Rafael Toral: The Space Program :: May 8, 2009; 8:00 pm :: EMPAC, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY.

From Lisbon, musician Rafael Toral presents a collection of his Space Studies, a series of works exploring different combinations of gestural control and sonic palette. Each study is an interdependent spatial and aural exploration that together create an instrument of Toral’s own design. These instruments require visible performance techniques that in many cases are more akin to dance than to what we think of as part of a laptop or electronic music performance (clicking, knobbing, mousing, buttoning).

Toral has performed throughout Europe, USA, Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia and collaborated with Phill Niblock, John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Alvin Lucier, Jim O’Rourke, Evan Parker, Roger Turner and David Toop, among others. Formerly known for his acclaimed work with guitar and electronics and records such as Wave Field (1994) or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance (2000), in 2003 he terminated that line of creation to completely renew his approach to music. In 2006 he released “Space” his first CD document from The Space Program, a quest for a discipline/process to structure musical discourse in “post-free jazz electronic music.”