Rafael Toral - Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance
(Touch)
Like Keith Roe and Christian Fennesz, Rafael Toral searches for new uncharted territories of sound with the electric guitar as his guide. Unlike his peers though, Toral tends to gravitate towards glacial sounds, bathing his guitar in layers of blurry glassy effects, hardly ever allowing a recognizable strum of a chord or pluck of a string to come through. Instead, his compositions open slightly, inviting you in to his world of suspended notes and frozen melodies.
The opening track "Desiree," is a delicate deep space exercise in restraint, calling to mind Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois's Apollo, their soundtrack for a documentary of the moon landing. Eventually guitars turn into space dust, microcosmic particles, and huge walls of tones and feedback that strain to hold together under the wait of the gravity of the stars. The feedback in turn gives way to low murmurs of melody, which in turn fall deeper into black holes of sound. The discovery and acceptance of the stars is a concern for Torral; track 10 has a recording of "silence during a Space Shuttle real time web cast." It reads like a imaginary soundtrack for the Challenger explosion, having the most recognizably "guitar" sounds on the LP; it wails mournfully in the silence, playing back or collecting memories of the event in a dream like slow motion.
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