Rafael Toral - Spectral Evolution

Pitchfork

Read Matthew Blackwell’s review of the album.

A Closer Listen

To describe Rafael Toral’s Spectral Evolution as guitar music would be like calling Beethoven a composer. A grave understatement: No album of guitar music has ever sounded like this.

Toral initially made a name for himself in the 1990s with the release of several now classic albums of guitar-driven drone/ambient work including Wave Field and Sound Mind Sound Body. Over the last two decades though he has just as often traded in his guitar to experiment with the harmonic and performative possibilities of electronic instruments. Through what he calls his “Space Program,” Toral has been working extensively with electronic instruments, experimenting with modified amplifiers, oscillators, and synthesizers, and developing instruments such as the Echo-Feed, whose theremin-controlled dynamics produce several sounds, including, a bird-like voice that is a frequent presence on his latest album.

The liner notes for Spectral Evolution describe it as “bringing together seemingly incompatible threads” of Toral’s practice, which too, feels like an under-statement: On Spectral Evolution Toral elicits profoundly moving textures and harmonies from his unique fusion of synthetic and acoustic sound.

The album is presented as one continuous track although liner notes reveal breaks between twelve discrete “pieces.” Over its 47 minutes run-time the album shifts between sections based on sumptuous harmonies and more spacious interludes (fittingly called long and short spaces respectively.)

The album opens with a gentle strum of a guitar chord, soon joined by several warped sing-song calls, and finally a swell of hazy, rapturous drones, harmonizing along with the increasingly active and eager chorus of bird-like voices. It’s an enchanting opening, full of pathos but also placidity, and one that produces a lush “carpet” of sound for the album’s first ten minutes. At that point the harmonizing is briefly traded for a wall of signal and feedback, before the album shifts to the achingly slow series of chords that marks “Descending.” The haunting nature of Spectral Evolution, in part, emerges from its slowness, the way Toral lets his tones just be, to stir and reverberate. It also surfaces from the fact that, and despite Toral’s blatant experimentation, the chord changes in several tracks on classic jazz chords from songs by the likes of George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. There’s a ghostly familiarity present here.

It’s not all lush chord changes though. “Take the Train” lets Toral’s warbling, squeaking, whirring, and squiggling electronic instruments have their way, duetting with horns, and perhaps some of Toral’s guitar as well.

There are few periods of silence on the record, although there is a lot of space, assembled in such a way that one can’t help but feel moved (take a look at some of the comments on Toral’s Bandcamp page to see the effusive praise this album elicits from listeners.)

The album ends with a reprise of the opener, “Changes,” Toral’s guitar re-emerging relatively unfiltered, to accompany the chirruping and whirring of his electronic accompanists. Spectral Evolution, and Toral’s recent career more generally, achieve what is all to often missing both from contemporary experimental music and its history, reminding listeners of an often overlooked link between jazz standards, free jazz, and the drone and ambient music that exists at the outer edges of experimentalism. Spectral Evolution is full of intense contrasts between the flagrant sounds of electricity and the unabashed luxuriousness and romanticism of Toral’s guitar tone and synthesizers. It’s a truly magical listen. (Jennifer Smart)