NL premiere

The Portuguese producer, composer, and performer Rafael Toral is a true gem of the experimental music canon. Over the span of his prolific career, he has worked across rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz both as a solo musician and in collaboration with musicians such as Jim O’Rourke, Chris Corsano, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, and Sonic Youth. Toral will perform music from his long-anticipated, new album Spectral Evolution (2024). The latest release on O’Rourke’s Moikai label, after a 22 year hibernation, it is a wonder of peaceful, microtonal ambient music, where reverberating and long-sustain guitars interweave with what sounds like birdsong. Working with music and sound as a metaphor for social relationships and as a statement about information and sensory overload, Toral’s glassy, prismatic compositions are part of an ambitious project that sits beyond ambient, drone, and electronic free-jazz, signalling Toral’s next phase of melodic and tonal experimentation.

*This is a seated concert