Steadily foregrounding her voice which is both plangent and eloquent even as her lyrics remain wispy and quizzical, if not sometimes breezily epigrammatic, tugging ever more forcefully at the frayed ends of popular forms, the Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti is at once ensconced within the alternative music scene of Mexico City and its foremost advocate. Brought up within the charismatic Pentecostal church of Guatemala City, she moved to the Mexican capital seven years ago and began to forge lasting relationships, a process which was accelerated by the strictures of the coronavirus pandemic when she and a group of fellow artists locked down in an old sugar cane hacienda turned residency called La Orduña in coastal Veracruz.
That period culminated in the release of her breakthrough album Será que ahora podremos entendernos, and by the time Se Ve Desde Aquí arrived a year later – paring back the layered cello thrums, swells of synthesizer and chattering birdsong plus the use of reverb and other effects which served to distantiate her vocals, with co-production by I. La Católica and features from the sound sculptor Carla Boregas, the drummer Gibrán Andrade and the saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore – a more muscular Mabe Fratti had clearly found her tribe.
Over the course of the past eighteen months, Fratti has dipped her toe into balmier waters as part of The Docking Choir for the trombonist Peter Zummo’s reworked Deep Drive 2+, banded together with the vocalist Camille Mandoki, the sound artist Concepción Huerta and the classically trained violinist Gibrana Cervantes who brought their withering wit and years of experimentation to fruition, reuniting in the forest haven of La Pitahaya in Zoncuantla for their debut album as Amor Muere, teamed with the composer and multi-instrumentalist Héctor Tosta, her partner who operates under the name I. La Católica, for the laden baroque chords and luxuriously low-slung jazz of their duo as Titanic, and contributed breathy mouth mantras plus cello alongside Tosta and Andrade for Gilgore’s latest outing as phét phét phét, a thrice-uttered Tibetan syllable which means to cut through.
Describing her new album Sentir que no sabes, she refers to the verb ‘superimpose’ for its overlapping of ideas and images, and defines a moment of sweetened permeability ‘when you feel you don’t know anything and you are soft like jello and any fork can go through’. Between confusion and softness she embraces the promise of not knowing, across a set of thirteen impressions and fragments once more produced and arranged by Tosta as Católica, who plays guitar, piano, bass and synthesizers while Jacob Wick blows the trumpet, Gibrán Andrade returns behind the drum set and Estrella del Sol of the shoegaze outfit Mint Field whistles background hisses and signal tones.
‘Kravitz’ opens the album, an apparent ode to Lenny whose hit song ‘It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over’ has been singled out by Fratti for its slinky Philadelphia soul. Yet beyond the bass-led groove, the track offers stalled marching band batteries and a smeared trumpet fanfare, all very deliberative and intentional until the horns and keys distend and her vocals quaver, imbuing ‘Kravitz’ with a sense of creeping anxiety to boot. Less than surreptitiously observed the song is about being endlessly nudged, compelled to form an opinion and react to the barrage of suggestion as the frets of the world refuse to be kept at bay. The lead single ‘Pantalla Azul’ is more pliable with an eighties synthetic sheen and a nocturnal air, the singer’s melatonin suppressed as the blue screen of death evokes both a sapphire retreat and sleeping disorders in a dank and ill-lit room.
Disorder stretches to the sequence of the album, with the cello squibs of ‘Elastica II’ eventually forced to compete with strained strings and pummelling drums. And on ‘Oídos’, which opens through a seesawing cello motif, an aural fixation is juxtaposed with the terrors of the page, a sort of death by a thousand cuts as the need to fill in every blank leaves no room to escape in dreams. There’s a stop-start, baroque pop-meets-music hall quality to ‘Oídos’ which is redolent of the title track to Joanna Newsom’s sprawling and Spider Dance referencing ensemble album Have One on Me, plus aspects of Latin jazz and indie rock of the scuzzy or slacker variety.
The likes of Arthur Russell and Kate Bush have become touchstones and reference points when it comes to describing Mabe Fratti’s music, which shares the sense of impish shapeshifting and experimenting beyond borders, a kind of contemporised chamber music which finds Fratti fastidiously conducting her own private orchestra and stranded out in some grassland wilderness as the sky breaks and the churning elements, chirping insects and other sonic raptures hold her in their thrall.
Yet the array of influences and likenesses stretches farther and wider than any beatific portrayal, for starters to the trio of Ana Ruiz, Henry West and Evry Mann as Atrás del Cosmos who between their formation in 1975 and their untimely disbandment in 1983 won acclaim as Mexico’s first free jazz ensemble, drawing equally from the loft scene in New York City and the surrealist theatre of the Chilean expatriate Alejandro Jodorowsky, holding an eight-month residency at the El Galeón theatre in Mexico City and collaborating with vaunted American improvisers including the trumpeter Don Cherry, who in 1977 afforded a new level of national recognition to the group.
