Through cities blissfully empty and miserably bursting, countryside bleak and beautiful, weather balmy, frosty, drizzly, mundane – Spectral Evolution, with its crescendos, blooms, swells and swoons, moulds itself to all ways of being. The only condition? It must be heard alone. Rafael Toral’s work is a thing of majesty, but only on one’s own.
Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral once described his music as “post-free jazz electronic music,” and he has spent the past couple decades bringing this concept to life, particularly with his Space Quartet group. In this context, Toral’s latest album Spectral Evolution, released on Jim O’Rourke’s newly-revived Moikai imprint, may be his most fully realized work. Toral’s early albums, such as Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance and Wave Field, are purely ambient, filled with lush textures that unfold continuously without ever interrupting the blissed-out state they induce upon the listener. Spectral Evolution is similarly lush and textural, but also far more unpredictable than those early albums, and branches out into some fascinating directions.
Spectral Evolution sounds like the totality of Toral’s work and influences broken down to a granular level, meticulously crafted into one whole piece. Toral’s influence for this album wasn’t esoteric free jazz, but rather the basics of jazz harmony, specifically in ubiquitous pieces like Gershwin’s “Rhythm changes” and Ellington and Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The very first thing one hears on Spectral Evolution is Toral’s guitar, which calls to mind John McLaughlin on In A Silent Way, punctuated by chirping electronics. The electronics bear an obvious resemblance to birdsong — and that’s not just the album cover talking — but more importantly, they capture the collective nature of improvisation harmony in early jazz music, an impressive feat considering this is the work of one man. Soon the guitar gives way to overwhelming textures, the clearest link here to Toral’s early work. The contrast between the dissonant bleeps and bloops and the textures — hazy and warm but also sweeping and cinematic at the same time — and the way all of these disparate sounds collectively swirl together creates an uncanny feeling. Towards the end of the piece the guitar returns, but in a wah’d out, Eddie Hazel-esque form, something radically different from anything we’ve heard from Toral in the past.
In a recent interview with Tone Glow, Toral compared the album to a garden, stating “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. So that’s how I had the idea of bringing in these electronic instruments. I thought I could make them sound like they were growing out of the chords.” Toral definitely succeeded in this sense, but much like how weeds also include dandelions, the electronics have their own alien beauty to them. That being said, though the electronics provide a healthy touch of danger, everything in the piece sounds perfectly in place. In that same interview, Toral also said that Spectral Evolution came into being through a lengthy process of tweaking and fine-tuning, and it shows. But the level of attention to detail pays off. It’s difficult to imagine the record being more fully-realized and immersive than it is, and it stands as a towering achievement in Toral’s formidable body of work. The album marks the exciting return of Moikai, and Jim O’Rourke has set the bar high for future releases. But Toral has always been around, constantly changing his sound and progressing as an artist without ever sacrificing the individualism of his approach.
