“Musicamorosa” reviewed by Touching Extremes

Influenced by a lot of names “to be found outside the music field”, which include Proust, Poe, Alighieri, Friedrich, Waterhouse and so on, up to director Sofia Coppola and erotic photographers Guido Argentini and Roy Stuart, Portuguese Jorge Mantas wants us to call him a “sound designer”, not a “composer”. He also hates those who don’t express emotion through their work, and concludes that there’s nothing more uninspiring than an “untitled” piece (a WBA/WBC title unification match with Francisco López looms after this declaration, one surmises). That’s why the large part of the titles in this CD are taken from Marcel Proust. But what’s all the more important is that in its non-revolution – because this is purely and simply laptop-conceived, loop-based music – “Musicamorosa” contains the best things I’ve heard from the artist in question. A touch of romanticism, a good choice of intoxicating spirals of orchestral samples and circular chords and, voila, almost 70 minutes flow away with few annoyances (next to none, I’d say) and several truly arresting moments, at times whispering Basinskian languages, often only showing different schemes for the utilization of common ingredients. Luscious, abstract, caressing; those are the most useful adjectives here, partially negated by the long final track “Soixtante-quatre” which tends to a blacker kind of electronic mystery.