From Lisbon, Portugal, comes this masterpiece of ambient guitar — an exercise in pure bliss. Droning guitar oscillations overlap in ecstatic harmonic resonations, to later be precisely looped, processed, and edited over the course of a year on a personal computer. It sounds like a liquid distillation of My Bloody Valentine's revelatory Loveless (the cover is an homage to that record), and has the heady, soundscape qualities of No Pussyfooting by Fripp and Eno, except that it's more lush, more beautiful, and thoroughly modern-sounding. Rafael Toral will change the way you perceive the guitar, and lull you to a sweet sleep while he's doing it.
Mike McGonigal