Rafael Toral
Rafael Toral is a musician and sound engineer also active in visual arts. Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1967, he has been performing live since 1984. Having attempted to study music, he realized his path was one of exploration and discovery, to which conventional music teaching was irrelevant. His work focuses mainly on the possibilities of ambient music (variable attention listening process), the electric guitar as a sound generator and improvisation with higher levels of risk (using instruments or systems that behave in unpredictable ways). Exploring relations between sound phenomena such as resonance or difference tones and the human capacity for creative listening, Toral has developed a sound world weaving a unique blend of references such as ambient, rock, chance and improvisation.
Rafael Toral is a musician and sound engineer also active in visual arts. Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1967, he has been performing live since 1984. Having attempted to study music, he realized his path was one of exploration and discovery, to which conventional music teaching was irrelevant. His work focuses mainly on the possibilities of ambient music (variable attention listening process), the electric guitar as a sound generator and improvisation with higher levels of risk (using instruments or systems that behave in unpredictable ways). Exploring relations between sound phenomena such as resonance or difference tones and the human capacity for creative listening, Toral has developed a sound world weaving a unique blend of references such as ambient, rock, chance and improvisation.
On Air
No Noise Reduction, a collaboration project between Rafael Toral and João Paulo Feliciano, operated throughout the 1990's and early 2000's. In the Summer of 1995, João Paulo Feliciano and myself did a more focused effort on extended improvisation pieces, each with either guitars or circuit-bent toys and various effects (including tape echo Copycats). We did a mini-tour performing only in radio stations, as live broadcasts. Back then we were really excited about experimenting new things and that …
Cire Noire
*2024 stock* A compilation of contemporary electronic sounds by parallel thinking agents from Europe and US.
Sounding Spaces (9 Sound Installations)
*2024 Stock * English / Japanese Book (Hardcover, 80 pages) with interviews and explanations about the works presented during the exhibition of the same name held @ ICC Tokyo, july 11 - september 29, 2003.
Spectral Evolution
After a two-decade interlude, Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai returns with Spectral Evolution, a major new work by Rafael Toral. Making his name in the mid-1990s with influential guitar drone platters like "Sound Mind Sound Body" and "Wave Field" (both reissued by Drag City in recent years), Toral has never been one to rest on his laurels repeating his past glories. In the early years of the 21st century, Toral laid the guitar aside, along with the focus on extended tones that had defined much of his musi…
Sirocco: A Compendium Of Experimental Music Made In Portugal Vol.2
As famous as the Northern Wind or Mistral, Sirocco is a Mediterranean wind that blows from the Sahara Desert, and is widely responsible for huge and cinematic sand storms, and also for a strange phenomenon called “blood rain”, due to the red sand that eventually mixes with the falling rain. I’ve also heard that “Life is in the blood“, so let the wind blow! Without any further delay, Wasser Bassin proudly presents: Rafael Toral, Han, Tózé Ferreira, The Beautiful Schizophonic, Discmen, Gala Drop…
Jupiter and Beyond
Jupiter, the gas giant in our Solar System, with thunderstorms a thousand times more powerful than on Earth, rainfalls of diamonds in the atmosphere, temperatures below -100°C, plenty of hydrogen, 79 moons and a South pole that looks like an abstract painting, has just the kind of environment this music seems to emanate from.
Jupiter and Beyond, the second collaborative effort of composer/performer Rafael Toral and percussionist João Pais Filipe as a duo (after Saturn in 2016), is definitely not…
Aeriola Frequency
Black Truffle announce the first vinyl reissue of Rafael Toral's Aeriola Frequency, originally released by Perdition Plastics in 1998. Toral made his name in the world of mid-90s experimental electronics with two releases, Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) and Wave Field (1995), both now recognized as classics and reissued on vinyl by Drag City, which saw him exploring the potential of electric guitar and pedals to immerse the listener in seemingly endless waves of sustained tones. On Wave Field, ins…
Moon Field
On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, mark the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase. Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Mood Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chose…
Sound Mind Sound Body (30th Anniversary Edition)
**30th Anniversary Edition. Remastered reissue, first on vinyl** Released in 1994 ‘Sound Mind Sound Body’ decrees the massive impact of discreet gestures; slow-moving tones and spacious orchestral resonances, drifting and droning with glacial majesty, hardly recognizable as guitar much of the time In 1987, Rafael Toral began making his own compositions and solo recordings. 30 years later, these recordings sound remarkably prescient and perfectly timeless - almost fresher today than when they wer…
Wave Field
**A prescient vision of the next phases of listening space! Remastered reissue, first on vinyl** Released in 1995 ‘Wave Field’ was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O’Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter’s cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements - a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno blend together. Here, the clangorou…
Space Collective 2 Live
Space Collective 2 Live commemorates Portuguese musician Rafael Toral’s first U.S. tour in several years. Since the 1990s, Toral has been primarily known for his guitar work, but has since been working on the Space Program project, within which he has probed visceral and personal components of electronic music performance, and how they relate to the performer’s experience, not to the resultant product.
