Lacrau

Lacrau is the first US release of music featuring the legendary Portuguese guitarist’s guitarist Manuel Mota. Mota’s mysterious, uncompromising, resolutely personal approach to the instrument has most often been captured on solo recordings - and typically of an immersive length, such as Rck, a 5CD release from 2013. Lacrau captures the ambience of a warm Sunday afternoon in late autumn in Lisbon when longtime friends Mota and David Grubbs sat down for this waking dream of a first duo performance. The session unfolds with a realtime, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings and tube amplifiers. These explorations are as apt to find emotional weight in the solitary note in all its fret-buzzing glory as they are in unexpected turns of phrase briefly referencing blues and jazz. Lacrau is an older Portuguese word for ‘scorpion’ (predating ‘escorpião’), as well as the name of a good, cheap restaurant in Manuel’s hometown of Ericeira, on the west coast of Portugal. Its quality of being out of time, its rough texture and its multiplicity of meanings make it as good a name as any - and better than some - for this beautifully unconventional and unconventionally beautiful album, one that occupies a unique place among the recordings of Mota and Grubbs. Apart from his solo performances and recordings, Manuel Mota is known for his collaborations with a range of musicians including Phill Niblock, Noel Akchoté, Margarida Garcia, David Maranha, Okkyung Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura. David Grubbs has played in Gastr del Sol, The Red Krayola and Squirrel Bait and performed with Tony Conrad, Susan Howe, Pauline Oliveros, Eli Keszler and many others.