Rafael Toral is an inveterate explorer. The Portuguese musician has ventured into multiple musical worlds throughout his long career, each more elaborate than the last. Ambient guitar albums like 1994’s Sound Mind Sound Body and 1995’s Wave Field paid close attention to the gradual changes of long-held tones. When he left his guitar behind and began his Space Program, he fashioned an orchestra of self-made electronic instruments that buzz, chirp, and warble like interstellar transmissions. With 2024’s Spectral Evolution, he wove those diaphanous threads together with harmonic ideas borrowed from the 20th century’s jazz songbook, to wondrous and mysterious effect. With Traveling Light, he hurtles further into the past, stretching standards into sparkling drones. It’s an evolutionary step that both synthesizes his practice and launches it in a new direction.
Traveling Light draws from the same sources that Spectral Evolution did, but interprets them much more literally. Where Toral abstracted chord changes from “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “I Got Rhythm” to use as the music’s backbone on Spectral Evolution, with Traveling Light, he places the songs’ melodies at the center, clearly articulating, layering, and expanding upon them. Where Spectral Evolution was glowing and gaseous, rendering its harmonic underpinnings all but unrecognizable, on Traveling Light he often gives us clear, unmistakable renditions of well-known melodies, elongating each note and letting phrases unfold at a snail’s pace. The result is a reimagination of jazz standards as drone etudes.
The glacially unfolding Traveling Light is a showcase of the techniques Toral has perfected since the ’90s. He has always made patient music. He lets his phrases unspool for so long that they start to feel untethered; his pacing falls somewhere between the drift of Brian Eno and the intense focus of Éliane Radigue. While his music often feels light, it’s intricately woven, with each drone comprising numerous phrases that have been stitched together. At times, new melodies puncture the hazy clouds that give his music its shape, each ushering in a shift in texture, harmony, or timbre. On Traveling Light, most tracks follow patterns indebted to the standards, but look below the surface and there are many intermingling layers, like the delicate wobble of a sustained note as it’s held over a lengthy period of time, or sharp-edged melodies that appear among the plumes of sound.
