Rafael Toral + Jessica Sligter

As a producer, composer and performer, Lisbon-born artist Rafael Toral has been deeply involved with rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz music.

Since the 1990s, he has pioneered the mixture of ambient and rock with electric guitar and electronics and recorded acclaimed albums such as Wave Field or Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. In 2004, he launched the extraterrestrial-sounding Space Program, in which he used 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. He describes his music as melodic without notes, rhythmic without a beat, familiar yet strange, meticulous yet radically free – full of paradoxes, but also full of clarity and space. In the last 15 years, he’s been thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as “space”, with a clear function in music creation but also as a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload. With a return to the electric guitar and a renewed interest in harmonies, Toral's latest album Spectral Evolution (February 2024) brings together seemingly incompatible threads from his entire career into a powerful new synthesis, both wildly experimental and emotionally affecting.

Performing solo or in numerous collaborations (including Jim O’Rourke, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, Eiko Ishibashi, and many others), he has been touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

In addition to his work as a musician, Toral also produced numerous videos and installations between 1994 and 2003.

Jessica Sligter
Jessica Sligter is a musician and composer whose work lies at the intersection of various genres and disciplines, in an experimental, noir, conceptual space. Her materials include, but are not limited to, voice, electronics, space, text and concept.
Sligter’s solo releases include A Sense Of Growth (Hubro, 2016), Polycrisis:yes! (Butler & Butler, 2018) and Room One (Butler & Butler, 2023), and she’s created works for Ensemble neoN, Tøyen Fil og Klafferi, and with Jenny Hval, among others. She is the founder of Nuts And Bolts, association for decentralized discourses and activities in music technology. Her current artistic research focuses on digitalisation, music technologies such as Max/MSP, and the voice.

Thursday, June 20
Kuppelhalle
Doors: 7 pm / Start: 8 pm
Tickets