Rafael Toral: Traveling Light

A year after his acclaimed release, Spectral Evolution, via Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai label, Portuguese experimental veteran, Rafael Toral, has wasted no time in delivering the beguiling follow-up, Traveling Light.

Rebuilding and manipulating sound through a set of jazz standards from the 1930s and 1940s, Traveling Light sees Toral not exactly reinventing these standards but, indeed, reinventing himself. It’s something he has always done, providing reactive, real time snapshots through sound, and here he takes experimental guitar composition to exquisite new terrains. Whether it’s by design or pure coincidence, with the nights pulling in as winter approaches, Toral’s arrival with his latest long-player is arguably the most timely in 2025.

While the same sound environments that were at the heart of Spectral Evolution reveal themselves on Traveling Light, everything feels more immersive and expansive this time around. Flirting with the frontiers of deep listening, Toral orchestrates the kind of sonic catharsis that may just go unrivalled this year; alongside The Necks, both producing the kind of narcotic effect that eases the mind. In Toral’s case, it’s sound that effortlessly stretches to new locales. The pace, unhurried and unintrusive.

Beginning with the same ecological sound sketches that – at least for now – feel like Toral’s natural habitat, featuring clarinetist, José Bruno Parrinha, Easy Living is a smattering of whines and drones widened into a brand of protracted post-jazz. It’s bliss in slow motion where the imagery of landscapes overpower the sound itself.

It’s this open space where Traveling Light thrives. Between lush borderless fields and the sprawling sea, these environmental motifs are the setting for Toral’s languid sounds to arc majestically over the horizon. On Solitude and You Don’t Know What Love Is, Toral’s self-made machines sound like guitars boiled down with a warm distortion that sits somewhere between the effect of a Mellotron and an accordion. It’s these passages that illuminate escapism, washing over you with the same hypnotic effect as listening to, say, Bohren & der Club of Gore.

Elsewhere, Body and Soul finds Toral examining the more conventional aspects of jazz. Still, he manages to add off-kilter subtleties that are engineered with homespun warmth – this time accompanied by tenor saxophonist, Rodrigo Amado, who provides the kind of tonal weight more attuned to street level intimacy than any high brow climes.

This ethos remains on My Funny Valentine, which sees Toral having fun. Positively abstract, it’s an adventure which lands the listener poolside drinking piña coladas. Part endorphin rush, part romanticism, it’s a getaway soundtrack of the most positive kind, and it continues on God Bless the Child. Immaculately sculptured, Toral composes something brimming with environmental resonance. The kind of calm where nature and humanity can actually peacefully coexist, it reveals another dimension to the escapism that these recordings offer.

Having shape-shifted through four decades of ambient composition with a sprawling body of work, Traveling Light stacks up as one of Toral’s greatest feats. Toral shapes compositions that teleports you to places that initially feel far from reach. A sound portal that shimmers like a path to peace, and while many claim that music has lost its power to change the world, it can still change things in the moment. And on Traveling Light, that’s exactly what Rafael Toral does.

Traveling Light is out now via Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.