The Brooklyn Rail

The Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral first made his presence resonate around three decades ago, with a sequence of naked guitar extensions, durational pieces that suspended themselves somewhere across the ambient music spectrum. Long lengths, slow evolutions, and shimmering tones marked out Toral’s sonic panorama, his drones never seeming harsh enough to belong in the official drone music canon.

Around the turn of the millennium, Toral moved across from his guitar, eventually recording as part of the Space Quartet for the Clean Feed label. In this role, he concentrated on a range of customized and self-constructed electronic instruments, or devices, heading into the free jazz and free improvisation zones. Toral’s metallic offspring were wild beings, verging on the uncontrollable, spurting pure tones, and often forcing sonic comparisons with familiar instruments. Initially, he worked solo, but from 2014, began forming groups of varying sizes.

Now, Toral is surprising his listeners by aligning those previous worlds, arranging abstract electronic matter around the relative purity of his guitar sound, which borders on a retro-mellow jazz-classic warmth. The new Spectral Evolution album (Drag City) is effectively a single forty-seven minute work, although there are twelve named tracks. Your scribe’s advice is to ignore these markings, and embrace the album as a single flow, without any division distractions.

Traditional guitar voicings open, joined by electronics that imply bottleneck sliding, strings as stem, tones as garlands. Pure frequencies are bent, sometimes via physical gesture, as when Toral employs his theremin antenna hooked up to a modular patch. Hints of imagined dawn birdsong, church organ, flute or absent-minded whistling surround the guitar, as a greater chorus of voicings appears at just under two minutes of the full duration. Both guitar and electronic sounds proliferate, carefully controlled in a blooming circle of calm, swelling then receding.

Toral’s bank of small devices can mimic shortwave searching, invariably hitting his tuning target, which is 432 Hz. Suspended soft drones don’t make this drone music, particularly, as they are only part of the array. There’s a multiplicity of awakening voices, a sustained climbing, hovering, as notes waver, managing an actively restless tranquility.

Hard-pressed to dredge up potential forebears, your scribe can nevertheless compare natures to “The Bells,” by Lou Reed, with its Don Cherry presence and frosted synthesizer panes, or perhaps the more gradual works of Gavin Bryars. Toral’s warm guitar sound has a soothing resonance, but he ascends to Terje Rypdal-levels towards the conclusion.

Your scribe called Toral at his home in the mountains of middle-Portugal, the land of thin bandwidth. He’s been there for the last decade, after moving from Lisbon. “I wouldn’t think of moving out,” he declares decisively. “It’s quite difficult to maintain everything, but it’s really nice to be off-grid. There’s quite a number of people here, with this more natural way of living. British, Dutch, a relatively big community in the area. The place I live is five minutes walk to our closest neighbors, fifteen minutes walk uphill to the nearest village, which is really small.”

Toral brought most of his electronic instruments with him when moving from Lisbon. These include modular synthesizer, electrode oscillator, echo feed, glove controllers, various modified small amplifiers, and a coil spring, as used by John Cage and David Tudor. “I wasn’t playing guitar for the last twenty years,” he reminds us. “I sold most of them before leaving, because I needed to make some extra money. I just kept my first guitar, but I didn’t touch it at all. I was developing new techniques, and ways of performing with electronic instruments, channelling all my energy to perfecting phrasing and performance. It didn’t make sense to play guitar at all, until a few years ago, when I started reintroducing some guitar sounds in some of the music. Lately, I realized that I’m really interested in picking it up again, but not with the same kind of approach that I always had.”

Toral used to be more concerned with harmonics, resonance, and feedback. He had basic skills, but now he’s more into notes and chords, traditional skills that he hadn’t really pursued historically. During the last five years he has been studying and practicing anew. “Basically, starting from scratch,” he smiles.

Live solo shows are forthcoming during 2024, debuting Toral’s sound-surround system, where he will provide all the live guitar parts, those ornery electronics kept harnessed inside the digital realm, their wild days now recorded for posterity. “It’s like an imaginary orchestra of electronic instruments, in which I play all of them, somehow making them sound as if they’re listening to each other.”

Toral’s guitar can be perceived as the core element, but it has a naked, clear quality. “There are two kinds of guitar, the ‘played’ guitar, as in the intro, which appears in other places, and the drone guitar, orchestrated chords, with the clean sound I originally developed back in the day when I recorded Sound Mind Sound Body.” (In 2018, Drag City reissued Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) and Wave Field (1995).)

The Space electronics are a separate aspect, but intimately interleaved with the guitar spine. “It’s all layered in separate tracks, but that was the hardest thing to pull off. These electronic instruments, all from the Space Program, were built in a way that they just play sound, you can’t tune them. But the more melodic ones play frequencies, and notes are frequencies too. So I tried to play bits of phrases trying to match the pitches of the key in the music and then stitch them together. This was across many instruments, and on several tracks each.”

Toral’s sonic field sometimes sounds like it’s born from trumpet, birdsong and church organ. There’s a pronounced magical forest mood. “With the mini-amp feedback, which has bits of actual free playing, I apply a phrasing manner that’s directly inspired by the true experts in ‘space’, like Bill Dixon and Miles Davis. Birdsong music is the theremin/modular feedback that sounds to me like a flute, but sometimes it can have a birdsong behavior. Organ impressions must come from the sine wave clusters I used in some points. But yeah, on one hand, the guitar chord drones do have an orchestral kind of arrangement, and my original idea was trying to make the electronic sounds appear to grow out of the chords. But these instruments are wild, and here I was inspired by having them respond to a natural logic, not so much an orchestration logic.”

Toral also plays bass, but it’s a more subliminal presence. “It’s embedded within the ‘orchestra,’ all the deep, low tones you hear are electric bass. If they bend, though, it’s a modular synth. Figuring out the exact chord voicings with this sound and at this pace wasn’t easy.”

It’s looking like the release of Spectral Evolution will mark the beginning of another marked phase in Toral’s development, as he combines guitars and electronics to make a music unlike the preceding separate approaches. Toral appears to feel this urge around every two decades. “By 2000, when Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance was finished, I didn’t see how to go any further, other than repeating a formula in comfort, which I really didn’t want to do. So I closed that period of my life, and turned tables upside down, entering a project as radically different as possible. Sharp phrasing sounds performed over silence, with custom-made experimental instruments that only played alien sounds, played with a post-free jazz mindset. Eventually I found out I exhausted its possibilities, even though I could improve my playing forever, it didn’t make much sense in pursuing it as a research project after fifteen years. For a number of reasons, picking up the guitar again and regaining contact with my past made sense now. Spectral Evolution is a reconciliation of two approaches to music made to be far apart.”