PHOTOS
Space Quartet
AUDIO
VIDEO
PRESS:
https://rafaeltoral.net/category/press/articles/
http://crowwithnomouth-jesse.blogspot.pt/2010/04/book-of-imaginary-beings.html
PRESS QUOTES:
Timeless, and at the same time totally up to the minute. Amazing.
Foxy Digitalis
Plenty of people say that they make creative music — Rafael Toral delivers it.
Dusted magazine
A devastatingly visceral listening experience.
Boomkat
Toral is looking for nothing less than a totally fresh language to work in.
The Wire
This is experimental electronic music operating at a higher level of deliberation and thoughtfulness than nearly everything else in sound synthesis and free improvisation.
Foreign Accents
BIO
Rafael Toral, born in Lisbon, 1967 has been intrigued by the potential of sound and the functions of music since he was a teenager. He’s been a performer and composer deeply involved with Rock, Ambient, Contemporary, Electronic and Free Jazz music in different periods of his life.
Working extensively with the electric guitar and electronics, in the 1990’s he created a blend of ambient and rock and recorded acclaimed albums like Wave Field or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. By the early 2000’s he arrived to a sense of accomplishment about his previous 15 years of work, awakening to the idea that the world needed a different creative response. He decided to start something new as radically different from the previous phase as possible. In 2004, as a transition to vulnerable action, he launched the “Space Program”, an ambitious long-term project exploring an approach to electronic music based on silence, through decision making and physical gesture, in a way inspired by post-free jazz. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space”, has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers”.
The release of Moon Field in 2017 marks the beginning of a transition to a third phase, not as a shift but as a widening of the working space, in a way that builds on the Space Program findings (mainly with the Space Quartet) but already integrates them with other elements (namely from his earlier ambient work) into a new blend such as the live Solo Multiples immersive experience.
Toral has been collaborating with many musicians including Jim O’Rourke, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, Eiko Ishibashi, Manuel Mota, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, John Edwards, Roger Turner or Tatsuya Nakatani and touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia. In 2014 he relocated to the mountains in central Portugal for a more sustainable life.
[Bio with links at the About page]
BIO (under 100 words)
Rafael Toral, born in Lisbon, 1967 is a music performer and composer active since 1984. Formerly known for his drone/ ambient work with guitar and electronics and acclaimed records such as Wave Field (1994) or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (2000), he radically renewed his approach to music in 2004, approaching electronic music in a way inspired by post-free jazz. Performing his own compositions or in numerous collaborations, he has been touring the US, Europe and Japan. In 2014 he relocated to the mountains in central Portugal for a more sustainable life.
