Manuel Mota: I Wish I'd Never Met You
(Headlights: HO2)
Manuel Mota (guitar), Margarida Garcia (percussion)
Mota plays effects-free electric guitar in a fast and loose manner, two-handed tapping for much of the time without dissolving into mindless technical noodling. Instead he takes a rather painterly, expressionist approach to the strings, seeming to allow his fingers to slide and drum over the fretboard in interesting shapes rather than zipping through arpeggios like a poodle-rocker. The sound is cool and clear, if not terribly personal.
It's true that much of it sounds samey, and but for Garcia's presence on alternating tracks it would be hard to tell one piece from another. She plays "electric percussion", which is very basic indeed; contacts are made and broken, microphones click or are rubbed on rough surfaces and so on. It sounds unpromising, but in the company of Mota's very clean-edged guitar it's extremely effective. Track 7 is the odd one out; Mota plays percussively for much of it, and the two become hard to distinguish; it's not completely convincing, but it's a nice touch to have included it.
Much as this writer regularly berates improvisers -- especially in a solo setting -- for leaning on novelties to lend variety to their sometimes over-long sets, it would be nice to have a little bit more variation on this disc. Still, it's gratifyingly short (under forty minutes) and that makes this a CD you can really live with, which is always nice. If that sounds ungenerous, think of all those unremittingly difficult CDs containing a single, 70-minute track. How often do you put them on? Be honest.
Mota isn't a genius, or even a brilliant player, not yet anyway. What he's produced here is a very pleasing demo CD which showcases his voice, a voice which is still developing and will need to harden up into something more individual before he becomes a bankable name. But it's always nice to be there at the beginning, and this CD is worth picking up if you can find it. Oh, and it has horrible but refreshingly non-po-faced artwork, too.