records > SPACE SOLO 1

	Quecksilber Berlin, Germany Quecksilber 11 (CD, 2007)  Taiga Minneapolis, MN, USA TAIGA 2 (LP, 2008)

reviews

Rafael Toral is in it for the long haul. The Portuguese improviser has for some time been planning his “Space Program”, a huge, multi-faceted project comprising performances and albums that will keep him busy until at least 2012. Commencing last year in most dramatic fashion with the epic “Space” on Staubgold, Toral made it quite clear that the album was merely the opener in a huge series of ten solo albums. “Space Solo 1” is the first of these records.
Recent news from Europe report that “performances” of laptop electronics -- some guy sitting at a table clicking a mouse, tapping a key, or wiggling a knob, “matching dreary sights to uncompelling sounds that can easily be traced to the known workings of a piece of software or gear” (Bill Meyer in Dusted) -- have become laughably passé. Good. And Toral eschews such anti-aesthetics. Even better. He makes his own instruments in such a way that he must visibly interact with them in real time. Great. Can he play them worth a damn? He’s spent years refining his steez, becoming the master of his D.I.Y. instruments and their associated extended improvising techniques and to all intents and purposes, he can make them do whatever the hell he wants.
So does it sound good? Does it what. Want a synthesizer that plays like robot-Evan Parker on speed? Check. Want the sound of a bunch of cheap op-amps twittering to each other? Check. Want to hear the sound of a massacre at the Rubber Duckie (TM) plant? Check. Want to hear the sub-atomic conversation between a bunch of clouds in an electrical storm? Check. Want to hear analogue spring reverbs making love in a prolonged MDMA-orgy? Check. Want to shake your head again and again at the sheer playfulness and inventiveness of it all? Check. It’s like he’s spent a whole bunch of time building a machine which runs on a twenty-five yr-old 8-bit microprocessor and which he’s programmed to play all the “Early Electronic Music’s Greatest Hits” as well as Olivier Messaien’s bird-music through a couple of speakers he ripped out of a old transistor radio. And now, bored with its repertoire, he’s teasing and irritating the thing with a pink noise generator and a hairdryer with a torch shining through it. Uh.. that is to say, timeless, and at the same time totally up to the minute. Amazing.
Stephen Clover, Foxy Digitalis



Solo performance is one of the most exacting challenges any musician may face. Sure, any mope with an instrument can get up and play; but can he hold your attention, let alone move your heart or boggle your mind? For every Evan Parker, there’s a legion of guys who get change in their sax cases because people feel sorry for them and hope they’ll go away; for every Jack Rose, there's a battalion of strummers that bleed anonymously into the background.
The second volume in Rafael Toral’s Space Program is the antidote to the electronic version of this phenomenon — the dude sitting at a table clicking a mouse, tapping a key, or wiggling a knob, matching dreary sights to uncompelling sounds that can easily be traced to the known workings of a piece of software or gear. The Portuguese experimentalist made his own instruments, and made them so that he must visibly interact with them in real time; there’s no falling back on a digital loop when you’re activating a filter with a light, or dipping and weaving a hand-held, hotwired toy amplifier.
But such novelties are means, not ends; Toral uses them to create a setting for genuinely performance-based, improvisational electronic music. His tools aren’t entirely new; over a decade ago I first saw him balance a little toy Marshall amp like the one that appears on three of this CD’s five tracks on his guitar neck, using it like an alarm-clock-sized e-bow. But he’s modified its workings and familiarized himself with it to the point where it’s not a toy, but an instrument capable of remarkable nuance.
He obtains trills, decays, and tonal variations on the opening track “Portable amplifier” that one might expect from a wind instrument blown by a master. The oscillators and filters he wields on “Echo-Feed” and “Electrode oscillator” yield more familiar sonorities — by going back to the earliest elements of electronic music, Toral echoes its sounds — but he doesn’t put them to kitschy or nostalgic ends. “Echo-Feed” unfolds mysteriously against a silent backdrop, while “Bender” tears at the surrounding space as savagely as a feeding shark. Plenty of people say that they make creative music — Rafael Toral delivers it.
Bill Meyer, Dusted magazine

