James Orr Complex – Com Favo

We may not compete with Brazil on the football pitch, but the Scottish-Brazilian musical alliance is one built on rather more equal terms, and as the TrocaBrahma concerts of recent years demonstrated, capable of fruitful collaboration. The somewhat tenuous link doesn’t end there though: we also have our own musical ex-pat, Christopher Mack aka James Orr Complex, living and recording in Sao Paulo, sending his music back to Glasgow to be packaged by Mogwai’s own Rock Action record label. Mack is simply a prodigy on acoustic guitar, and so the only other sounds to intervene on Com Favo are his unimposing voice and smatterings of Latin percussion. Far from being one-dimensional though, the impossibly intricate playing is otherworldly, beautiful and multi-layered, while culture vultures will appreciate that Mack’s Brazilian experience infects his music, whether it’s the samba lullaby of Dear Green Blues or the thoroughly non-native chord shifts of Sharpie. [Nick Mitchell]