Rafael Toral is an inveterate explorer. The Portuguese musician has ventured into multiple musical worlds throughout his long career, each more elaborate than the last. Ambient guitar albums like 1994’s Sound Mind Sound Body and 1995’s Wave Field paid close attention to the gradual changes of long-held tones. When he left his guitar behind and began his Space Program, he fashioned an orchestra of self-made electronic instruments that buzz, chirp, and warble like interstellar transmissions. With 2024’s Spectral Evolution, he wove those diaphanous threads together with harmonic ideas borrowed from the 20th century’s jazz songbook, to wondrous and mysterious effect. With Traveling Light, he hurtles further into the past, stretching standards into sparkling drones. It’s an evolutionary step that both synthesizes his practice and launches it in a new direction.
Traveling Light draws from the same sources that Spectral Evolution did, but interprets them much more literally. Where Toral abstracted chord changes from “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “I Got Rhythm” to use as the music’s backbone on Spectral Evolution, with Traveling Light, he places the songs’ melodies at the center, clearly articulating, layering, and expanding upon them. Where Spectral Evolution was glowing and gaseous, rendering its harmonic underpinnings all but unrecognizable, on Traveling Light he often gives us clear, unmistakable renditions of well-known melodies, elongating each note and letting phrases unfold at a snail’s pace. The result is a reimagination of jazz standards as drone etudes.
The glacially unfolding Traveling Light is a showcase of the techniques Toral has perfected since the ’90s. He has always made patient music. He lets his phrases unspool for so long that they start to feel untethered; his pacing falls somewhere between the drift of Brian Eno and the intense focus of Éliane Radigue. While his music often feels light, it’s intricately woven, with each drone comprising numerous phrases that have been stitched together. At times, new melodies puncture the hazy clouds that give his music its shape, each ushering in a shift in texture, harmony, or timbre. On Traveling Light, most tracks follow patterns indebted to the standards, but look below the surface and there are many intermingling layers, like the delicate wobble of a sustained note as it’s held over a lengthy period of time, or sharp-edged melodies that appear among the plumes of sound.
While Traveling Light is led by guitar, solos from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe, and flutist Clara Saleiro add airy textures to the music. Midway through “Body and Soul,” Amado’s saxophone emerges from a dense thicket with a soaring riff that would be equally at home at a jazz club or a meditation retreat. On closer “God Bless the Child,” the low pitches of Saleiro’s flute, heavily ornamented with vibrato, offer a sweet touch that eventually gives way to one last sigh from Toral’s increasingly distorted guitar.
Throughout, guitar often provides a guiding light through the hazy music. In “Solitude,” for example, a series of warm chords float around each other until the guitar pierces them with the song’s nostalgic melody. And on album highlight “My Funny Valentine,” Toral begins with a pensive rendition of the 1937 Rodgers and Hart tune that gradually disintegrates into a melancholy, swirling drone. As the arrangement blossoms, it becomes slipperier; Toral slides between each note and then glissandos into the ether. Once the atmosphere is at its murkiest, the guitar appears, like a beacon, to find those bittersweet phrases once again.
While these melodies often feel familiar, Toral puts a mysterious spin on them, warping them enough to make them feel otherworldly. His instrument wavers; his drones have a sparkling, celestial sheen. In the process, the poignant songs start to feel less like themselves and more like a dream. In a life of sculpting new worlds in which to live, Toral continues to show us there’s still a lot left to discover—even in the places we know.
