Margarida Azevedo

Space Quartet | Last Set

You can listen and buy the record on Rafael Toral’s bandcamp page.

In a review of one of Rafael Toral’s records, I wrote that I always missed his live concerts. This one couldn’t fail!
I saw this quartet at Out.Fest, on June 3, 2021, and wrote about the concert. Writing about this record is reliving the moment, with the necessary distance to listen to it more carefully, go into detail and re-enter the world of Rafael Toral. Listening to the record gives me the freedom to go back and forth, to capture that moment when Nuno Morão made an important detail that I had missed live. Yes, believe that Nuno Morão playing live has these things. He dialogues so well that only on the records I realize absolutely incredible things. One of the drummers I most enjoy listening live in the improvisation scene.

This quartet has its own energy and Toral has a lot of weight in this matter. To enter their world is to allow our head to embark on a complex journey, with different languages ​​that we don’t always master. It’s learning about expansion and containment, fluidity and resistance.

I’m starting to listen and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to the entry of Rafael Toral’s electronics. The conversation between the double bass and the saxophone opens the record and we slowly begin to let ourselves be led. I remain very attentive to Hugo Antunes’ double bass, but today I pay more attention to details of Nuno Torres’ saxophone. Nuno Morão unites moments, interconnects stations we pass through on this record’s journey.

The trip lasts 1 hour and takes me to places I didn’t go to in the live concert. Between the ground floor and space, we never sat down waiting for the next transport. On Toral’s records there is always a story of parallel universes, different dimensions, realities that intersect and interconnect.

On this record the common thread is clear, the dialogue between the 4 musicians is fluid and there is no moment in which they get lost and fail to keep up the conversation.

A very close person told me a few years ago: “Don’t want to get to the end result right away, learn to enjoy the process”. Between the live concert and this record, 2 years passed. Now I hear it differently, with the right distance, and it continues to enter my ears with the same delicacy and beauty. It’s like I just sat in that auditorium on June 3, 2021.