Rafael Toral - Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance

Urs Leimgruber || Rafael Toral || Mariachi & Maria Bertel | via nilonilaz

via nilonilaz

Roger Turner & Rafael Toral || Live in London

Recorded live at the Wire 25 Festival, Bush Hall, London (UK), on November 17, 2007.

credits

released May 20, 2017

Roger Turner, drums and percussion & Rafael Toral, electronics instruments

Rafael Toral || SATURN

"Saturn" continues an ongoing post-Space Program expansion into new contexts for free phrasing on Rafael Toral's electronic instruments. From the jazz-rock groove opening on Saturn I to the metallic drone ambiance on bells, gongs and feedback of Saturn II and the precision of free shapes on Saturn III, derived from developments in the Space Quartet (on which João Pais Filipe plays the drums), Saturn is a live suite in new directions.

"As i was looking for image ideas for the "Saturn" cover, i arrived at the Cassini spacecraft and the gorgeous photos in took of Saturn, its rings and all its moons. I'm in awe of its staggering achievements, having been 20 years in space and beaming all these amazing photos to Earth, plus lots of insights about that planetary system. But the music was recorded long before i started looking for cover images and has nothing to do with Saturn, heh. It's just music."

- Rafael Toral

João Pais Filipe :: Drums and Percussion
Rafael Toral :: Modified MT-10 Amplifier, Modified MT-2 Amplifier Feedback, Electrode Oscillator

Rafael Toral || Moon Field

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 chosen musical elements.

“Moon Field was originally written for live performance by a configuration of the Space Collective 3,” Toral explains, “It was with Ricardo Webbens on modular synths, Riccardo Dillon Wanke on electric piano and myself on electronic instruments. While working on it, the piece revealed a strange hovering quality, a kind of stasis. It's alive and awake, like all the recent Space Program music, but doesn't seem to want to go anywhere. The music wanted to be something very peculiar and I changed it a lot in response to that. It also revealed what I find a kind of nocturnal mood, as if we were listening to alien signals with satellites crossing the sky under the moonlight.”

guitars ++

Mick Barr - guitar, voix

Rafael Toral

Rafael Toral´s Music





Rafael Toral - electronics
Afonso Simões - drums





Guitar sessions, rare tracks, studio takes, etc. 

Vol. 1 is towards the ambient side.

released July 12, 2016

Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance || Space Elements Vol. I | Rafael Toral

One of my favourite albums, ever.

This is the first volume of the Space Program's Space Elements series. It is a series of releases each focused on one kind of instruments, on small settings and most often including collaborations, but sharing the same concerns of the program. The Space Program is a long-term work process launched in 2004, consisting on the quest for an approach to electronic music performance using a disciplined matrix of decision-making possibilities (and therefore not quite regarded as "improvisation"). Having found that jazz is the field of musical knowledge where disciplined decision-making is most developed, this music is more informed by jazz than by any other. The Space Program emphasizes articulating silence and sound, by structuring musical discourse on experimental instruments with a simple and clear sonic identity.

To my surprise i found no historical precedents to this practice, being that it draws practically no information from electronic music history (which is grounded on different thinking patterns), and it draws very little from jazz history as well, since the instruments i use are inadequate to play any music based on the Western system. I regard this approach to jazz (meaning a system of individual decision-making from the standpoint of free-spectrum live electronics) as a new and exciting field of creative possibilities. I called it "post-free jazz electronic music".

                                                                                             Rafael Toral, 2008

Jim O'Rourke | Rafael Toral || Two Masters

Recorded at Steamroom Chicago.
Jim O' Rourke - modular synthesizer
Rafael Toral - electronic feedback circuit

• Rafael toral

Liveloop is the forerunner of Cyclorama Lift - an empty feedback loop with electronics in between - but it sounds way more agressive. It was actually the first time i found a way to bypass the guitar. It started by, at the end of a show, unplugging the guitar from the effects and routing their output back into their input...

• jim O'Rourke

Solo Guitar Albums

Perhaps, it was the 1st solo guitar album I bought.

Sei Miguel

Sei Miguel

No Noise Reduction - ON AIR || FREE Download

ON AIR:

Rafael Toral - instruments: modified electronic toys (part I), 1967 Lion Foreign, MS-2 micro-amp (part II). Circuits: Whammy pedal, Big Muff, modified Ibañez digital delay, Morley wah, Korg X-911 filters, Wem copicat tape delay.

João Paulo Feliciano - instruments: modified electronic toys (part I), Gibson Les Paul deluxe, MS-2 micro-amp (part II). Circuits: Small Stone phaser, Memory Man analog delay, Big Muff, Morley Wah, Wem copicat tape delay.

On Air is an improvised music piece with two parts. Part I consists of sounds produced using modified electronic toys further altered by analog electronic devices. Part II uses electric guitars with feedback circuits modulated using the same analog electronics as in the first part. The present recordings document a series of performances delivered by No Noise Reduction as live radio broadcasts in Portuguese radio stations.

Go to rafaelToralDOTnetSLASHdownloads
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