Popwatch

by Bill Meyer, 1996 (Chicago, USA)

When I’ve looked abroad for exciting music I’ve never ever considered Portugal. After all, the Raincoats’ Ana Da Silva had to leave the country, she found it so stifling. So when I read in the local free rag about an upcoming concert by an experimental guitarist named Rafael Toral, I went partly out of bemused curiosity about what Portuguese experimental music might be like, but also because I knew that he’d be joined by Jim O’Rourke. It’s hard for me to recall now, ten months later, exactly what made the ensuing concert so amazing; I was too spellbound to take notes, carried away like I rarely am but always want to be. But I do remember a moment during Toral’s solo set where I watched him balance a toy Marshall speaker on the guitar’s neck while he worked a set of pedals and a glorious racket dopplered around my head. Who was this guy, and why hadn’t I heard of him before? His performance encompassed the enveloping vastness that his pal O’Rourke realized on the “Remove The Need” album, but Toral’s masterful deployment of colorfully distorted sound masses was somehow friendlier. When O’Rourke joined him, playing accordion and piano and radio, Toral revealed that he was as good a listener as he was a player.

I bought a CD from the guy at the end of the set, and played it as soon as I got home. “Wave Field”‘s three tracks are composed of stretched shimmering neon resonances that evolve constantly, moving more glacially than the live performance did but never courting boredom. There aren’t many discs that I’d consider putting on repeat and playing all night, but I’ve done it with this one (and had quite a nice rest, thank you). The CD’s packaging suggests that it be played “very soft or very loud,” and each way it’s a different album. Played softly it establishes a bright and ethereal ambience. Play it loud and tendrils of exquisite feedback shapes ascend and fall relative to each other in a symphony of ghostly howls, reverberant moans and transparent chimes.

Not long afterward I found another of the discs Toral sold from the stage in a used bin. _The Complete No Noise Reduction is nothing like _Wave Field_. It’s a duo recording by Toral and Paulo Feliciano, who together made 46 fragmentary miniatures using guitars, turntables, drum machines, and sampled environmental sounds, that sound variously like mid-70s Can, a Public Enemy backing track, Derek Bailey amusing himself late at night in a hardware store, or a Patti Smith record broken in two and glued back together the wrong way around (which is what they did); the resulting sound-moments are as playful as they are noisy. I had to learn more about a musician capable of such lively, mischievous diversity. Toral’s on line, which allowed this interview to unfold over four months.

LEE RANALDO:

I think the most interesting thing about Raphael is that he lives out on the end of the world, which is about how isolated Portugal is, even for the rest of Europe, and that he has managed to forge some sort of interest and trajectory for himself in the esoteric realm of “new” music. He’s a young man forging ideas out of what he has heard and read about, and has a good set of ears and knows what he’s listening to. (He’s) rather scientific in his approach…

JIM O’ROURKE:

Rafael is a really good guy with a good ear, I think, and a sense of timing and density that is a luxury to find. He is a swell, honest person too.

***

Note for the editor: from this point all capitalized text is me talking, all normal text is Raphael

WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?

Lisbon, Portugal. A beautiful sunny place with more or less beautiful people in which it never snows (maybe once every 200 years…).

HOW IS YOUR MUSIC RECEIVED IN PORTUGAL?

My records don’t sell much, the distributing company sold six copies of “Wave Field” in three months. I sell more to friends and such. Concerts (Usually for 50-150 audiences) are usually appreciated, more by the audience than by the press. On the other hand I play very rarely, maybe twice a year.

WHAT KIND OF MUSIC SCENE EXISTS IN PORTUGAL?

The experimental / improvised music scene is very poor. A few stubborn people who really believe in what they do (less than 10) and some more pretentious ego-propelled fake experimental musicians. Also a good deal of conservative old jazz musicians calling themselves improvisers. I’m kind of pessimistic about this scene, it may be not that bad. I can tell you the good ones are really good, as good as if coming from anywhere else on the planet. Anyway, there is a very cool and refreshing indie rock scene. The infra-structures (clubs, promoters, distributors, labels, AUDIENCE, ..) are miserable, but there are very nice bands and kids doing what they gotta do. Small country, small scene.

PLEASE GIVE A BIT OF PERSONAL AND MUSICAL HISTORY?

Well, it’s a long story now, but i know Americans like short ones… I was born in the same block I live in today and never moved. My history up to age 16 is like any other kid’s. That was when i realized i wanted to be a musician and that would be the most important thing in my life.

WHAT MADE YOU REALIZE THIS?

I think it was the way it made me feel alive, how I could find in it emotions not to be found elsewhere in life.

***

Once I was in a record store and picked up Eno’s “Discreet music”. Reading the notes in the back cover made me feel my life changed. To this day, the idea of a music that doesn’t demand the listener’s attention to be heard is still a basic principle to me. A lot of what I’ve been doing has to do with what you could call “ambient”.

HOW DID THE EXPERIENCE OF HEARING THE RECORD COMPARE TO READING THE NOTES?

