Rafael Toral
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Biografía
- Rafael Toral has been intrigued by the potential of sound and the functions of music since he was a teenager, and involved with Rock, Ambient, Contemporary, Electronic and Free Jazz music respectively, in different periods of his life.Rafael Toral was born in Lisbon, 1967 and played his first gig as a drummer in 1984, but would be noted instead as a guitarist. In the early 1990's he created a blend of ambient and rock, recording acclaimed albums like Wave Field (Drag City) or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (Touch). By the early 2000's, in a radical shift he launched the "Space Program", a 15 year project exploring an approach to electronic music based on silence, through physical gesture and human decision-making on phrasing and swing, deeply inspired by post-free jazz. The resulting music, "melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free", has been described as "a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers". His thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as "space", with a clear function in music creation, is also a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload. In 2018 Toral entered a third phase in his course, prenounced with Moon Field (Room 40), in which his jazz-like phrasing moves into a wider landscape and appears to, in a way, come full circle with his beginnings. Performing solo or in numerous collaborations, he has been touring throughout the world. In 2014 he relocated to the mountains in central Portugal for a more sustainable life.̸Sound Mind Sound Body (1994) Wave Field (1995) Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (2000) Space (2006) Moon Field (2017) Space Quartet (2018)
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