Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral has never been the type to call a lot of attention to himself. Despite releasing some of the most exceptional ambient albums of the 90s and early 00s, he’s always remained an artist strictly for the heads, never quite receiving the following that contemporaries such as his former MIMEO bandmate Christian Fennesz enjoyed. His retreat from ambient guitar soundscapes into the ever-insular world of electroacoustic improvised music, with his Space Quartet group, only further solidified this.
But last year, when comrade Jim O’Rourke relaunched his Moikai label, their very first release was Toral’s return to longform composition, Spectral Evolution. The album unexpectedly struck a chord, providing such a unique, evocative listening experience that listeners, regardless of their familiarity with his previous work or the context of the album, could not help but feel drawn in. From its very first moment of chippery birdsong-like electronics, it’s clear that Toral’s new album Traveling Light is very much working within the framework of Spectral Evolution. The hazy guitar pedalwork which calls to mind his early ambient albums, the subtle elements of electroacoustic abstraction informed by his Space Quartet work, and the cinematic, stargazing nature of the whole affair is immediately recognisable.
Still, some seemingly subtle differences go a long way in making Traveling Light a totally singular record. Spectral Evolution was born, in part, out of Toral’s interest in early jazz standards such as ‘I Got Rhythm’ and ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’, playing with their chord structures and heavily abstracting them to the extent that someone not deeply familiar with jazz theory would likely not be able to pick up on its basis without having known first.
Traveling Light pushes the jazz influence to the forefront. It’s essentially, in the most literal sense of the term, a standards album, though the sounds surrounding the chord progressions of each individual piece are so far-off from jazz that listening to the album through that lens feels almost impossible. Luminaries from the Portuguese improvised music scene contribute to four out of the six tracks on the album, colouring them in a way that provides an anchor of sorts in the jazz tradition. The instrumentation fits perfectly with the otherworldly, thoroughly non-jazz sounds of Toral’s guitar pedal wizardry, and the absence of an expected dissonance between the two feels strangely hypnotic.
A frequent criticism I have for contemporary ambient music is that much of it feels like soundtrack-bait, utilising big, dramatic crescendos to force a sense of catharsis into the music that doesn’t feel genuine and rather feels designed to manipulate the emotions of the listener. The six pieces on Travelling Light are, in fact, unabashedly cinematic, but in the same sense that Robby Müller’s film work is cinematic. Both works occupy a medium between the everyday and some unknown force, one which can perceive an overwhelming beauty and strangeness in, say, a long walk home. In this sense, Toral evokes such sweeping visions not by bashing his listeners over the head with his pathos, but through a sense of comprehensive listening that identifies the full cosmic scope of these standards.
