For some musicians, talking about their work is a crass, easily dispensable exercise, a needless impediment to pure, unadulterated expression. This would be the “let the music speak for itself” camp. Others have no problem in principle talking about their work but simply struggle to articulate their process. Indeed, communicating the mysterious intentions and meanings behind a record can be a cumbersome task. For Mexico City-based cellist and singer Mabe Fratti, talking about music is a beautiful, joyful thing; an ongoing, vital element of her process as an artist. Throughout our conversation, that outlook becomes wonderfully apparent.
Fratti’s remarkable new record, Sentir Que No Sabes, has been released just a few days before we talk and has garnered a rapturous reception. But, in line with the album’s title, which translates to Feeling Like You Don’t Know, Fratti’s immediate feeling is not one of overwhelming excitement but of doubt: “I’m feeling uncertainty, definitely. Yesterday, I was feeling the same. I was pretty low on energy. I was thinking that I was having this postpartum depression, you know. It’s kind of like an emptiness, or building up for something, and then it happening and then letting it be in the world.” She assures me that despite getting cold feet momentarily on the day of release, she has gotten used to the stresses of release day: “I used to get more nervous, I guess. But now it’s excitement.”
Fratti is chatting from Berlin, enjoying a few free days before a gig. Together with Hector Tosta, her ongoing collaborator, she’s in the process of translating the album’s studio recordings into live performances, compressing the songs’ often expansive sound palette into a tight three-piece band setup. It’s a challenge that has wrought some exciting experiments. She enthuses about some new directions for “Oidos.” (“There’s like a new intro that I came up with, and Hector came in with a very Robert Fripp energy!”) Later, she teases an upcoming collaboration with Shards, an experimental vocal ensemble, for a gig in London.
That choral approach makes perfect sense given Sentir Que No Sabes’ increased focus on harmony. Fratti is keen to credit Tosta for that shift. “In that case, I will definitely honor Hector’s mind. You know? He studied composition. So he has lots of color palettes in his brain,” she says. “We would discuss a lot about harmonies, you know, like there’s so many approaches you can give harmonically to stuff… You can also feel the change of the sound. There’s a lot of groove in the record, but definitely I think that there are a lot more colors.”
I feel that as I’m touring, as I meet people on the road, and I talk about music with them, whenever I have the chance to do it, it’s a very beautiful learning process
Tosta, who also works with Fratti as Titanic, has been a major addition to her sound. Their creative relationship is a special one: “Well, first of all, he’s my partner. So we work a lot together, you know. And we have this chemistry that is sometimes quite intense that becomes like an endless argument about what is going to end up [on the record] and I’m doubting my decisions and he’s doubting his decisions, especially when it’s something that is derived from my name. I feel very trusting about his imagination. So sometimes I’m very surprised by his ideas, and vice versa.”
Fratti relishes that conflict of ideas. “Musically, I can be like, a pain in the ass,” she says. “I am very aware of that, you know, because sometimes there’s ideas that he would love and I’m like ‘no, no, no.’ And he’s like, ‘yes, yes. yes.’ And that is something very special, you know, because we would go deep. I feel this record, things would go very, very deep. In Titanic, I felt that I was more laid back. But in this one, we went super, super deep on things.” That creative intensity could be exhausting. Fratti describes feeling “seasick” from listening to the songs over and over, toiling away, shaping the record’s singular tone.
As Fratti mentions at several points, this is a record with a keen focus on groove. It’s another bold progression. Where her music has often flourished in formless spaces, her voice meandering through sparse arrangements, here she delves into a more traditional, pop-adjacent songwriting, substituting abstraction for the more concrete joys that groove offers.
The title of opening track “Kravitz” hints at a core stimulus for that move. “[Lenny Kravitz] was a big inspiration to delve into the groove in this record, you know, in a very vague way,” she says. The caveat isn’t necessary. As with previous releases, this is decidedly a Mabe Fratti project, existing far beyond easy categorization or obvious influence. “We were listening to music with a friend of ours, on the ceiling of the apartment building, and then ‘It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over’ came on. And I was like, ‘oh man, I love this group!’ I had forgotten about the song and Hector was like, ‘you don’t even know all of the songs!’ And I remember I got very obsessed with it.”
Though Sentir Que No Sabes takes many bold new directions, it still feels like a development of the sonic aesthetic Fratti has been honing over several releases. “I tried to approach this idea in Se Ve Desde Aqui, with very hi-fi microphones, but very flat microphones. No aesthetic at all, but in itself, aesthetic,” she says. For the new record, Fratti excitedly recalls finding the type of microphone used on Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock (a favorite of hers), and trying it out for herself. “I was like damn, this sound is so pristine, so clear. That makes me feel very vulnerable. And that’s basically what made me fall into the crisis, the day of the release, because I was feeling so fucking vulnerable. Like, listening to it again, I was like, damn, my voice is so frontal; so no makeup, you know.”
