Foggy Notion: Rafael Toral

Rafael Toral, born in Lisbon in 1967, was already fascinated by the potential of sound and the functions of music as a teenager. As a producer, composer and performer, he has worked intensively with rock, ambient, contemporary music, electronics and free jazz at various stages of his life.

In the 1990s, he pioneered the blending of ambient and rock with electric guitar and electronics, recording acclaimed albums such as Wave Field or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. By the early 2000s, he was satisfied with his 15 years of work and realized that the world needed a different creative response. As a transition to vulnerable action, he launched the alien-sounding Space Program in 2004, using experimental electronic instruments. It was an ambitious long-term project in which he explored an approach to electronic music based on silence, decision-making and physical gestures, inspired by post-free jazz. The resulting music, "melodic without notes, rhythmic without beat, familiar yet strange, meticulous yet radically free - full of paradoxes but also full of clarity and space", has been described as "an electronic music far more intuitive and emotional than that of his intellectual peers".