Experiencing music live is rightly regarded as one of the best ways to enjoy it. Sharing the same space as your chosen hero as they navigate and construct a sonic world before your eyes and ears. The visceral immediacy of the whole thing, the way sounds you might already be familiar with, but now recreated instantly, a few meters away. The experience, the physical effort, the physicality of the music, the connection between those on the stage, and those gathered in the crowd. That buzz in your ears and brain as you head home…
Rafael Toral, the Portuguese sonic adventurer, with his new release Spectral Evolution Live, is an invitation to approximate the experience of his mind popping music, from the comfort of your own home.
Throughout his extensive discography, a marriage of guitar, electronics, and feedback has always circled around physical spaces, a practise, where results are positioned somewhere between live performances and studio recordings.
Early albums like Wave Field and Aeriola Frequency, his entire Space series, and more recent releases like Moon Field and Saturn, whilst all blisteringly good listens, all feel like music unfolding in real time. Despite this music occurring somewhere other than the a room here at OBLADADA, they react and mesh with wherever you happen to play them in. These albums often namecheck actual voids, but the sounds fill space with more than just volume. They are fixed in time, locked in format, but sound different, and still evolving and growing, every single time you hit play.
Toral’s Spectral Evolution from last year, a towering masterpieces of our listening, and occupies a prestigious place in our world as one of our favourite albums ever. An utterly spectacular recording, which feels like the culmination and concentrated peak of decades of creative enquiry.
So, Spectral Evolution Live is both a document of the event and somehow again another bottled infinitely repeatable experience. A real time slightly modified version of its parent album but what pours out our speakers is simply another 58 minutes in this mind popping universe.
Even watching early working versions of the Spectral Evolution project, it’s clear how finely poised everything here always was. Whilst there is a clear fluidity to how the musical forms are created, there is a continual sense that any errors, however minute, could destroy the whole thing.
However, this knife edge of precision is somewhere that Toral navigates with understated confidence and grace. Another dance along laser beams. Spectral Evolution Live effortlessly becomes another heady hour in this sumptuous zone. It’s almost easier to understand the sounds captured here as further worked or remixed, or most comfortably and usefully, a track to alternate, contrast, and ultimately expand on, with the studio version.
This flip flopping between both recordings, gifts us almost 2 solid hours in sonic nirvana.
As Toral offers in his notes, this release is in part, an opportunity for folk like me that haven’t had the chance to hear/feel this music performed in the flesh. I’m only guessing how that experience would add to this body of music I already adore, but I’d imagine it might just be beatific. Until then, Spectrum Evolution Live remains another impeccable window into this partially improvised, partially composed, informed by phenomena, weaved in light beams, and sculpted in utter magic.
This album confirms whatever Spectral Evolution actually is – it’s clearly a whole new world everytime it plays, and feels like a whole new direction in music.
Spectral Evolution Live is out now, and available digitally, on CD and signed CD here
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