Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution (digital, Moikai, February 2024)

My first thought when I heard this was ‘my, this is strange’. My second thought was ‘my, this is good!’. It’s a hard one to categorize, so let us deal in specifics.

We start with a simple phrase played on a guitar: kind of lo-fi, kind of echoey. Then we get two of Toral’s home-made deliciously woozy electronic instruments. One of them sounds like a muted trumpet that keeps speeding up and slowing down, and reminds me of Kid Koala’s Drunk Trumpet. The other one is a sad sine wave that puts me in mind a bit of R2D2 running out of batteries and a bit like something deeply familiar that I can put my finger on and I don’t know if that’s real or an illusion. These elements weave around each other for a bit. Then the sound is enriched with a warm, ambient hum. And then we get the first chord progression. And those chord progressions are really what make this. They’re like something out of the most melodramatic torch song, done with complete sincerity, but with a sonic palette which is relentlessly alien to the form. The overall impression is of a gang of robots who are stoned out of their tiny silicon minds auditioning to be Tom Waits’ backing band. (Yes, I know I’m using a lot of similes here. It’s that kind of music.) There are, I gather, quotes from jazz standards from George Gershwin to Duke Ellington, not that I’d know. (Toral uses the phrase ‘post-free-jazz’, and who am I to argue with that?) This is presented as one 47 minute track, though sections with names and timings are listed in the blurb on bandcamp, and there is a recognizable progression. At some times, it sounds like it’s about to cohere; at others, it threatens to drift off into the æther, but just about manages to keep it together. This is a record which is baffling on the surface, but has a very clear logic to what it’s about, and has many passages of genuine beauty. Wonderful stuff.

I bought this from Boomkat. They call it modern classical / ambient.