After Drag City’s recent LP reissue of Wave Field, Rafael Toral responds to the challenge of revisiting this seminal album of Ambient music that he recorded with the guitar in 1994.
Its transformative character and expansive crossing of genre boundaries remain intact a quarter of a century later. 2019 is the 25th anniversary of its recording.
Wave Field’s LP reissue on Drag City
“I wanted to make an ambient piece that sounded like a thousand rock gigs reverberating from a distant hall,” Rafael Toral explained New York Press in 1998. Wave Field‘s essence was suddenly revealed as an epiphany, as Toral saw the Buzzcocks opening for Nirvana in 1994. “The acoustics were so bad that all I could hear was an amorphous roar,” Toral recalls, “but as my attention drifted from this otherwise boring set, I began to listen to the unarticulated stream of electric sound and found it extremely interesting. When I walked out of the concert I was dreaming of Wave Field.”
The present version of Wave Field is expanded with new treatments of the original materials (it lasts 50 minutes) and is performed by Rafael Toral alone, not on stage and without a guitar, but at the mixing desk, installed at ground level to one side of the audience. The sound is dynamically spatialized on 6 channels (or four, in the available Quad version).
The video Power Field (Rafael Toral, 1995) is projected during the performance.
Power Field excerpt (Rafael Toral, 1995)
Rafael Toral performing Wave Field in 2019 at gnration, Braga, Portugal.
Wave Field HEX 2019 stage plan and technical requirements
Press kit – Hi-res Photos and Bio
