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Rafael Toral
Traveling Light
Drag City
‘Sidesteps the traditional logic of how to play a song, moving outside the framework with which one would expect a standard to be treated. Three decades ago, in the early years, Toral used the guitar as a generator, to create discreet texture and droning tones. Later, he abandoned the guitar entirely, focusing on self-made electronics to render his music, and the silence from which it came, with a post-free jazz perspective. For the music of Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light, Toral has combined his methodologies, remaining ‘in the tradition’, even as the elongated harmonies seem to alter time and — says Toral — ‘the chords become events on their own.’ At points, the long tones evoke the sacred ennui of liturgic music, the choir or the organ standing in for silent contemplation while rumbling the ground beneath our feet. In addition to Toral’s guitars, sine wave, feedback and bass guitar, each track features clarinet, tenor saxophone, flügelhorn, and flute, by turn. One of Toral’s self-made devices incorporates a theremin to modulate feedback melodies. The spring of the old pours through the new in an unstoppable flow.’
Back in business, with his best outing for a while, this is class.
Fine songwriting, steeped in its own version of Americana (Don Williams, late Elvis), and richly produced.
With Matt Sweeney.
‘A moody, atmospheric delight. Jim’s roots in composition via tape-editing have evolved into a highly musical assembly of found-and-processed sounds that achieve near-orchestral majesty as they hang in the very air of the drama that unfolds in Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind.
‘Described as a ‘slow-burn prairie gothic drama’, set in the farmland of Canada’s Alberta province, and starring Will Oldham and Bruce Dern, Hands That Bind is a spellbinding trip to the existential bone of rural working life in North America. As conflict rises over hard worked patches of land to provide a mere and mean existence, a desperate air settles in, as a series of mysterious, often supernatural occurrences rock the small community.
‘O’Rourke’s vaporous, serpentine musical backdrops and atmospheres reflect the obsessions and distractions of the film’s principles; moods of all sorts seen or otherwise implied. Additionally, the music highlights cinematographer Michael Robert McLaughlin’s closely observed accounting of the farmers’ environment, as well as the striking widescreen images of the big sky country with unnerving flair.’
Dawn Le Faun with Billy Le Bon, co-singers of The Letting Go and Wai Notes, digging up a modern(ish) parable from deep in their Everlys sack, afore getting down and sliding around on the flip.
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