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Mabe Fratti believes improvisation is part of human nature, a conduit for our messy inner lives. “In everyday life, I can be very neurotic sometimes, but sometimes I feel very fluid, and that’s when I feel very comfortable,” the Guatemalan cellist told us in 2021. This fluidity naturally extends to the way he plays. “I see improvisation as a means to get to know myself better, or even to enrich or nourish myself.” However instinctively he dives inward, his music exists and emerges as a product of deep thought and communication—on a purely technical level, his latest album, Sentir que no saber, is built around a conversation with his Titanic partner and bandmate Héctor Tosta (also known as I. La Católica), which will continue “until things become unavoidable.” In this way, the limitations of the mind and its environment become elastic, but rather than creating a divide between artist and listener, Fratti’s fertile imagination acts as a bridge. The result is raw, surprising, and liberating.
In the press materials, Frati quickly identifies what distinguishes “Sentir que no sabers” (his fourth solo album in five years) from previous material: the beat. But this isn’t a happy beat, nor does it mean a veer into pop, but rather a pulse of neurotic awareness. In a different state of mind, opener “Kravitz” might come off as somber and languid, but when Frati turns his plucked cello into a thunderous instrument, he punches and kicks—fitting for a song that not only expresses fear for the listener on the other side of the wall, but within it. Another single, “Enfrente,” is a more interpersonal angst that, along with one of the most energetic arrangements on the album, also features the most memorable chorus, though its lyrical interiority is appropriately reflected in the lyrics via parentheses. The beat here is once again dreadful, but Frati and Tosta are eager to change things up and drive the song home with some real drum and bass.
There’s a dance between the nervous excitement in these songs and the musician’s brash confidence. It’s usually deft instrumental decisions that move you in Flutti’s music, but “Whether You Want It or Not” does so by introducing a vocoder that wraps a bow around her voice — a deeper, twisted longing creeps in. The melody. The effect is repeated on “Forgotten Alarm,” where the house itself is given a line of dialogue. The song slowly falls into the sky before settling into an elegiac finale; it should sound like failure, but it almost feels like a revelation. “There’s no lesson to be learned except to understand that everything is a disaster,” Flutti sings on “Pantalla azull,” and yet he’s able to make the whole devastation sound like a relief. That’s not to say there aren’t ambivalences: on “Failed Attempt,” she makes her request clear — I don’t want you near me — and then the music, her own instrument, challenges her. “And I crumble before you.” And I crumble before you.
Lyrically, Flati becomes more expressive and demanding in her songs, a result of Tosta’s interrogation of the songs’ meanings. Rather than getting lost in the chaos of words, she imbues her performance with a heightened vulnerability. Another shaky song, closing track “New Angel,” two minutes in, its soft harmonies are overlaid with radiant screams, something no experimental artist not named Björk would dare to use in a track. Flati is intensely aware of how ideas shift and grow over the course of a song’s creation and duration, “Inventing Relief” serving as a metaphor for that process: “I speed madly/I seek shelter in the sky/It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t exist/If you could invent it,” Flati sings. It’s this proposition, this mad quest that he believes most fervently, that makes the chaos in his music not only brilliant but incandescent.
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