Album Of The Week: Rafael Toral Traveling Light

Traveling Light is beautiful on so many levels. Without any context, Rafael Toral's new music is a gorgeous thrill: soothing, illuminating, aglow with feeling. Out this week on Drag City, the album presents a transcendent listening experience, the kind that might leave you dumbfounded and revitalized regardless of how much background you're bringing to the album. Yet there are layers of history that might deepen your appreciation for what the Portuguese musician is doing here.

Much of that history is Toral's own. He sealed his reputation as an experimental music icon with a run of albums from 1994 to 2001 that combined droning guitars with electronics in spectacular new ways. Works like Sound Mind Sound Body, Wave Field, and Aeriola Frequency pulled influence from many heady corners of the music world — ambient, shoegaze, post-rock, free jazz — and blurred them into a breathtaking mirage. He was a peer and collaborator for electro-acoustic innovators like Kevin Drumm, Jim O'Rourke, and Christian Fennesz, whose vigorously canonized Endless Summer owes something to Toral's innovations.

After 2001's spellbinding Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance, Toral put down his guitar and began making music with bespoke electronic instruments. According to his own demarcation, the so-called Space Program lasted from 2004-2017, yielding a galaxy of minimal experiments on the bleeding edge. The best of these recordings, by Toral's estimation, are gathered on the 2020 compilation Open Space; it's a handy primer, even if the concept of a greatest hits album for music this abstract is mildly humorous. He explored these concepts in a more straightforwardly jazz context with the Space Quartet on albums like the bustling, screaming Under The Sun, which is more my speed than a lot of the music from the Space Program proper.

Since 2017, Toral has embarked on a third era, a return to his ambient roots, seasoned by his years exploring space, so to speak. This current phase led him to revisit the guitar on works like last year's Spectral Evolution, which out-music authority Christopher R. Weingarten hailed as the best experimental album of 2024 on this very website. Spectral Evolution was the kind of album old-school Toral devotees had been dreaming of for decades, a single track of shapeless flickering harmony that merged stretched-out jazz chords and the whirr of his devices into 47 awe-inspiring minutes.

In a startling twist with stunning results, Toral's new Traveling Light applies the Spectral Evolution aesthetic to a series of jazz standards from the 1930s and '40s. This is the other kind of history folded into the album: Songs that already felt like a dream when performed by the likes of Billie Holiday and Chet Baker are here transmuted into the sound of pure radiant energy — spectral sighs spilling out into infinity, heavy with emotion despite their apparent lack of physical form. If you're familiar with the material, Toral's treatment might trigger a profound emotional response akin to excavating memories from the recesses of consciousness. If you don't know songs like "My Funny Valentine" and "God Bless The Child" — though you've surely caught glimpses of them in the ether — Traveling Light might still leave you gasping in amazement, so potent is this combination of composition and arrangement.

Those bringing an indie and alternative rock background to this music, as I am, will find parallels to latch onto. Brian Eno and My Bloody Valentine loom large, as ever. There are moments that connect the dots between Toral's turn-of-the-millennium heyday and the brand-name critical darlings that were tapped into the experimental underground at the time; "Easy Living" conjures the same wistfulness I get from the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin instrumental "Sleeping On The Roof," while Toral's take on "Body And Soul" reminds me of what Radiohead were going for with their own elementary guitar drone offering "Treefingers." There are decades of sonic backstory to draw on beyond such dorm-room basics, from downcast noir film soundtracks to spiritual jazz classics. But with music this exquisite, how much you know matters far less than how intensely you feel.

Traveling Light is out 10/24 on Drag City.

Rafael Toral - Traveling Light [LP]

