After nearly four decades of taking his music into different phases and directions, Rafael Toral is still looking for new ways to reinvent himself. Traveling Light finds the Lisbon-born musician continuing the trajectory set by 2024’s Spectral Evolution, moving from exploratory spectrums of abstract harmony into the luminous contours of old jazz standards. Each of the album’s six pieces is reconfigured, but never reinvented from the ground up, to fit his intricate musical language, crossing the foundational jazz textures added by clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flutist Clara Saleiro with his own electronic apparatus, as well as his own guitar and bass-playing. Just as much as its predecessor, Traveling Light offers a culmination of a repertoire-spanning creative search, as Toral continues to redefine what it means to be a sonic experimentalist on his own terms.
Before his performance of Traveling Light in full at the 2025 edition of Braga’s Semibreve in Braga, Toral sat down with us to dive deep into the past, current and future stages of his career.
Firstly, I wanted to touch on the release of Traveling Light, which just so happens to coincide with your full performance of it at this year’s edition of Semibreve. How have these release shows been for you in comparison to the Spectral Evolution concerts, with just you on stage?
It's a different concert from Spectral Evolution, because the album is also different. There are only three concerts, the first of which was at the opening of the Venice Biennale, and the third will be in Lisbon, at Culturgest in January. Technically, it's similar to Spectral Evolution, although it's simpler - it's not in quadraphonic sound, but in stereo. However, these are special launch concerts where we'll play the album in its entirety. For this reason, it made perfect sense for the guests to be present, in order to recreate the album as it was recorded. But as each [member of the ensemble] only plays one solo on the album recordings, I felt it would be desirable for each of them to be more present on stage. To do that, I reworked the arrangements so that the wind instruments would have parts to play during other parts of the pieces. Each one plays on one track, whereas on the album's six tracks, four of them are with guests and two without. To make the concert more consistent, I decided to have one song without guests and another with all four at the same time. Arranging for a wind quartet playing simultaneously on "My Funny Valentine" was actually the most complex part.
One aspect that I truly feel comes alive in your performances is the strong sense of physicality that your music possesses, through the feedback and interactions with space, audience, etc. I really liked your description of it in a previous interview as a magical place for “perfectly aligning the instruments, the phrasing, the sound, acoustics and room energy” into a unique time capsule.
In the case of these two albums (unlike what I did previously with the Space Program, for example, which was much more focused on instrumental performance), the music and sound are interconnected in a way that cannot be separated, which is why the preparation for the concerts is very meticulous in terms of sound treatment and the relationship between sound and the room. My goal is to offer the audience a sensory experience where the sound is crafted in such a way as to invite the audience into the sound. If it's too loud, the sound can easily become oppressive and push the listener away. And what I always try to achieve with the treatment of sound is for it to envelop people and draw them in - fortunately, I've been able to do just that so far.
Now that it’s known Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light were made in parallel, I’m curious as to what kind of dialogue these two albums have with one another, or in what way does one complement the other?
They were developed in parallel to a certain extent, still in the phase of studying harmony. Since Spectral Evolution is based on somewhat abstract patterns, made from chord sequences that are quite typical of older jazz, part of the album-related research involved studying the standards - which is why, while studying, I prepared arrangements that were somewhat based on the same patterns of the standards themselves. At a certain point, and to my surprise, I realized that I was going to make an album of standards, knowing also that if I released it out of the blue, no one would understand it, as it would be very atypical in my repertoire. I therefore decided that Spectral Evolution would come out first, partly because the ideas on that album encompass everything that came before it. It was a more absolute and comprehensive undertaking, and for that reason, it made sense to release it first. Traveling Light was put on hold until Spectral Evolution was complete, which meant I didn't touch that album for over a year. But after it was finished, I really started working on the production, the arrangements, the guest recordings, and collaborating with them. It took more than two years for Traveling Light to be ready. They’re different albums, albeit produced in a slightly similar way. Spectral Evolution has a clear ambition to unify the entire world of electronic sound with the world of classic jazz harmonies, whereas the standards don’t lend themselves to working in this way, nor would I be interested in doing so, because I'd end up making two identical albums. The standards require a different rigor; they don't allow for as much experimentation in the way I'm working, which is to enhance the harmonies of the standards rather than reinventing or deconstructing them. Apart from the fact they're very slow, which in itself makes listening to them somewhat strange, they're exactly as they were written harmonically and melodically. Even the melodic lines of the songs, which I initially thought I'd record with electronic instruments, weren't suited to a melodic approach with notes. These are instruments that play feedback and more or less chaotic oscillations, and that's why I decided to record the melodic lines of the voice with the guitar. Traveling Light, despite being a record with fewer elements, is more simplified and has a much greater presence of the guitar.
