Manuel Mota
Outubro – Solo Guitar Playing”
skug 70 | Text: Noël Akchoté | Wed 4. Apr. 2007
Where and who is Manuel Mota in 2007 ? I..m not talking about finding his
email adress or website or trying to locate him on a map.
No map will do, he is his own. He is a presence, a passion, a source of
light and inteligence, an evidence. - Two discs : one says Acoustic Guitar
the other one Electric Guitar. It is probably about the maximum
information one could give. This double album is like a book but each of his
records are like that. To me his music involves all the history of music
since the word music has been found. He improvises songs, standards,
traditionals, repeated lines, landscapes, attacks, chords, gaps, suites,
links, bridges and language. He Strings them. While listening to this music
i start to see Picasso drawing on a glass in front of Clouzot..s camera
in »Le Mystere Picasso«. Mota is also a mystery, you can..tell what happens,
how does he provokes so many ideas in you and where does this come from. You
ll never be a passive listener here. He permanently confronts you to the
origins. All of them. He definetely has left any idea of Styles far behind
himself. Anyway most musical terms would only define a small part or an
isolated apect of his whole being.playing. He is someone giving you
something in the hands. Something pure, something naked and fragile, but
also timeless and nameless. The idea before the verb, before society or
aside. In the worst case you should collect all his albums and place them in
your library. Just watch them and await the time when you ll open one and
listen. His music will ask you Who are you and Where are you ?
Sounds Like
about "OUTUBRO":
Double disc set that features one solo acoustic disc and one solo electric disc from this great Portugese improvising guitarist that Derek Bailey named as one of the few interesting musicians currently orbiting the planet of free sound. And while it's true that Bailey must've heard a little of himself in aspects of Mota's angular, percussive style and his fondness for dead-stop harmonics there's much more to his playing than mere 'improv' form. Indeed, the overall late-night quietly thought-out atmosphere reminds me most of Keiji Haino's Change The Shape/Remove The Colour series of vaguely jazz-inflected home recordings along with aspects of Masayuki Takayanagi's pointillist work circa Lonely Woman and even some of the lonesome string grunt of Guitar Roberts. This is free, hermetically profound six-string alchemy rendered with a delicate, calligraphic ear for awkward personal detail.
VOLCANIC TONGUE
guitarist born in Lisbon, with public activity since 1989. From that to 1997 he studies and experiments with prepared guitar, mainly acoustic. Since then his interests shifted to the development of a personal language for fingerstyle electric guitar and started working in a regular basis with bassist Margarida Garcia. A lot of acoustic guitar has been played at home in the last years, and it has also been possible to find him playing with bands Osso Exótico, Curia, Dru, and collaborating with David Maranha and Afonso Simões. Worked with Sei Miguel from 1997 to 2005. Founds the record label Headlights in 1998. Draws and shoots.
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