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Rafael Toral: Traveling Light 2LP (Drag City)
Release Date: 10.24.25
We’ve been fans of Toral’s since the Dexter's Cigar CD pressing of Wave Field in the late 1990s. And Toral’s Spectral Evolution was at the very top of our EOTY Lps in 2024, a return to his extended musicality after a protracted period of no-input and other forms of more complicated gear-based experimentation.
Developed in parallel to Spectral Evolution, this album rethinks the “jazz standard,” using techniques and processes similar way to the 2024 LP.. Traveling Light is being released October 24 and will premier live at the Venice Biennale. Toral has crossed over, folks.
From the one-sheet: ““Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the major accomplishments in his long history, expressing these songs on their own terms through the unique listening lens of his music. It’s nearly a century since the innovation that electrified the guitar, almost a century since the era of songs like ‘Easy Living’ and ‘Body and Soul.’ Since then, guitars and songs have been played hundreds of different ways by thousands of diverse individuals. After a century of progress, they probably should sound like something else again! And they do, as Toral sidesteps the traditional logic of how to play a song, moving outside the framework with which one would expect a standard to be treated.
Three decades ago, in the early years of his practice, Toral used the guitar as a generator, to create discreet texture and droning tones. Later, he abandoned the guitar entirely, focusing on self-made electronics to render his music, and the silence from which it came, with a post-free jazz perspective.
For the music of Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light, Toral has combined his methodologies, radically expanding the space within their harmonies with his self-made machines, while engaging directly with his instrument and the chords of the material. The result is a listening experience of these standards, that remains ‘in the tradition,’ even as the elongated harmonies seem to alter time such that, as Toral notes, ‘the chords become events on their own.’
At points, the long tones animate the sacred ennui of liturgic music, the choir or the organ standing in for silent contemplation while rumbling the ground beneath our feet. Another echo of the concentric circling of music in time...”
Get it while we got it and before the artist takes off again for somewhere else.
Release Date: 10.24.25
We’ve been fans of Toral’s since the Dexter's Cigar CD pressing of Wave Field in the late 1990s. And Toral’s Spectral Evolution was at the very top of our EOTY Lps in 2024, a return to his extended musicality after a protracted period of no-input and other forms of more complicated gear-based experimentation.
Developed in parallel to Spectral Evolution, this album rethinks the “jazz standard,” using techniques and processes similar way to the 2024 LP.. Traveling Light is being released October 24 and will premier live at the Venice Biennale. Toral has crossed over, folks.
From the one-sheet: ““Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the major accomplishments in his long history, expressing these songs on their own terms through the unique listening lens of his music. It’s nearly a century since the innovation that electrified the guitar, almost a century since the era of songs like ‘Easy Living’ and ‘Body and Soul.’ Since then, guitars and songs have been played hundreds of different ways by thousands of diverse individuals. After a century of progress, they probably should sound like something else again! And they do, as Toral sidesteps the traditional logic of how to play a song, moving outside the framework with which one would expect a standard to be treated.
Three decades ago, in the early years of his practice, Toral used the guitar as a generator, to create discreet texture and droning tones. Later, he abandoned the guitar entirely, focusing on self-made electronics to render his music, and the silence from which it came, with a post-free jazz perspective.
For the music of Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light, Toral has combined his methodologies, radically expanding the space within their harmonies with his self-made machines, while engaging directly with his instrument and the chords of the material. The result is a listening experience of these standards, that remains ‘in the tradition,’ even as the elongated harmonies seem to alter time such that, as Toral notes, ‘the chords become events on their own.’
At points, the long tones animate the sacred ennui of liturgic music, the choir or the organ standing in for silent contemplation while rumbling the ground beneath our feet. Another echo of the concentric circling of music in time...”
Get it while we got it and before the artist takes off again for somewhere else.