39.99

Amazon

Other albums of note out this week:
• Tortoise's Touch
• Lily Allen's West End Girl
• Just Mustard's We Were Just Here
• Spiritual Cramp's Rude
• Eliza McLamb's Good Story
• Miguel's Caos
• The Lemonheads' Love Chant
• DAVE's The Boy Who Played The Harp
• Brandi Carlile's Returning To Myself
• Hannah Jadagu's Describe
• Machine Girl's Psycho Warrior (MG Ultra X)
• Ouri's Daisy Cutter
• fanclubwallet's Living While Dying
• Demi Lovato's It’s Not That Deep
• E.R. Visit's my children will ignore you, my children will type amen
• Natural Information Society's Perseverance Flow
• Sigrid's There's Always More That I Could Say
• Mammoth's The End
• Major Stars' More Colors Of Sound
• Buddy Ross' K We're Here
• Hether's Holy Water
• Jim White's Inner Day
• Daniel Caesar's Son Of Spergy
• Ko Shin Moon's Sîn
• Julianna Riolino's Echo In The Dust
• Joelton Mayfield's Crowd Pleaser
• Oruã's Slacker
• Cubzoa's Unfold In The Sky
• Dancehall's 100% Music
• Galactic Empire's Cinemetal
• Low Girl's Is It Too Late To Freak Out
• Besphrenz's bert
• Circa Waves' Death & Love Pt.2
• Björk's Cornucopia live album
• Various artists' Naive Melodies
• Alice Phoebe Lou's Oblivion
• ADEPT's Blood Covenant
• Sumo Cyco's NEON VOID
• Billy Dean Thomas' MX
• The Acacia Strain's You Are Safe From God Here
• Big Wreck’s The Rest Of The Story
• Dayseeker's Creature In The Black Night
• Various artists' CAN’T GET ENOUGH: A TRIBUTE TO BAD COMPANY
• Jim Keller's End Of The World
• The Lilac Time's Live Live Album
• Joyer's On The Other End Of The Line...
• Flycatcher's Wrench
• Liraz & Adrian Younge's Azadi
• Joshua Hedley's All Hat
• Erika Dohi's Myth Of Tomorrow
• Carrier's Rhythm Immortal
• Conjurer's Unself
• Hail The Sun's cut. turn. fade. back.
• Kinneret's Field Guide
• Action/Adventure's Ever After
• Jessica Moss' Unfolding
• Serj Tankian's Covers, Collaborations & Collages
• Taylor Acorn's Poster Child
• Rachael Sage & The Sequins' Canopy
• Ezra Bell's Chin Chin
• Tyson Motsenbocker's Modern Worries
• The Noisy's The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat
• JET JAGUAR's Severance
• Downswing's And Everything Was Dark
• Them's Psychedelic Enigma
• Our Oceans' Right Here, Right Now
• Lillian King's In Your Long Shadow
• Late Aster's City Livin’
• Alexander Stewart's What If?
• Møtrik's Earth
• CV Vision's The Beast
• Soulfly's Chama
• Montanha's Alvorada
• Jesca Hoop's Selective Memory
• Dre Dupuis' Dre Dupuis
• Born Divided's Chronicle Of A Shipwreck
• Cautious Clay’s The Hours: Nights
• Amadou & Mariam's L'amour à la folie
• Cautious Clay's The Hours: Night
• Sam Burchfield's Nature Speaks
• Naïm Amor & Kid Congo Powers' Tucson Safari
• West Virginia Snake Handler Revival's They Shall Take Up Serpents
• Psychonaut Shape's World Maker
• Natalie Jane's the world i didn’t want
• Yazmin Lacey's Teal Dreams
• pets' 🌀❓ (Spiral Question Mark)
• Antibalas' Hourglass
• Jeff Larson & Gerry Beckley's Jeff Larson With Gerry Beckley
• GG Magree's Spit Love
• Nep's Noelle
• Big Wreck's The Rest Of The Story
• BOYNEXTDOOR's The Action
• Stroik’s 65th And York
• Judy Whitmore's Christmas
• Pentatonix's Christmas In The City
• Harrington, Mohler, & Bellerose's "First Set" Live at eta
• Various artists' Verve // Remixed Holiday
• Sam Himself’s Moonsongs
• Golden Brown's Patterner
• Stranger Cole's Rough And Tough
• The Kasambwe Brothers' The Kasambwe Brothers
• Various artists' SUN GOD FRAUD SQUAD
• Magic Wands' Cascades
• Artemas' LOVERCORE
• The Thing With Feathers’ So Electric
• Maoli's Last Sip Of Summer (Island Vibe Edition)
• Various artists' Nobody Wants This Season 2: The Soundtrack
• Mickey Guyton's Feels Like Christmas
• London Clay's Private View
• Ax And The Hatchetmen's So Much To Tell You
• Zahriya Zachary's Rediscovery
• Henry Moodie's Mood Swings
• YUNGMORPHEUS' A Spyglass To One's Face
• Skye Newman's SE9 Part 1
• Monte Booker's noise / meaning
• Boy & The Alchemist's Goldfish
• Halle Bailey's love? …or something like it
• Brainwasher's 39 Lightyears From Heaven
• R.A.P. Ferreira & Kenny Segal's The Night Green Side Of It
• YUNGMORPHEUS & Dirty Art Club's A Spyglass To One's Face
• Straight No Chaser's Holiday Road
• Sadie Jean's Early Twenties Torture
• Kareem Roustom's Shade Of Night
• CupcakKe's The BakKery
• Bird's Eye Thief's Flash
• RETI's Blue Hour
• girlfriend's There Goes The Neighborhood
• Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition
• JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown's SCARING THE HOES: DIRECTOR'S CUT
• Frank Zappa's Halloween 78 box set
• Modern Baseball's MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast LP Feat. Modern Baseball (30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition)
• Alessia Cara's Love & Hyperbole (Deluxe)
• Mathieu Santos' Massachusetts 2010 (Deluxe 2025 Edition)
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Live Like The Sky
• Horse Jumper Of Love's Disaster Trick (Deluxe Edition)
• Rose Gray's A Little Louder, Please (Deluxe)
• Field Music's Field Music (20 Year Anniversary Edition)
• Pulp's Different Class (30th Anniversary Edition)
• Elton John’s Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy (50th Anniversary Edition)
• Five Finger Death Punch's Best Of - Volume 2
• Bowling For Soup's A Hangover You Definitely Deserve (Live And Hungover)
• Bon Jovi's FOREVER (LEGENDARY EDITION)
• Theo Croker's Dream Manifest (Deluxe)
• Horace Silver's Silver In Seattle: Live At The Penthouse
• Parts Work's Parts Work EP
• Dazy's Bad Penny EP
• Bartees Strange's Shy Bairns Get Nowt EP
• Martin Garrix's ORIGO EP
• Speed's All My Angels EP
• Leon Thomas' PHOLKS EP
• Obed Padilla's Do You Still Love Me? EP
• D. McCartney's For Those Not Here EP
• Amirah's all the things i didn’t say EP
• EMF's Reach For Something Higher EP
• Drift City's Spectral Heart Mosaics EP
• Keyland's Stand Up To You EP
• The Chainsmokers' Breathe EP
• Spearside's Couldn’t Be Told EP
• Alma Muñeca's Deseo Un Brillo EP
• Heavensgate's A Heart Is A Heavy Burden EP
• Lindsay Ell's fence sitter EP
• VALLETTA's Bitter Lucid Truth EP
• Eli & Fur's Dreams At Dusk Part I – Mirage EP
• The Strumbellas' Burning Bridges Into Dust EP
• Nell Mescal's The Closest We’ll Get EP
• Zem Adu's You Can’t Catch Me EP
• Hajaj's In the Meantime EP
• Song Sohee's [Re:5] EP