14. 'Sentir Que No Sabes' by Mabe Fratti (2024)

last night i saw the best musician in the world at the top of her game. some reflections on the masterful Mabe Fratti and her best work to date

Guatemalan iconoclast Mabe Fratti traverses worlds, universes, dimensions with her cello. Sometimes she slaps it like a bass, sometimes she uses it as an abstract viewfinder a la ‘World of Echo’ (1986), and sometimes she uses it to absolutely shred. The worlds she creates are rich, realised, alien, and her sound a series of luminescent mutations on jazz, pop, ambient and rock music.

She is my favourite active musician, each album a transportive opus that offers something truly different. I haven’t covered much new music on this blog, but if you will for one post indulge me, as I just saw her live for the first time.

Tonight, she has the entire EartH theatre, Dalston, London, enraptured, as alongside her band of Hector Tosta (guitar) and Gibrán Andrade (drums), she zips through a set of some of the most exciting music in the known universe. Fratti grips her cello throughout the whole set, wielding it as the jumping off point for dizzying soundscapes, twisted art-pop songs, and fucked jams of the avant-rock persuasion.

The industrial rock of ‘Kravitz’ is intense, a real apocalyptic stomp, whilst the meditative ‘Creo Que Puedo Hacer Also’ from her debut ‘Pies sobre la tierra’ (2019) is misty, transcendent, soaring, Fratti’s cello here a portal to another universe. She does a solo cello piece, too, near the close, that sees her dial up the reverb and achieve a noise-rock guitar sound that would make Keiji Haino quiver in its wake.

I think I have probably seen an average of about two and a half bands a week, every week, since I was fifteen years old, so to say this could well be the best gig I have ever been to is significant praise. Totally enthralling, she covered so much ground in an hour that I was left speechless – she is an artist that I will now spend my life seeing at every possible opportunity.

In the 12 hours since Fratti’s performance finished, I have spent six hours sleeping, two hours watching the X Files, and four hours listening to ‘Sentir Que No Sabes’ (2024) again and again and again.

I wrote this 9/10 review when it came out, but it is very much now the clear favourite to be my album of the year. I didn’t initially love it, like I loved ‘Se ve desde aquí’ (2022) or ‘Vidrio’ (2023) (which she made as part of the group Titanic). Obviously I really enjoyed it, appreciated it, but it was firmly my third favourite of her records.

But now some time has passed I think it is probably her finest masterpiece. I think the way that she weaves her otherworldly soundscapes into pop songs here is absolutely masterful, and every song treads different, new ground – to listen to this album is to make the whole world feel fresh.

I will be posting my end of year lists in the coming weeks, so rest assured you have not heard the last of Mabe Fratti in this newsletter.