Their solitary live album Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams was restored and issued on vinyl for the first time in April by the Brooklyn nonprofit Blank Forms, just a few weeks after Séance Centre and the archival project Smiling C released Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra, a compilation of obscure Mexican electronic and electroacoustic composers from the eighties and early nineties who collided ancient Mesoamerican traditions, pre-Hispanic ocarinas and flutes, ritual chants and the teponaztli and huéhuetl drums of the Aztecs with slapped cajon percussion and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms, brassy banda, new age or Fourth World ambiances and the chord changes of progressive rock. Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra highlighted the efforts of Antonio Zepeda, Eblen Macari, Armando Velasco and Germán Bringas, an improviser and composer whose early works were inspired by Fred Firth and John Zorn while in 1995 he opened the café Jazzorca, which remains one of Mexico City’s most important venues for free jazz and experimental music.
Fratti shares a penchant for limpid science fictions and rhythmic genre deviations with some of her fellow Latin American avant-pop crossover artists, while she is one of a surge of cello practitioners who are scraping at the conventions of their instrument, from the cinematic washes of Lia Kohl and MIZU to the folk themes of Leyla McCalla and Deborah Walker, and from the jabs and flurries of the sought-after jazz improvisers Tomeka Reid and Christopher Hoffman to the rigours and rashness of Lori Goldston and Fratti’s own inspiration, who she has described as like a portal, the avant-garde South Korean cellist Okkyung Lee. Between Atrás del Cosmos and Lucrecia Dalt, there is a chasm down which you might also find echoes of cult indie acts like My Bloody Valentine, Mazzy Star and Animal Collective, which is to say that Fratti’s music is both experimental and enveloping, while her own listening hews close to the surface and stretches very far out.
For all of that, ‘Quieras o no’ features a vocoder and other electronic distortions which are reminiscent of the pitched organ and eulogising of the Purple Rain opener ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ by Prince. Carried over a plunging bassline and matching the sense of weightless freefall, Fratti’s vocal performance here is one of the best on the album, speaking of disaster in her native Spanish the repetition of which nevertheless calls to mind the poem ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop, which also lingers deftly on the cusp of a sudden implosion. And with a squeeze of acid, ‘Enfrente’ turns that feeling of lagging behind in mental acuity or scrambling always out of step into a critique of a shoddy conversationalist, who aims for profundity but winds up putting their listeners to sleep. The track condemns pretension while still holding on by a thread, combining plucked bass, padding drums, twinkling bell chimes and insistent synths in the margins of early-nineties acts like The Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Massive Attack or Cocteau Twins.
‘Elastica I’ moves through squeaking brass and plucked or prodded strings to a foggy ambiance whose flamenco flourishes call to mind the Books and their folktronica debut Thought for Food. ‘Márgen del índice’ suggests that as much as some of the songs on Sentir que no sabes seem directed at someone else, a former partner or some other interlocutor, they are also surreptitiously directed at herself, pondering her own capacity to feign understanding, as if viewing herself from the outside with some perturbation as well as a wry grin. Then the plucked bass of ‘Alarmas olvidadas’ is submerged by watery synths, a kind of inverted ‘Hyberballad’ as the morning breaks but the day remains encumbered, with a lofty choral swell punctuating the drum rolls and whistles, buzzing strings and other percussive downbeats.
The jazzy rhythm section of ‘Descubrimos un suspiro’ briefly pulls apart for shrill whistles and surges of brass, setting the tone for another beautifully plaintive vocal from Fratti, and ‘Intento fallido’ develops one of the record’s most pronounced themes, spiralling in the bad vibes of another person, with the driving cello of the last minute an attempt to get some distance and finally put a cap on the relationship.
Another short instrumental where jagged cello vies with ominous surges of noise gives way to ‘Angel nuevo’, the album’s closing track. Compelled by the Angelus Novus of Paul Klee, which Fratti has described as ‘a metaphor for history, this idea that we’re looking forwards, but also always looking back’, the song scans like a subdued and forlorn take on ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, the French star Édith Piaf’s signature piece. Stressing that there is no coming back for this particular relationship, for now the singer must deal with the fact that there’s nothing in its place either, a long melodic caterwaul halfway through ‘Angel nuevo’ reckoning with the spectre of absence while echoing the yeahs and yohs of Kate Bush’s gender dealing ‘Running Up That Hill’.
But then the strings and bass begin to work in tandem to establish a slightly winnowing, churning and uplifting counter melody, the strings jostling and elevating the bass, before a muted trumpet blows some of life’s breath back into a wealth of shared experience, a good news message which ever so tentatively points the way forward.