Rafael Toral’s Space series of releases were brought to life last year in the most dramatic fashion with the epic ‘Space’, Toral making it quite clear that the album was merely the opener in a huge series of ten solo albums. ‘Space Solo 1’ is the first of these records and let me tell you now it’s got my brain splattered all over the nice clean white wall behind me. Continuing the themes explored on the first disc we again see Toral getting into the thick of it with home-made electronic doohickeys and portable amplifiers. This is DIY electronics at its best; screaming, hissing and scraping all the way to the final splutter and it is a devastatingly visceral listening experience. I must admit I’m a real sucker for anything with belching synthesizer sounds and machine hum in the background, but Toral is one of the masters of the genre and he sound perfectly at ease with his decomposing equipment. Whether he’s making feedback loops from small amplifiers or ear-piercing high pitched analogue wails it all sounds perfectly realised. There is a danger when producing this kind of music that the gear can take control of the artist rather than the other way around, but although you can hear in these improvisations a certain amount of serendipity there is never the sense that Toral loses control. His keen ear for the right amount of experimentation is what holds this disc together and whether we are hearing a single blip in a wave of silence or a tape-delay drenched drone buzzing with saturation it is both impressively listenable and mind-blowingly experimental. Fans of the new wave of noise music and power electronics (Wolf Eyes, Jessica Rylan et al) would be wise to invest in this disc, it shows someone who really knows their craft simply revelling in it, and what more can you ask for than this? Excellent stuff and a huge recommendation...
Bookmat

Machine music of the first order, Space Solo is the pure work of a pure agonist. In terms of uncovering new methods of origination and the accompanying demands of continuing to up the ante among listeners, Toral has departed the safety of the pale and begun demarcation of his very own protectorate. The sonic clarity of these solos—in each case the voice is unaccompanied by anything other than itself—offers the same unsettling and stark character as does the lighting technique employed by photographers for forensic imaging. The opening piece—“Portable Amplifier”—is derived from modified MS-2 amplifier feedback and a light-controlled filter intercut with interludes performed on amplified coil spring percussion. The sound itself resembles some clinical and macro study of what we might imagine happens when subjecting a small bit of willing plastic to being stretched, compressed, tweaked and twisted in a nearly terrifying level of detailed sqeaking that insists one experience every nuance and bit-level resolve of the event free of grain, free of distraction and completely free of any embellishment. Like excursions in the hard and the soft, continuous and discontinuous, round out the remaining four pieces, the last being a return to more of the first. The single-minded explorations dissect traces of delayed feedback, pitch manipulation and overlapping pulse waves, completing a sampling of unflinching work based on the quintessential components that comprise any and every thing else we think we hear.
KL, ei-mag

Those who got into Rafael Toral's music through his guitar work, and its unashamedly tonal post-Eno Ambient drone (he isn't too fond of those last two words either, but they do tend to stick) might find the bleeps and squiggles of the Portuguese sound artist's latest offering rather strange, especially if they're unfamiliar with last year's Space (Staubgold), which inaugurated the ambitious Space Program, a series of albums that will occupy Toral for the best part of a decade to come, and of which Space Solo 1 is the second chapter. He finally unplugged the drone and hung up his guitar after 2001's Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance ("there was a clear feeling of completion, and I knew if I continued along that path I'd just repeat myself and become formulaic," he told me in an interview that formed the basis of a Wire feature last September – shortly to appear in extended and updated form here, fans please note), since when he's been busy designing, building and playing a whole studio full of customised electronic instruments for the Space Program. Each of these will be showcased in its own Space Study, but several of them feature in the Space Solos, a parallel solo project (there's also a projected set of six ensemble albums entitled Space Elements).
Toral's "fascination with hacking" isn't new. His investigations of "randomness and the resolution of the uncontrollable in real time" with Paulo Feliciano in the duo No Noise Reduction began back in 1990 (the pair's 1997 AnAnAnA album On Air, though hard to find now, is worth checking out as an important precursor of the Space Program), and in 1995 he found himself in the hackers' paradise of Amsterdam's STEIM improvising with "a modified toy with a messed-up pitch control". But there's a maturity to Space and Space Solo 1 that's lacking in the earlier work, a sense that Toral has finally assimilated the influence of Cage, Lucier and most importantly Sei Miguel. Toral has been involved with Miguel's music since 1996's Showtime, and appears on the trumpeter's outstanding Creative Sources release last year The Tone Gardens (Miguel and trombonist Fala Mariam repaid the compliment by guesting on Space). The key to what the Space Program is all about is probably Toral's description of the project as "what electronic music might have sounded like if the studios that sprang up shortly after World War Two had been frequented by jazz musicians instead of composers." That link with jazz is tenuous, but it's there: there's a kind of odd swing to Space Solo 1 that recalls Michel Waisvisz's pioneering work with the legendary crackle box (isn't it about time somebody somewhere reissued Steve Lacy's Lumps?). But there's also enough silence – space, if you will – surrounding Toral's electrode-controlled cross-modulating twin square-wave portable oscillators, delayed feedback empty circuits with joystick-controlled filters and amplified coil springs to remind us of his enduring allegiance to Cage. This adds a certain austerity to the music, which is matched by the pale grey green colour scheme and the black and white architect's drawing doing on the cover, a reminder (perhaps) that space isn't just some sci-fi final frontier, but our everyday awareness of the objects that surround us and their relationship to each other.
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic

