Sunday 23 June 2024, 2pm
Rafael Toral has been deeply involved with rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz music in different periods of his life. In the last 15 years he’s been thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as “space”, with a clear function in music creation but also as a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space”, has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers”. Currently, along the sound of slow motion harmonies over what sounds like an electronic rainforest in Jupiter, Rafael Toral picks up the guitar again to develop a new synthesis between several layers of past and future. An ambitious project beyond ambient, drone and electronic free-jazz, catching Toral’s “third phase” in its early stages. Performing solo or in numerous collaborations (including Jim O’Rourke, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, Eiko Ishibashi, and many others), he has been touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