These recordings, taken from a live set at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2012, find Toral perform…
Space Elements III
This is the third volume of the Space Program's Space Elements series. In this series, each volume features guests and is focused on a compositional function. The Space Program is a long-term project launched in 2004, for performing music with a post-free jazz mind-set but using strange sounds from electronic instruments. Playing physically, the body is involved in making decisions. The Space Program is about articulating silence and sound, structuring musical flow on experimental instrum…
Violence of discovery and calm of acceptance
Considered by the Chicago Reader to be "one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade", Rafael Toral has been developing in the last 15 years a unique sound world, having been as influenced by Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno as by Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Using the guitar as part of a complex electronic instrument, Toral has collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock and played in many European countries and in several states in…
Space elements vol.2
'Space elements Vol. II is the fourth release in Rafael Toral's ongoing project, the Space Program. Following the first elements release, this volume features a new set of collaborators: Evan Parker (soprano sax), Manuel Mota (guitar), Afonso Simões (drums), Stefano Tedesco (vibraphone), João Paulo Feliciano (rhodes piano), and Ruben Costa (digital synthesizer), as well as returning guests Sei Miguel (trumpet), César Burago (percussion), Fala Mariam (trombone), and Rute Praça (cello). Space el…
Space Elements Vol. 1
The third in Rafael Toral's Space Program series of releases - his long-term research project launched in 2004, through which he has unearthed an innovative approach and a complete re-thinking of how electronic music is conceived and experienced. Using custom experimental instruments, Toral performs electronic music concerned with 'phrasing and swing' and performing strange melodies with physicality, movement and gesture in flux.' 'Space Elements Vol. I features Rute Praça (cello), Margarida Gar…
Space solo 1
The LP version of the CD released by Quecksilber in 2007. Limited edition of 500, mastered direct to metal and pressed on 200g virgin vinyl.In 2004, Rafael Toral announced that he was to embark on a long term project, which was to be a multi-facetted work in progress representing his new approach to music. With the release of the first album of the program, the eponymous Space (staubgold 69 cd), he managed to disrupt the notions of avantgarde music even of those who consider themselves well-vers…
Space
After over 15 years of drone and ambient work based around guitar and electronics, Rafael Toral has set off on a radically new mission. Leaving the guitar behind, Toral has equipped himself with instruments such as a theremin-controlled white noise generator, amplified coil spring percussion, and a random pulse width modulation oscillator. With these he has launched his jazz-fueled craft through Earth's atmosphere, into outer space. The resulting voyage is one where the sounds created recall the…
Sound Mind Sound Body
Rafael Toral's music is guitar based, but doesn't seem to involve any of the usual guitar histrionics. Instead he focuses in on the little details, the expansion of the sustained note. Sound Mind Sound Body is indeed a sustained note; the music is not dissimilar to Fripp and Eno's classic extrapolations, to Toral's mentor (and former NYC landlord) Phil Niblock, or to other like-minded drone masters. What is special is its (for lack of a better word) tenderness and hands-off gentleness. For this …
Harmonic series 2
Japanese-only release. Recorded live in Japan in 2003, Harmonic Series 2 is a 43 minute piece for computer generated sinewaves, custom software, guitar and analog electronics. It follows Harmonic Series 0 which was released on Table of the Elements. Since I have always been involved with the inner structures of sound, working with the harmonic series comes as a natural move, since harmonics are well known to guitarists. Thus, inspired by Fourier's theory, I chose to work with the most basic elem…