Rafael Toral has returned to Earth. The jet plane on the cover of his 1994 debut, Sound Mind Sound Body, signaled his skyward trajectory, and he spent the rest of the decade surfing on clouds of guitar. Each new release dissolved a bit more of Brian Eno’s long ambient tones into My Bloody Valentine’s rapturous haze until Toral’s sound faded into the stratosphere. Toral knew he had escaped gravity: The last sound on 2001’s Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance was grainy background noise from a Space Shuttle webcast. He had gone as high as the guitar could take him.
To survive out there untethered to his instrument, Toral founded his own Space Program, a rigorous 13-year project that required inventing his own devices: glove-controlled sine-wave generator, light-controlled portable amplifier, electrode-controlled oscillator. He wanted to combine jazz with electronic music without borrowing from either tradition—as he put it, “making music from scratch.” Daunted by his own ambition, Toral felt his way through this concept like he was navigating a cathedral blindfolded. He didn’t initially perform his new music in public for fear of baffling his audiences, he said, since “it was impossible to demonstrate that each [instrument] is like the tip of one among many networked icebergs.” Still, he worked with enviable discipline, performing Space Solos and in Space Quartets and Space Collectives, honing his craft across a growing constellation of releases until his audience understood the scale of the enterprise.
The Space Program ended in 2017 when Toral decided to combine his ambient guitar work with the improvisational tactics he had developed with his own instruments. Spectral Evolution is the result. Toral’s machines chirp, croon, and howl over a base of shifting guitar hum, responding to one another like extraterrestrial species. The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.
The album is a chiasmus, the second half mirroring the first. Fold it down the middle and each section meets its counterpart: “Changes” and “Changes Reprise,” “Descending” and “Ascending,” “First Short Space” and “Second Short Space.” This structure develops organically across the record’s 47 minutes, as song-like forms emerge from, and dissolve into, ambient lulls. The “First Long Space” is a slow drift that would fit squarely into Toral’s 1990s discography if it weren’t for the electronics soloing over top. From this harmonic bed arises the crescendo of centerpiece “Fifths Twice,” which again makes way for electronic devices to flutter and buzz over the “Second Long Space.” Tides of guitar are pulled across the record again and again by the retreating celestial bodies of Space Program instruments.