Rafael Toral has been deeply involved with rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz music in different periods of his life. 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. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space,” has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers.”
Currently, along the sound of slow motion harmonies over what sounds like an electronic rainforest in Jupiter, Rafael Toral picks up the guitar again to develop a new synthesis between several layers of past and future. An ambitious project beyond ambient, drone and electronic free-jazz, catching Toral’s “third phase” in its early stages. 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.
truth in the well is the shapeshifting ephemeral ambient project of Leigh Lugosi, often featuring collaborator Tim Alexander. truth in the well runs the gamut of genre; it could be called shoegaze, country, trip hop, punk rock, folk or noise, depending on what direction the wind blows. what remains constant is Lugosi’s commitment to exploring the ways in which genre’s soundtrack a cultural moment, a landscape, a social context. popular music is a funhouse of mirrors in which truth in the well stops to ponder their reflection every couple of feet. for send + receive v.26, truth in the well presents subliminal verse party mix 2024, a live mixtape/reimagining of popular music found in youth culture in winnipeg’s north end circa late 1990’s through early 2000’s.
Katherine Liberovskaya is a video and media artist based in Montreal, Canada, and New York City. She has been working predominantly in experimental video since the late eighties. Over the years, she has produced many single-channel videos, video installation works and video performances which have been presented at a wide variety of artistic venues and events around the world. As of recent years her work – in single-channel and installation video as well as performance – mainly revolves around collaborations with new music composers/sound artists, notably Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If, Bwana, Hitoshi Kojo, Zanana, Anne Wellmer, David First and David Watson. In addition to her art practice she has concurrently been involved in the programming and organization of diverse media art events, notably with Studio XX in Montreal (programming coordinator 1996-1998, president 2001-2003), Espace Vidéographe, Montreal and Experimental Intermedia, NY (Screen Compositions 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) as well as the OptoSonic Tea series with Ursula Scherrer at Diapason in NYC and in various locations in Europe and elsewhere with OptoSonic Tea On the Road.
Phill Niblock (1933-2024, USA) was an artist whose fifty-year career spanned minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. Since 1985, he served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realised in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honoured with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award.
Presented in collaboration with GroundSwell.