It's interesting you touched on the bigger presence of the guitar this time around, and Traveling Light does seem to retain or even expand some sonic motifs from Spectral Evolution - the birdsong-like sounds are still prominent every now and then, for example.
It's all electronic music, but I also know that that's a common perception, largely because of the Spectral Evolution cover and the fact that some of the sounds are reminiscent, in one way or another, of a bird like the one on the cover. When we stick to that perception, however, the music runs the risk of becoming superficial, when what is actually recorded are quite demanding instrumental performances from a strictly musical point of view. Throughout my work, there has never been any intention to try to imitate other sounds or evoke anything in particular. These are sounds I've been using over the last 20 years in the Space Program as musical instruments, and whatever’s there is phrased musically and instrumentally. Since there's no reference for how feedback can sound and what can be done melodically with an experimental electronic instrument, it's hard to grasp just how complex the technical work behind some components on these last two albums is, from an instrumental standpoint.
Exactly, there’s something subconscious about that illusion as well, how the artwork can inform (and even downplay) the listening experience. It’s natural for someone to see the Spectral Evolution cover and immediately think of nature and the presence of birds, even if they’re all electronic elements, much like the Traveling Light cover might attach a nocturnal label to the music itself. On that note, and looking back at your discography with both your ambient period and the space program, what is your view on creating and generating imagery around the music itself through electronic instruments and sound as a whole?
We're often talking about spontaneous encounters between images and music. The image doesn't always have a direct relationship to the music itself - in fact, I think that's rarely the case. They just seem appropriate and suitable for album covers. Sometimes this work is done after the album is already finished. There's an album I have in collaboration with João Pais Felipe, called Saturn, which is fundamentally electronic and percussive. It was recorded in Aveiro, at a concert where we dealt purely with musical concerns, improvisation, and composition. Later on, I found some incredible images of Saturn taken by [NASA's] Cassini space probe and saw in them the possibility of an interesting cover, and in Saturn a fitting album title. In fact, neither the planet Saturn nor the imagery of these shots has anything to do with the music, but you can make that connection, that bridge. Other covers feature works of art, namely Rui Toscano's drawings in the Space Solo series and João Paulo Feliciano's collages in the Space Elements series. These collages, called I Dream of Cities in Colors, resemble a kind of ludic game, made with pieces of paper reminiscent of urban planning. They end up reflecting thoughts on space, and there is a common thread between what you see and what you hear. Of course, the images are neither evocative nor illustrative of the music. Each album has its own encounter with the image that emerges over time. When I saw the photograph for Spectral Evolution for the first time, for example, I instantly saw it as the perfect cover for the album, not because it had anything to do with nature or birds, but because of the quality of the photograph and the posture of the bird itself - hanging in an unstable, uncomfortable position and extremely focused on something it possibly wants to eat. The expression in the bird's gaze seems to be telling us that it isn't playing around, and I drew many parallels with the music itself. There's also the cliché that birds are free, so it also offers a play on that.
