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.

Hand-numbered edition of 200 copies LP on Manuel Mota’s private Headlights imprint documenting a heavyweight duo set from Marcia Bassett of Zaimph, Hototogisu, Double Leopards, GHQ et al and improvising Portuguese bassist and guitarist Margardia Garcia. Garcia is one of the major new generation European free players, coming out of the same scene as Mota, and she’s just as capable of generating Swans-style Industrial entropy as she is playing explosive fire music. Here Bassett uses keyboard and guitar to create austere arcs of Industrial-strength drone that Garcia anchors with tactile, questing strings, giving the whole thing an odd avant-classical backbone. 

New self-released LP in an edition of only 200 hand-numbered copies from improvising Portuguese guitarist Manuel Mota. Mota is a big VT favourite and his recent live shows where he plays electric guitar with a wah-wah pedal have been fairly revelatory. This is s stunning document of that particular style, with the wah wah used to let the guitar really breathe, letting out little coital gasps of string burn and sending up luminous bubble tones that float all the way to heaven before being snatched back and bent like paperclips into odd sonic sculptures with plenty of microtonal detail. Elsewhere he plays almost-blues using notes balanced on the very throat of the void, playing secretive, hermetic melodies that touch on Loren Connors and even US Saucer as much as Derek Bailey. Which is to say there’s a hell of a lot of personality here, much more so than on your average ‘improvising guitar’ side. Indeed, Mota is one of the few contemporary guitarists to go well beyond/outside the vectors previously laid down by Bailey, combing psychedelic snake-charming and subtle auras of fuzz and attack with an approach that would re-think six strings entirely. Recommended. 

Another new album from Manuel Mota, this time in a hand-numbered edition of 150 copies on his own label. Here Mota is playing acoustic guitar, combining silent tensions with beautiful, forlorn guitar lines and odd stubbly melodies that combine fleet smears of string with melodies that seem haunted by the spectre of country blues yet fractured, broken down, as if they were phasing in and out of form. Again, it feels like there’s a heavy Guitar Roberts vibe to the way Mota deconstructs and recreates his lines in real time, using a poignant backdrop of silence that heightens every pin-prick tone and singing harmonic. Another beautiful side.