Abbandonati temporaneamente gli esperimenti alla chitarra - quegli esperimenti che hanno funzionato per anni come una sorta di processo di sublimazione consistito nell’approcciarsi allo strumento amato come a semplice cosa tra le cose, in grado, esattamente alla stregua di tutte gli oggetti, di emettere suoni -, il portoghese Rafael Toral ha inaugurato un nuovo programma di ricerca che lo terrà impegnato almeno fino al 2012. Lo Space Program consisterà in una serie di sperimentazioni (strutturate in tre differenti capitoli: gli Space Studies, gli Space Elements e gli Space Solos, ed inaugurata da quella specie di manifesto programmatico che è stato, qualche mese fa, Space) che reperteranno su supporto frammenti infinitesimali delle migliaia di ore di musica realizzate nello studio di Lisbona dove l’artista lavora da anni - nella migliore tradizione del tecnico del suono - a dispositivi e generatori di onde sonore personalmente brevettati. Spazio è qui parola da accogliere nel pieno della sua valenza polisemica - e ovviamente, il pensiero non può che tornare a Sun Ra. Spazio è l’estensione illimitata entro cui il suono si propaga. Spazio il luogo privato in cui sentirsi a casa propria - lo studio in cui l’artista sperimenta senza remora. Spazio l’avamposto ideale di infinite possibili civiltà aliene – lo Spazio su cui ancora timidamente fantasticavano i primi film di fantascienza.
Space Solo 1, il primo lavoro della serie Space Solo pare concentrarsi proprio su quest’ultima accezione del termine. Così, in Portable Ampiflier e Portable Amplifier 3, l’amplificatore portatile elaborato da Toral sembra quasi voler mimare le conversazioni impossibili degli alieni protagonisti di uno z-movie fanta-erotico di Mario Gariazzo; il circuito generatore di feedback in Echo-Feed simula i rumori di un ecosistema, con tanto di fauna, appartenente a una galassia sconosciuta (riuscite a figurarvi cosa sarebbe successo se Olivier Messiaen avesse compilato il Catalogue d’Oiseaux  su un altro pianeta?); l’oscillatore portatile di Electrode Oscillator produce frequenze al limite dell’udibile per l’orecchio già culturalmente forgiato dell’ascoltatore medio - che, è facile  ipotizzarlo, le riterrà scandalosamente in-ascoltabili. Ormai totalmente affrancata dai concetti di scrittura o notazione - non a caso l’influsso più duraturo sull’operato del portoghese è stato quello esercitato dall’opera di John Cage -, la musica di Rafael Toral vive di azioni, nel senso che a questo termine dava il Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Spesso del tutto subordinati alle dinamiche corporee di chi li maneggia (si dia un’occhiata ai video presenti nella pagina web del musicista), gli apparecchi di Toral diventano quasi protesi di un corpo umano che non ha più parola, interfacce fisiche tra la propria cassa di risonanza interiore e il rumore dello spazio esterno - qualunque cosa qui la parola voglia significare.
Sentireascoltare