You spoke earlier about the rejuvenated role of the guitar in your music - it’s well-known that these twin albums have helped renew your love and engagement with it. Compared to earlier phases in your discography (with albums like Sound Mind Sound Body or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance), how has your guitar practice evolved in the process of making these records?
It was a very slow process; it still is and will continue to be. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do with the guitar, and after not playing it for almost 20 years, something became very clear to me: it didn't make sense to pick up the guitar now and play it without going through the culture of the guitar, which was something I had always avoided and sidestepped. I have always used it as a sonic generator that lends itself to all kinds of sound creation work. Unlike so many guitarists in the world, perhaps, I was never interested in using the guitar in a conventional way, but I've now chosen to reverse that. I realized that it only makes sense for me to play it if I know what I'm doing, using it in the same way and for the purpose for which it was built: to play notes and chords. From there, I realized I had to start virtually from scratch, because it requires years and years of study and practice to have any mastery over this subject. The field of guitar culture that interests me most has to do with blues and jazz, which I've never worked with on the guitar before. The universe of knowledge that jazz guitar encompasses is astronomically greater than that of rock guitar; it's much more complex. Of course, I don't want to become a jazz guitarist, but I'm absorbing and learning as much as possible from the teachings and knowledge that come from that culture. That being said, neither of these two albums has yet reflected the work I've been developing. The presence of the guitar on Traveling Light is relatively modest, limited to practically stating the melodic themes of the standards. And on Spectral Evolution, even less so, with the guitar only being played at three moments throughout the album. I'm still developing this whole process, but it's something that will be shown later, perhaps next year, in a new work more focused on guitar playing. It's also interesting that, in parallel with the premiere of Traveling Light and these concert presentations, I've just premiered another guitar concert called Guitar Concert in Coimbra [on October 18th]. It's a repertoire show that lends itself to a kind of reunion with the guitar and the audience, with older works, with songs that haven't been released yet, but also with excerpts from these last two records. The idea is to develop an approach to the guitar that's more about actually playing the instrument itself, which is a strange direction for an artist with my background.
Knowing that your fascination with the guitar began as a teenager, what are some of your earliest memories with it (or with music in general) that stick out to you? Do your early musical obsessions still contribute in any way to the different phases and directions you’ve embarked on in the last 35 years and will continue to embrace in the near future?
My earliest memories are, naturally, of my first contact with the guitar. I started playing acoustic guitar at age 12, largely influenced by my older brother, who had a Beatles songbook. I learned to play several of their songs at that time. That experience didn't have much impact on the direction I took, but it was only later that I realized I wanted to be a musician. Afterwards, I became very interested in the guitar and the possibilities it offers for transforming and creating new sounds through electronics. I think that's perhaps the most enduring notion in all my work. This journey I'm now embarking on with the guitar is also linked to what I'm interested in doing with it. I'm not interested in playing blues or jazz, or any known guitar language. In fact, I don't want to play anything, but I want to keep playing. I realized that what interests me is precisely the sound of music, a kind of musical abstraction, but through sonority. That's what also interests me in these two albums, through the sound of the chords. Sound has been present throughout my career, from the beginning right up to the present day. Everything comes from sound and returns to it, and my involvement with various genres, styles, and musical approaches is closely linked to my interest in doing something creative with sound - which, by its very nature, will be implemented more appropriately in this or that musical culture. That’s what determines which genre each work will fall into, sometimes into invented genres as well.
You’ve already touched on the fact that Traveling Light marks a surprising turn toward jazz standards, even if it’s very clearly not a jazz album and, like you’ve said, it’s not your intention to become a jazz guitarist all of a sudden. What initially drew you to this repertoire, and what did you find within these songs that resonated with your explorations of melody that sparked these last two albums?