Well, the record illustrates the truth in that text beautifully. But what he wrote goes infinitely beyond what he recorded. I still love that record. It’s one of my favorite records of all times and one of Eno’s best works, maybe the best, for being so pure.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT “NON-DEMANDING MUSIC THAT APPEALS TO YOU?

Exactly the fact that it doesn’t demand your attention! It’s not full of emotions or someone’s ego, it’s a part of the environment you’re in. What perhaps distinguishes the most interesting ambient music is that if you choose to pay attention to it you may have a rewarding listening experience.

***

My life changed again when, a few years later, I read John Cage’s “Silence”. A lot of his thoughts are with me all the time. In the last years i’ve been shifting to a kind of ambient that flows with the noisy spheres of the guitar universe. I’m a big fan of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth (in whose work I could see a bridge between Cage and the Rock world). Well, if you hear “Wave Field” you’ll know what I’m up to.

PLEASE SAY A BIT ABOUT “WAVE FIELD”.

I prepared Wave Field because I had a concert in Copenhagen and had nothing to play. I made a tape full of guitar drones and loops and then I’d play the tape into 4 loudspeakers, playing guitar along with it. I improved the tape for subsequent concerts and they always seemed to be not quite good enough. I slowly began to know the piece very well and realized it could be a good CD. I was trying to bring together the form of ambient music with a distillation of noise from the rock sphere.

While I was listening to the final mixes, I was amazed to discover “Wave Field’s” potential: it became a totally different thing if played at different levels. I was aware of its applicability as ambient (working well played soft), but when I experienced playing it really loud, I discovered a dense, powerfully charged stream of electricity. It’s definitely not ambient, but something intensely hypnotizing. You can feel the wave around your body.

YOU HAVE ALSO RECORDED AS A DUO. PLEASE TEL ME ABOUT “THE COMPLETE NO NOISE REDUCTION”.

Paulo Feliciano and I became close friends and began doing sessions of musical exploration in a very experimental way. We’d come up with such bizarre things that we’d get back to it and say “hey, what is this, what did we do?!”. We’d get together for whole weekends and do these pieces, for a few years. Once I was joking and said “one day we’re gonna make a full CD out of this. And call it “THE COMPLETE NO NOISE REDUCTION”, ha ha!”. I was far from dreaming we would end up really doing it! It’s just that, a collection of all the short pieces that we produced in those sessions. The tracks are short because we were sharply aware of the time it would take to expose an idea. Those are musical situations, they don’t have “parts” and all that. We knew they’d become boring if they were longer.

THE NEXT NO NOISE REDUCTION ALBUM (which will be Toral’s first US release, on 8th Day Music) WILL BE VERY DIFFERENT. COULD YOU SAY A BIT ABOUT IT?

The next record is called “On Air”. It’s made of live radio broadcasts we did, improvising with electronic toys, guitar feedbacks and a bunch of old analog devices, with two tape echo machines in the end. The sets are much longer than in the previous CD, basically two pieces (Part I – toys, and part II – guitar feeds) with 3 versions each (we did 3 broadcasts). It sounds like the bizarrest sci-fi soundtrack possible in the 50s!… NNR plays live very rarely, averaging once every 2 years.

COULD YOU SAY MORE ABOUT JOHN CAGE’S IMPACT AND HOW HIS THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU? (Toral has nearly completed a CD of Cage compositions called “Love”).

What impressed me most deeply in Cage’s thought is perhaps his most important statement: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SILENCE. There’s no limit to things you can learn once you accept this. It becomes clear that very often what we’re used to calling “error” or “noise” are in fact things we can accept with a smile. The idea of noise is inside our heads only, noise is quite unreal. Noise could be defined as a something we just don’t want, and error as the simple difference between our intention and the result of our action. In daily life we’re faced with infinite opportunities to change our minds with respect to things we have no reason not to accept. I had this idea for a concert with Paulo in which we’d play Cage’s “Solo for Voice 23/ 0’00” No.2.” It consists of a chess (or other) game played live on an amplified board with loudspeakers around the audience. My project involved building a set of chess pieces all made of different materials, so that each would give a different sound. Play it live, record it, then splice the recording in many parts and superimpose them, which would take the piece quite beyond what was written. By that time i realized no one had ever recorded his music in Portugal and there were several pieces of his i’d love to work on. Then I decided to write him (this was July 92), asking for permission to do the project and telling him about the “Love” project. About a month later a friend of mine told me that Cage had died that day (August 12). I spent like three days in shock, but was determined to go through with the project. A week later I was opening the mailbox and my hands started trembling as soon as I saw I got a letter from… John Cage! It was dated August 5th and he was telling me that i could certainly do the various things that i had in mind. He also told me “I’m very busy these days because of my age”… I could hardly believe it! It felt like a letter from heaven! Shortly after that i went to NY for the first time and after searching for scores in libraries i decided “Love” would include “Cartridge Music,” “Fontana Mix,” “Variations II,” “4’33”,” “0’00” No.2″ and a live version of my “AER 7 E,” played at the opening of an art fair in August 15, three days after Cage died, and dedicated to him.