Back in stock!
Latest (and greatest - more on that later) from Rafael Toral from earlier in the year and now back with the #muchneedederepress. And if it's not yet appeared on your radar, let me chime in with some good news - we're talking best-of-2024 material from the legendary Portuguese composer, who returns to Jim O'Rourke's Moikai imprint for a seamless, near-50 minute piece of mind-bending experimental electronics, jazz disorientations and guitar manipulation. Releasing since the early 90s, Toral's catalogue is both profuse and highly inventive, moving impressively between drone, ambient, free jazz, post-Berlin School kraut dynamics and the otherwise uncharacterisible. Even within the context of such broad output, Spectral Evolution feels like a flagship moment. The track titles might suggest otherwise, but this is essentially one long piece comprised of a series of different movements which seem to inadvertently map Toral's career as a whole, shifting from interpolated jazz standards into free jazz dynamics, through Fennesz style walls of drone, pitch-shifted electronics that veer between the sickly and abrasive, and into digital bird song that resembles a computer booting up in the middle of Fern Gully. Where to file this exactly is the challenge, though if you imagine the version of post-rock envisaged by Gastr Del Sol (there's a reason why Jim O'Rourke decided to reboot Moikai after 20 years of inactivity in order to release this) then you might be stumbling halfway towards some truth. Mostly though, like all the best innovations, this one manages to avoid easy categorisation, slipping into that post-everything territory where all is up for grabs and only the very sharpest of minds can make it make sense. Toral is very much going for it here, but never once does it feel over-cooked or trip over itself - the sense of purpose remains astutely on point throughout. Think we'll be coming back to this one all year. So, apologies for the delay in sourcing - been a bit of a mission getting copies, but here we now are with goods in hand, so now you can too.