That was also a very slow process, which began many years ago. I've been listening to standards, largely due to my fondness for Billie Holiday, and of course, as I became more involved with jazz, I also got to know more songs, versions and interpretations by many different musicians. At a certain point (before I even started thinking about Spectral Evolution), I began to notice that the arrangements and orchestrations of most of these tunes were true masterpieces, crafted with mastery and effortlessness. We’re talking about people who did this every day at the time (in the 1930s), and this comes across in the music in a way that became increasingly ingrained in me. The harmonies created by the saxophone sections in the arrangements of these songs, for example, became an object of fascination. I began to feel the urge to do something that was in touch with this way of thinking about harmony, and it was the starting point for these two albums. I wanted to take harmony as musical material, in the sound of the chords rather than in the songs themselves. The songs on Traveling Light are there, enunciated by the guitar, to consummate the version of a standard, but the real focus and spiritual core of this album is to shed light on the harmonic work that's on it. That's why I realized that, in a song with a normal tempo, the chords follow each other at a pace that makes their beauty perceptible, but not enough to get into or stay immersed in those same chords. They would need to last longer, and to achieve this, I looked for what I call the swing's tipping point: how slow a song can become so that when one chord changes to the next, the song's structure remains perceptible, but so does the sequence of chords belonging to the song. Most of the songs [on Traveling Light] are ballads, with a relatively moderate tempo of around 60 beats per minute, while on most of Spectral Evolution, the average tempo is very, very slow.
Speaking of tempos and the slowed-down treatment of the standards themselves, I feel like time in general is extremely prevalent on the album, considering how many decades of musical lineage are transported to the present and refracted through your imprint. How do you think about the role of time when you’re making music or performing?
Awareness and action regarding time depend on the type of material you're working with. If it's a work like those in the Space Program, which researches phrasing and is very focused on silence and space (here they're equivalent, since when I talk about space I'm talking about silence), time plays a part in creating tension. The length of silence between two sounds will change what each of them means and their impact. It can make them completely irrelevant or an authentic musical atomic bomb. All of this can be achieved by the way silence is treated: in time. Even in the case of musical approaches based on continuous sounds, the function of time changes. It can, in various ways, give us a sense of place, physical space, just as it can give us a sense of movement, of a process moving in a certain direction. It's something determined by the quantity and quality of the changes that take place within the music. Music that doesn't undergo noticeable changes - even though it may have a dynamic sound and be constantly changing - but lacks structural events tends to be static in nature. In fact, I divide music into two broad categories: music that moves and music that stays. The former progresses in a certain direction (you can feel it) and ideally transports or at least leads the listener in that movement, while the latter becomes a place, a sound that is and goes nowhere. There's nothing wrong with that; it can be either a flaw or a quality - it depends on what you want.
I recently saw that your current studio is situated in a kind of “wood-and-stone bunker”, it looks beautiful. How has that space (its acoustics, texture, atmosphere and even the contrast between the cabin and its earthy surroundings) shaped the way these last two albums came into being?
I tend to think that when I'm making music, I'm dealing with universal data from world culture. It was already like that when I was in Lisbon. All the music I made there doesn't reflect anything about the city itself, and I tend to think the same is true here. When I'm working on music, I'm thinking about standards, harmony - data which is cultural rather than natural. They're specific to the culture of music, rather than the data that reaches me from the environment I'm in. It's essentially a stone house with a natural environment outside. I don't draw any particular inspiration from the walls. I'm not really aware of any influence from the natural environment around me, I always see all my musical concerns as strictly musical. They're notions of arrangement, form, density, composition; concerns of all kinds that belong to the universe of musical culture, rather than the natural environment. Now, there's one thing I can admit that appears for the first time in Spectral Evolution. There's an interest on that record in a certain type of composition that's more connected to an ecosystem logic, to the functioning of a natural soundsystem, rather than an arrangement and orchestration logic. There's a very dense track on Spectral Evolution, "Second Long Space", where this was tried out for the first time. In essence, it's a kind of pseudo-infinite free jazz orchestra, but one which behaves like a tropical forest. It's an idea that interests me.