Manuel Mota

Manuel Mota is an improvising guitarist from Lisbon who works emotive improvised magic from six strings with only the ghost of a Derek Bailey influence. Sings is a self-released album featuring nine solo guitar pieces – no singing – that have an up-close, intimate personality, tying up sighing melodies and cross-wired harmonics with gentle tweaks of string and the occasional blue note. Some of the more lunar playing here seems to pick up where Loren Mazzacane left off on his ‘big band’ record, Come Night, but Mota is even more involuted than Loren, his playing style almost a drawing-in as much as a teasing-out. Still, each piece feels like a full investigation of the guitar, fuelled by an inquisitive, exploratory logic that is just as open to straightahead tonal and melodic statement as it is to tying the whole thing up in a ball of twonk. Excellent.