MANUEL MOTA
Leopardo
Rossbin
RS 009
NOËL
AKCHOTÉ
Perpetual Joseph
Rectangle
REC AL 2
More
entries in the quest to find something fresh to play with the electric
guitar finds two European musicians pursuing far different strategies.
Portuguese guitarist Manuel Mota propels his solid body electric guitar
through different variations of quietude, while Frenchman Noël Akchoté
manipulates his amplifier as much as his strings.
Lisbon-based
Mota, born in 1970, plays regularly with locals bassist Margarida Garcia
and trumpeter Sei Miguel; while Paris resident Akchoté, two years
older, has recorded with fellow guitarist Derek Bailey, played in the
band The Recyclers and with a variety of other musicians including saxophonists
Evan Parker and Sam Rivers.
Interestingly
enough, Bailey has expressed his admiration for what he calls Mota's "really
interesting, quite radical" style. One can see why. On Leopardo,
playing finger-style, Mota goes beyond Bailey-like explorations to almost
pure microtonalism.
Closely miked, during the course of the nine tracks here, it appears that
he'll exert pressure merely with his fingertips and spend more time behind
the bridge and near the sound holes than going full frontal on the strings.
With sporadic, echoing, banjo-like tones, the sluice of fingers along
his strings and the suggestion of bottleneck, sounds produced could come
from a folk guitarist's practice session. But considering that tones keep
rolling along throughout each piece, and there is no resolution, negates
that idea.
Sporadically,
he'll slide from one string to another without pausing or speed up and
slow down creating duple ringing notes as if he was finessing two different
guitars. Very occasionally, if his cuticles aren't buried in the fret
guard or near the pegs, he'll come up with sharp, short tunelets. By the
end, proceedings get sharper and spikier as he auditions a series of notes
and tones, then snaps them off, exercising his amplifier using the electronic
impulses and crackles as his sound base.
With
a history encompassing noise bands as well as improv, Akchoté centres
his achievement on his peripherals as much as his instrument. The third
part of the Joseph Trilogy, Perpetual Joseph makes its points over the
course of four long tracks. Often as stentorian as Mota's CD is silent,
Akchoté deals with intermittent amp buzzes and the oscillation
of sound waves. Moving from maximum to minimum, he maneuvers the frequencies
every which way. In fact, there are times the output more resembles a
soprano saxophone tone or radio frequencies than anything arising from
six strings. Among the intermittent drones his palm and finger pressure
sporadically create two separate sounds, the undertone of a darker strum
wiggling beneath the higher-pitched radio wave from the amp.
Like
the game plan on Mota's disc, Akchoté's final track is also his
longest. Here the amplification gets even more clamorous and varied and
you begin to hear the overtones on top of the overtones. It's a Cagean
reversal, proving that pure noise no more exists than does pure silence.
Soon, the oscillation is altered with strums and flat picking as the output
takes on the siren-like properties of a circular saw or an air raid siren,
often with a secondary drone joining, then superseding the first. Was
it Andy Warhol who talked about the mechanized beauty in monotony? Well,
that same near-automated rhythmic splendor is showcased here. Captivating,
a singular on-off pulse makes up the coda, starting and stopping, then
starting and stopping until the very end.
Traditionalists
may not even recognize guitar sounds in these recorded equations. Yet
if music history is going to evolve, electric guitar experiments like
these must be taken into account.
--
Ken Waxman
Track
Listing: Leopardo: 1. 01.43; 2. 03.26; 3.03.04; 4. 05.23; 5. 02.35; 6.
04.57; 7. 04.38; 8. 04.16; 9. 11.08
Track Listing: Joseph: 1. Plage 17; 2. Plage 18; 3. Plage 19; 4. Plage
20
Personnel:
Leopardo: Manuel Mota, solid body electric guitar
Personnel:
Joseph: Noël Akchoté, electric guitar, amplifier