Rafael Toral. Photo by Vera Marmelo.
Rafael Toral’s 30-year career as a solo recording artist is a story of perpetual growth — a more fluid line than most experimentalists take toward their major achievements. Excluding his work as the guitarist of Portuguese punk band Pop Dell’Arte in the ’80s and early ’90s, his first album was 1994’s Sound Mind Sound Body, a collection of Eno-inspired synth tracks he now looks back on as derivative.
He hit his stride a few years later, forging a fascinating aesthetic of his own: characterized by dissonant drones that sync up now and again in gorgeous harmony on albums like Aeriola Frequency (1998) and Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (2001), it’s a style that sits at the quietly teeming center of the soft-noise spectrum.
In 2004, as Toral entered his second decade of life as a solo artist, he refocused his practice on a philosophy he called Space Program — “Electronic Music… that is more concerned with the musician than with the instrument.” 20 years later, he’s returned to his guitar roots with the appropriately titled Spectral Evolution, an album that brings every aspect of his three-decade development under one big tent.
Tuesday morning at UNSOUND, Toral performed a faithful rendition of his new project to a rapt crowd that filled the basement of Krakow’s Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology to the point of overflowing. Wearing a grayscale outfit that struck a contrast with the colorful image projected behind him — a hi-res enlargement of the bird photograph from Spectral Evolution’s cover — he sat with his guitar behind a relatively modest array of synth pedals, a few feet left of a modular synth with a theremin attachment.
He began with some playfully rudimentary guitar work that built slowly in complexity, quoting the chord progressions of evergreen jazz standards like Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” and George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”
Soon, bolder elements — a massive electric organ, a synth that chirped like a flock of birds during mating season, another that howled like lost wolves — started filtering in, all but subsuming his guitar. Relieved of his strumming duties, Toral sat staring at his right hand as he flexed his wrist in circles, lost in his sound world.
Photo by Vera Marmelo.
In a February interview with Tone Glow’s Joshua Minsoo Kim, Toral described how, in the early aughts, he’d taken up Zen meditation as well as Wing Chun — an efficiency-forward, no-frills form of kung fu — in order to strengthen his relationship with his body as he entered the latter half of his 30s. These deeply intentional practices have had a major impact on the way he performs his music live today.
“Something I always admired about dancers is how, when they walk, it looks like their whole body is aware of each step; there is a grace to every movement,” he told Kim. “When I’m performing electronic instruments, there’s an awareness of the movements that are involved in the performance. I don’t exaggerate the movements, but should there be any grace in them, there’s a bit of focus there.”
The patience and bodily awareness he’d attained from his meditation and Wing Chun days was apparent in his UNSOUND performance — not just in his extracurricular hand motions but also the deliberate slowness with which he slid his fingers along the fretboard and the miniscule movements by which he shifted his weight in the chair.
These nearly subliminal changes appear in the music as well: One strike of a muted string can highlight the tidal transitions of otherwise-smooth modulations; an offhandedly strummed ii-V-I sequence can jar a listener out of the hypnotic state induced by the synchronous drones and atonal synths; or, conversely, the fading of a synthetic sound to which the listener has grown accustomed can highlight an unexpected guitar passage.
Photo by Vera Marmelo.
Distilling Toral’s newest tour de force into its basic parts and putting his guitar to the side for a moment (as he did at several points during his UNSOUND set), the most prevalent are its persistent organscape and the birdsong synth that flutters above the rest of the mix.
The latter element is one that’s become a trope in contemporary experimental music. (Field recordings of birds inspire synths that sound like blurbs, leading to an overemphasis of birds across the board.) But Toral, whose avian album art makes no attempt to hide his fondness for the denizens of the sky, uses these sounds as a system of bridges, contextualizing the underlying themes of the record’s abstract sounds while also connecting the LP to his earlier work.
In his Tone Glow interview, Toral said he’d created the birdsongs of Spectral Evolution using the same piece of gear he had to evoke the extraterrestrial atmospheres of his Space Program records: a mod synth that’s “actually a feedback path controlled by a theremin antenna.” And the critical feedback he’s been getting on the album has demonstrated how covers and titles act like magnets, in this instance turning “electronic feedback phrasing instruments… into birdsong” — a neural link listeners might not form otherwise.
Thematically, the blurrily verdant backdrop behind the bird on Spectral Evolution’s cover gets at the intention behind the record. “It was like this parallel between an album and a garden,” he told Kim. “Gardens… are controlled environments. But I wanted to have the soil, the substrate, as the harmonic ground, and instead of having these plants that were neatly arranged, I’d have a chaotic mess of weeds.”
Mirroring the overgrown lushness of this untamed landscape, Spectral Evolution is a rare portal into the machinations of the natural world.