Na twee jaar van stilte brengt het Duitse Quecksilber, het experimentele bijhuis van Staubgold, nieuw werk uit van Rafael Toral. ‘Space Solo 1’ is het vervolg op ‘Space’ en hoort thuis in een langlopende serie die de Portugese componist en visueel kunstenaar Toral vorig jaar startte. Toral besliste na de release van ‘Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance’ om de wereld van de microscopische soundscapes waarin hij toen grossierde achter zich te laten. Met de ‘Space’-serie onderzoekt hij op een bijna wetenschappelijke, maar evengoed impulsieve manier, de mogelijkheden van het livegebeuren. De opnames voor ‘Space Solo 1’ zijn dan ook uitsluitend registraties van liveconcerten die Toral, al dan niet in samenwerking met het Sei Miguel Quartet (waarmee hij recent nog in KC Netwerk stond en binnenkort Zaal België staat), brengt. Toral bevestigt een aantal microfoons aan zijn armen en handen en kan door het maken van simpele bewegingen geluidsgolven voortbrengen. De intensiteit en de kracht waarmee hij beweegt hebben een directe invloed op het geluid. Met titels als 'Electro Oscillator' en 'Portable Amplifier' heeft dit enfant terrible van de moderne elektronica (Het britse label Touch vond zijn project te moeilijk en te ambitieus en verzocht Toral om andere oorden op te zoeken) zijn bronnen opzettelijk prijs. Wie de man live aan het werk zag, weet dat het hier om een puur staaltje van elektronische improvisatie gaat dat moeilijk op plaat te vatten is. ‘Space Solo 1’ is dan ook, veeleer dan een coherente plaat, vooral een uitgepuurd experiment van een muzikale ontdekker pur sang.
Peter Deschamps, Gonzo Circus magazine

De in Lissabon geboren Rafael Toral heeft de afgelopen 20 jaar gespeeld in bands als No Noise Reduction en MIMEO en samengewerkt met artiesten als Sei Miguel, Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, John Zorn, Thurston Moore, Dean Roberts, Christian Fennesz, Alvin Lucier, Evan Parker, David Toop, en Jim O'Rourke. Hij houdt ervan experimentele muziek te maken met gitaar en elektronica. Hij heeft voor het verschijnen van zijn vorige cd Space, onderdeel van zijn ambitieuze “Space Program”-project, al geroepen dat hij avant-garde zou vernieuwen. Dat doet hij vanuit de jazzmuziek, waar hij naar eigen zeggen het meest van kan leren. Hij heeft nieuwe muziek willen maken die jazz noch elektronische muziek is en toch allebei ook weer wel. Hij creëert daar een tijdloos universum mee, dat op prachtige wijze weet te integreren. Op zijn nieuwste werk Space Solo 1 gaat hij daar gewoon mee verder. In de eerste compositie “Portable Amplifier” maakt hij gebruik van de feedback van een versterker die hij volgens een ingewikkeld procédé filtert. Dit zet hij om naar hortende elektronische geluiden die als een soort metalige trompetklanken, die passen bij zijn eigen geschapen genre. Meer dan ooit lijkt hij de ruimte tussen de geluiden te gebruiken, waarbij het ontbreken van geluid de ruimte toch weet op te vullen. Niet door verbeelding, maar gewoon doordat het er tussenuit kan. Net als je bij een woord de klinkers weghaalt en toch kan lezen wat er staat. In 21,5 minuut weet hij hiermee diepe indruk te maken. De overige 4 composities zijn een stuk korter. In twee van die stukken werkt hij ook met een versterker, waarbij hij weer die ondenkbare jazz-elektronica hybride laat horen met gebruik van bijzondere effecten en ambientachtige softnoise. Verder werkt hij nog met een oscillator en een joystick aangesloten op een elektronisch circuit. Het is ongelooflijk wat voor een ongrijpbare geluiden hij hiermee weet te produceren. Niet organisch en toch weer wel. Zijn muziek bevat elementen van Aube en Ryoji Ikeda, maar staat eigenlijk los van alles en iedereen. Waarschijnlijk wordt dit afgedaan als piepknor muziek, maar voor degenen die meer zitvlees hebben krijgen een onbeschrijflijke, soms haast fysieke ervaring. Ruimte en tijd bestaan even niet meer.
Jan Willem Broek, Caleidoscoop