Muffin

A small but welcoming venue, the enthusiastic willingness of the young people who had only recently brought it back to life under new management, the passion of those who helped put the evening together, and that of two young women who had landed just twenty-four hours earlier from far-off Japan and, passing through Rome on a brief Italian tour, gladly agreed to gift a delicate live acoustic set to the small but warm crowd in attendance.

These were the ingredients of a damp, intimate evening that saw Muffin perform for the first time in Italy at "Le Mura" in San Lorenzo: a chamber-psych-folk project built around the shy songwriting and silken little voice of Mana Sasaki, joined for the occasion by her friend Okome, who supported her on second vocals while adding occasional flute or melodica flourishes alongside her guitar.

Dim lights and a homely atmosphere, with the audience comfortably filling the small tables just steps from the stage: an ideal setting in which to enjoy live music, a world away from the crush, heat and confusion that all too often plague even many indie-artist shows. Visibly moved – and with a shyness that, partly due to her modest command of English, could almost be mistaken for aloofness – Mana opens her brief set the same way she opened her debut album last year, the delightful "Grapes": "Prologue" is the first track on the setlist, immediately followed by "17", also taken from that same record. The gentle plucking of Muffin's folk guitar strings and her dreamy (and slightly drowsy, thanks to jet lag) voice reveal their fragile filigree in this stripped-down form, which nonetheless loses none of its melodic charm despite the inevitable absence of the arrangements and fuller instrumentation found on record.

The set's formula never really changes, built as it is around guitar and voice, and yet Mana shapes her songs with the care and mastery of some Japanese representational art form, an exercise from which ethereal melodies blossom — among them the gorgeous "Kumo" and a cover of Judee Sill's "500 Miles", soon revealed to be included on an intriguing CD-R titled "First Trip", put together specifically for this, her first European journey, and featuring sixteen interpretations of songs more or less well known.

After the due tribute to the reason for her Italian presence, summed up in "Flora", a track released on a split alongside our own Comaneci and Mattia Coletti, plus a couple of songs pulled back from her debut Ep "Folklore" (the Sandoval-esque "Sea" and the more evocative "Lost Song"), things move smoothly towards the close with "Sleeper", faithfully mirroring the album's own trajectory, of which it stands as a fitting, impressionistic conclusion.

At this point someone in the crowd - incredible but true, there really are people who came to "Le Mura" specifically to see this show! - loudly demands "We Are The Rainbow", the Japanese artist's most successful and "radio-friendly" song, so she can't help but offer a few more minutes of her music, in a performance that reveals the song's melodic sweetness and folk transcendence, even if stripped here of the airy arrangement that made it the album's standout track.

And so, with her typically East Asian shyness, Mana quietly steps down from the stage, retreating to sort out her instruments next to the little corner where, shortly after, she'll get the chance to sell a few CDs, a sign of appreciation from the small but devoted fans of her music, and of the welcome discovery made by those who stumbled upon her precisely on this very special evening. A small but deeply satisfying reward for the dedicated fans who made this small but precious event possible, starting with the "romantic" folks running "Le Mura".

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