XLR8R

Portugal’s Rafael Toral makes music almost archetypically ambient: slow, shimmering drones that revolve around a single point; blurred bursts of light like a succession of dying starts; liquid electricity given flight. All the more impressive then that he ignores banks of synthesizers in favor of guitars and and oodles of delay. The ten tracks here sound marginally more dynamic than previous releases for Tomlab and Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai, but that’s not to say they are easy to grasp: like orbs of frozen energy, they melt and trickle through your fingers before you’ve had the chance to realise that your hands are empty. There’s a radical simplicity here: you sense that Toral isn’t forcing anything, just letting things exist as they are. Violence… is a breathtaking glimpse into the unadorned sphere of being.

Philip Sherburne