principal era a guitarra, e acabou até por parecer mais espacial e mais banda-sonora de ficção científica do que era. Há uma outra mudança: os espaços de silêncio que caracterizavam o mais recente Rafael Toral são agora ocupados por um mantra de estática. Para já, as novidades introduzidas são tão cativantes quanto intrigantes, muito prometendo ainda que nada fique já afirmado. A seguir com toda a atenção…
Rui Eduardo Paes