Whilst starting to compile our end of year list back in November, we were excited to receive a new promo. A few hours later, whilst waiting on a train, I was grinning. Standing on the rainy platform with my headphones on, the thought quickly formed that Spectral Evolution might be the most exceptional thing I’d heard that year. A recording that wouldn’t be released until late February 2024.
Deeply grateful, and fortunate to have access to this preview, and continually overwhelmed after several months and countless listens since, this 47-minute-long album is now confirmed in our mind, as nothing less than an absolute towering masterpiece.
Rafael Toral, a prolific Portuguese guitarist and electronic artist, has long been a favourite here. Since the mid 90’s, his catalogue of works has calmly explored all sorts of settings and possibilities. Each release, a study in particular tangents within his sonic universe.
Albums like Wave Field and Violence of Discover and Calm of Acceptance are just two earlier examples of Toral’s droning, deeply ambient form of magic. His entire Space programme, focussing on self-made instruments, was both a journal of his ideas and a catalogue of his findings. The nocturnal spaces of Moon Field and Jupiter and Beyond all convey an artist that seems incapable of putting a foot wrong.
For us though, the album that somehow hits our third eye the most spectacularly is Aeriola Frequency. An album we missed when it was originally released in 1998, but whose reissue on Oren Ambarchi’s ever stunning Black Truffle label in 2020, was easily our album of that year. In fact, upon getting my turntable back up and running, after a few years of home office chaos, it was the first new piece of vinyl we had purchased in a decade.
Aeriola Frequency is an album that never seems to sound the same way twice. Despite, the fact this music exists as both a digital file, and a groove cut in vinyl, its fixed contents remain oddly fluid and malleable.
These broad characteristics also radiate through Spectral Evolution.
Clearly the importance of this music is felt by others as well. This album being the first new release on Jim O’Rourke’s label Moikai in over two decades. The very label that for us is legendary. Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba, and recently departed Phill Niblock’s G2,44+/x2, are just two of the label’s previous releases that remain all-time favourites. The home of music that stays with you for life.
Similarly elevated, Spectral Evolution could easily be a culmination of everything Toral has done to date, his decades and exploration whittled down into the most concise showcasing of what happens to sound that is sculpted by his processes, and fingers. As wild as it might sound, Spectral Evolution could somehow almost be considered as his first album, after years of breath-taking research and case studies.
Made up of one continuous track, the album is divided into 12 sections or zones. Growing out a pure and rounded guitar, within 10 seconds the atmosphere is pecked at by beautifully rippling electronics. Within a minute and a half, it’s grown into a throbbing orchestral peak, that has the power to make your brain tingle in delight.
Now that the music has your brain in its tractor beam, you are guided into a zone that is both pure science and magic. Ebbing and flowing, alternating between islands of musical structure, then slipping and sliding into a sea of vapour trails and atoms. Everything is coated in the illusion of expansion, like gliding up an incremental staircase, decorated with Sheppard tone wallpaper.
Toral shares that these clusters of notes retrace various structures lifted from jazz but more fundamentally, that the process just needed a starting point. His set up just needs something inputed so that his electronics can then blossom into music that feels as pure as light beams, whilst as heady as honey thick psychedelia.
Somehow, despite all this excitement, and its undoubtable technical excellence, Spectral Evolution never seems to lose any form of real-world potency. The details state the music is tuned to 432 Hz, often considered to be a sonic improvement over the more widely used 440 Hz. Quite how all this works might be part of the music’s undeniable magnetism, even without any real understanding of what any of this actually means.
Played loud at home, it has at times felt like the entire house is levitating. Head phoned walks in local woodlands have felt like a hyper form of reality. In this ongoing wave of creative excitement, we’ve tried not to binge listen, but so far, it’s completely impervious to any sense of anything approaching familiar or routine. Every time, it unfurls another uninterruptible occasion unlike anything else. Music so effective, it renders almost everything else redundant – the sound of actual bliss.
Spectral Evolution, as you can probably sense, is an exceptional release. No less than a glowing, expanding, absolutely perfect form of sonic alchemy.
Spectral Evolution is out now. Available on vinyl, CD and digitally here and here
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