For an unequivocal sign of how busy Mabe Fratti has been in the last year, look no further than her toes. “My foot is growing a bunion!” she laughs, calling from a stop in rural Sweden as she rehearses with recent collaborators Efterklang. “I’m like, fuck, I don’t want to get the fucking bunion when I’m touring this year! So I’m just trying to keep the body healthy. I have that sock that pushes the toe back into its place, so while the bunion is in a good situation, it’s not so intense. We keep going, you know?!”
Bony foot growths or not, the forward march – and unfiltered humour – is Fratti’s stock in trade. The Guatemala-born cellist has released four solo albums since 2019, treading a lightning-speed creative evolution from dream pop to swaggering, spartan cabaret. Additionally, last year saw the debut release by Amor Muere, the experimental four-piece Fratti co-founded in her adopted home of Mexico City, and another first with Titanic, her gorgeous chamber-prog duo with musical and romantic partner Héctor Tosta; not to mention a growing body of collaborators, from the aforementioned Danes to Oneohtrix Point Never and fellow Mexico City band Phét Phét Phét. Fratti’s inexorable flourishing, if not her sound itself, feels comparable in recent memory only to an artist like Julia Holter.
Her latest, the sublime Sentir Que No Sabes (Feel What You Don’t Know) possesses a stark and beguiling gravity, as pristine and stately at moments as it is tender and devastating in others; spliced with surprise breakbeats, vocoder gasps and elemental twitching. Often billed for her facility with cello – which might sound flayed by distortion one minute, or sharp as a sabre being drawn in the next – Fratti’s voice may actually be her most immaculate instrument, always intently inquisitive and reaching outward as she sings (in Spanish) her recurring questions about the true meaning of knowledge, and how aspiring to it may necessitate be forgetting so much of what you already know. At Rewire festival in the Hague this April, her performances with Amor Muere and Titanic certainly did as much for the enrapt audience.
Fratti’s totally idiosyncratic music feels like uncertainty embodied; determined to strike out into new ground with every new album and rethinking all that came before. Sentir Que No Sabes was written and recorded with Tosta, largely in their home studio and later completed in Holland with drummer Gibrán Androide and trumpeter Jacob Wick. Bone dry and bone deep, it prioritises a deep groove that she has likened to that of Camel. One suspects she may be the only 32-year-old experimental musician currently working who is citing the Guildford band as an influence, although they don’t feature in her Baker’s Dozen, which instead tends to staples of her Central American adolescence, cult dream pop and French post-punk Zeligs, in addition to a number of tQ staples (one of which, she admits, she discovered through reading the site). In November she curates Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, bringing with her a number of luminaries from the Mexico City experimental jazz scene (don’t sleep on Germán Bringas) and putting in a number of performances herself. You suspect this period of activity ordained by acclaim for Sentir Que No Sabes as one of the year’s very best albums is going to require an extremely powerful sock.
Mabe Fratti’s new album Sentir Que No Sabes is out now via Unheard Of Hope. She performs and serves as guest curator at this year’s Le Guess Who? Festival, which takes place in Utrecht from 7 to 10 November. To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below.
