Portuguese guitarist Rafael Toral is a musician of no small stature, whose work in drone, edgy atmosphere, and guitar deconstruction is reflected in contemporary guitar/electronic experimentalists operating around the globe (e.g., Oren Ambarchi and Christian Fennesz). One of the most gifted experimental string manipulators of his generation, Toral's harnessing of tone and timbre has found him collaborating with artists of similar remit such as Phill Niblock, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, John Zorn, Rhys Chatham, and numerous others. What separates Toral from his erstwhile peers are seemingly fearless drive and motivation: his work fails to comfortably engage pigeonholing or traverse nominal directives. He has strived to alter the very nature of the guitar and the sounds it's capable of making while simultaneously paying 'tribute' to the instrument itself; the trick has been to strip away the obvious context (classic modes of playing and performing) but retain the inherent mystery � Toral's varied body of work manages this in spades.

In essence, Violence of Discovery... (title notwithstanding) cares little about confrontation or emancipation. Toral's absolutely unique playing style is all about caress, subtlety, and mood, each of the ten pieces on display awash in swiftly eddying currents of sound that pool and congeal like oil slicks on rain-dappled blacktop. The three beauteous minutes of "Quiet Mind", for example, could extend to thirty and still not fail to fully engage your senses. Toral then turns the tables and allows his Fender Jaguar to emit controlled little corkscrews of skronk on "Maersk Line", but the overall effect is more Eno than Earth; restrained yet forthright, Toral manages to convey in just a few minutes the kind of vivacity it takes other artists an entire album to realize. The following "Libert�" still makes use of the Fender Jaguar except that Toral chooses to channel his inner Autechre, orchestrating a dazzling landscape of electrical blips, bleeps, and errant hums. These particular strands of emaciated textures has led Toral into the more electronic climates of his recent Space Elements series of recordings, but immersed in the pieces here, some of them dating back to 1993, makes it clear the man was reinventing genre a full decade ahead of everyone else.