Manuel Mota

Manuel Mota is a Portuguese guitarist and improviser born in Lisbon in 1970. Since the late 1980s he has developed a highly individual language on electric guitar, in which delicate gestures, irregular phrasing, amplifier noise and silence become part of an open musical vocabulary.

His extensive discography includes solo albums and recordings with musicians from Portuguese and international improvised-music scenes. He also founded the independent label Headlights. On Creative Sources releases, his performances document a practice that resists predictable structures and gives particular attention to the guitar's physical response, resonance and spontaneous decisions.