It’s a major shift from her earlier records. Pies Sobre La Tierra found Fratti’s voice combined with myriad digital effects, wrapped in textures that were beautiful and entrancing but avoided the raw vulnerability of an unvarnished vocal. Where her early albums felt distinctly contemporary, entwined with modern recording technologies, her recent projects retain some traces of electronics while also drawing on something with much deeper roots. “That aesthetic came from these very old recordings that I really like, you know. Like archive music from different parts of the world. Very dry sounding, very outside recordings, you know.” Fratti connects to that side of music, to “things that feel very alive and real,” things that “have this goblin feeling.”
She’s referring to the words of Spanish playwright, Federico García Lorca. El Duende (the goblin)—used by Lorca in relation to flamenco—is that mysterious, untamed expression that permeates certain works of art. It is in Lorca’s own words a “tragedy-inspired ecstasy, a poetic emotion which is uncontrolled.”
That philosophy comes through not just in Fratti’s remarkably honest vocals, but through her astonishing command of her instrument. Whether she’s treating her cello like a fretless bass as is often the case on the new record, or sawing out harsh, discordant textures, Fratti seems intent on pushing the cello to its outermost limits. When I ask about her relationship to the instrument, she immediately credits an early mentor.
“It was classical at the start but I had a very special teacher,” she says. “Like, I always think about him with a lot of love. But he would love the more classical [material], you know. I remember when I talked to him about this [György] Ligeti record that I had: The Cello Sonata. He was like… it’s not my taste! He was like, that is bullshit! So, I was like, oh, this is interesting. He doesn’t like it, that’s fine. You know, for me, particularly, it was also hard to listen to the second segment of that one. The first movement… I connected with it instantly.”
The more contemporary, challenging avant- garde cellists came later. “I feel that I connected in a very slow way with the more avant-garde stuff, you know. But, I feel that I could connect with my heart to it. It felt right to my heart in its own time.”
Given Fratti’s penchant for continual evolution, I’m curious about whether she’s still learning from her cello, still finding new sounds. “I really feel that the cello is, I mean, when you start—at least in my school of learning the cello—the learning is infinite, you know, the approach that you give to that instrument, the expressive parts of it, you know, like the technical parts of it… it can go so far, you know—,” Fratti interrupts herself to briefly self-deprecate. “I am not like…any kind of Jacqueline du Pré you know.”
The influences that emerge throughout our conversation are a fascinating eye into an artist who seems utterly unique. There are highly emotive, decidedly classical cellists like du Pré, challenging avant-garde composers like Ligeti, archival folk recordings from around the world, delicate post-rock in the form of Talk Talk. When I ask about the astonishing explosion of vocal harmonies halfway through “Angel Nuevo,” Fratti excitedly credits her love for Bulgarian choral music: “Oh, we love Bulgarian choirs, you know, so, that nasal singing had a space to be in that in that song.”
Another vital influence for Fratti has been her immersion in the Mexico City music scene. “It was super special, super important, because, for example, I felt connected with some parts of the contemporary and more vanguard music through listening to it, and in a very academic sense,” she says. “But I felt even more connected and even more excited about it later, in Mexico, because there was a punk aspect to it.”
The collaborators she’s met through that community—among them, her drummer and musical “sensei” Gibrán Andrade, and her three collaborators from the magnificent Amor Muere—have been inspiring to Fratti beyond simply making music together. It’s the conversations that Fratti treasures.
“Talking with friends about music is the thing that still inspires me a lot,” she says. “And I feel that talking with Hector or talking with Gibrán… talking with Concepción, talking with Camille, talking about music… these are mostly people that I’ve met [in Mexico City]. I really appreciate that“.
It’s a touching, wholesome sentiment to embrace conversation with friends and fellow artists as a central element of one’s working philosophy. Creatives are often stereotyped as an insular bunch, but Fratti finds enormous value in sharing her love for music. It’s an inexhaustible resource, and a source of inspiration that still excites Fratti.
“I feel that as I’m touring, as I meet people on the road, and I talk about music with them, whenever I have the chance to do it, it’s a very beautiful learning process,” she says. “And I would say that I can still find that in Mexico, but I believe that as I’ve traveled, I’ve learned that there’s a lot of conversations that I want to have.”
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