When you listen to Mabe Fratti’s music , it’s hard to imagine the artist ever being nervous. She can sing in a way that sounds tender and vulnerable, yet there’s a strength about her, too. Her cello — her main instrument, though she incorporates other acoustic and electronic sounds into her productions — can conjure any feeling, from sweet to scary.
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Still, the Guatemalan musician admits that while she’s excited about the music she’s about to drop, she’s also a little unsure. Her fourth solo album, titled Sentir Que No Sabes , features more traditional song structures and a lot more percussion than her past releases, pushing her toward new territory.
“It’s a good but weird feeling,” she says as she sips mezcal with tonic water at a quaint cantina near her apartment in the Obrera neighborhood in Mexico City . “I have never done extreme sports but I think it’s a similar feeling.”
Fratti shouldn’t worry much. Sentir Que No Sabes might be more traditional in structure but these songs possess a daring spirit. Fratti’s emotional delivery is more resonant than ever, reminding listeners of the qualities that have won her praise around the world and rallied fans in Latin America, U.S. and Europe while she’s been touring and playing festivals such as Primavera Sound , Rewire, and Le Guess Who? She’s also been recognized by artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never and Efterklang; Rolling Stone has placed her albums on year-end lists for the past two years
For this album, Fratti wanted to work closely with Hector Tosta, her partner and a live musician who is also half of their joint project, Titanic. Tosta also records as I. La Católica and here, he acted as producer and arranger. They started the process by discussing what Fratti wanted for this record while hanging out on the terrace of the apartment where they live together. They were listening to a ton of music, including lots of Lenny Kravitz, most notably reflected on the album’s opening track, “Kravitz.”
Fratti’s solo work has been experimental and pretty open-ended, but this time around, she and Tosta were determined to delve into traditional songwriting. “Hector studied composition and he loves well-made songs,” Fratti says. “We talked about making traditional songs [and] at first I was like ‘No, what do you mean?’ It was something new to me.”
She adds that they dove into the project head-first. “We dug into those songs way deep,” she says. “We would wake up and start working on them and then fall asleep after working all day. We barely took a day off and when we did, we would feel guilty. It was all about getting into the universe of each song and having a ton of dialog around their aesthetic. It was a process of learning and unlearning. We went over every fine detail of each song and I think they sound very organized and very well trimmed. They had great grooming, güey !”
Once the songs were done, the plan was to book studio time to get the best sounds out of Fratti’s cello and vocals. She’s proud of what she’s accomplished with her computer, two-channel interface, and “very, very basic mixing skills” in the past, but now she wanted something more expansive. They spent time recording at Soy Sauce and Pedro Y El Lobo Studios, both in Mexico City, adding drummer Gibrán Andrade and trumpet player Jacob Wick to the team. They also worked in Willem Twee Studios in Den Bosch in the Netherlands. As the album came together, it captured the best of Fratti’s performance with “just EQ and compression.”
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“There’s barely anything there,” she says. “It’s a very classic kind of mix.”
Sentir Que No Sabes is an evolution for Fratti. She had a “strictly classical” musical upbringing in Guatemala City, where she grew up. Soon, she met other musicians — some around the church her family attended — who introduced her to a wide range of music. After playing as much as she could in Guatemala, she was invited to a residency in Mexico City; she fell in love with the city’s live music scene, especially the free improv contingent. After a few years, she integrated herself into it, learning how to improvise and playing in many different ensembles. In 2019, she released her first album, Pies Sobre La Tierra , through Hole Records, a label run by Mexico City’s heavy psych trio, Tajak. Around this time, a friend in Guatemala met someone signed to British label Tin Angel Records, who eventually signed Fratti.
Ever since, Fratti has been on a constant sonic trip, going from the stark Pies Sobre La Tierra to the expansive Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos (2021) to the auspicious Se Ve Desde Aquí (2022), not to mention her many collaborations and side projects. She notes that on her first record, she relied on ambient textures, reverb, and auto-tune as “aesthetic choices” to achieve a certain vibe. While she has let go of some of those elements, she still questions her process, something reflected in the title of the album, which translates to “feeling like you don’t know.”
“In general, my process is a constant questioning of what I’m doing,” she says. “[It’s also] about always learning something new, learning about the things that I like and using them, and it doesn’t have to be music. I love white light, which means that I like a raw, very grounded, and not too solemn aesthetic. How can I translate that into music? How do you microdose what you like and use it in your life and your creative process? I feel like every album is a different approach to the same process. I don’t have to always be the same person.”
Fratti notes that the album’s title stems from a very sincere emotion, which she describes “like staring into the void.” By trying many different things, she let self-doubt become something positive. “To say something with a lot of confidence is not easy [for me],” she admits. “I think I’m a very confused person but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I sympathize with insecure people because I’m a very insecure person,” she adds with a laugh.
In addition to her solo work, Fratti spends a lot of time playing with different musicians and on side projects. In addition to Titanic, another prominent band of hers is Amor Muere, a four-piece experimental unit. “I feel very fortunate because, on one hand with Titanic, Hector is pretty much an academic. It’s [amazing to] collaborate with a person who has all this technical abilities, and then on the other hand there’s Amor Muere [which] is like a collective…Gibrana [Cervantes, violin] is also an academic but she’s very open-minded, Camille [Mandoki, vocals and keyboards] is very mental when it comes to sounds, Concepción [Huerta, tape manipulation] is very visual… They give me the tools to approach sounds and once in a while, it makes me learn about myself.”
With Sentir Que No Sabes , Fratti continues a brilliant streak. She might not have concrete answers but she keeps rebuilding her music into something beautiful, and unlike anything else out there. It’s bound to keep getting her more fans. When asked about the impact her music has already had, she seems slightly overwhelmed but also giddy. “It’s exciting and nerve-wrecking,” she says. “I can’t believe it. Sometimes I get impostor syndrome. It’s crazy when you see things happening up close, like, ‘Oh, so this is how it works.’ [This is] an industry with a structure and priorities and things don’t get popular just because of good music,” she says. “I feel very lucky.”
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