Mabe Fratti ★★★★
Sentir Que No Sabes
UNHEARD OF HOPE. CD/DL/LP
Guatemalan experimental singer/cellist’s most accessible statement yet.
Mabe Fratti appears to have boundless energy. Between 2019 and 2023, she released three solo albums, a fourth in collaboration with Malaria! singer Gudrun Gut, and two more with collective Amor Muere and as a duo, Titanic, with her Mexican partner, jazz musician Héctor Tosta. They’re all different records too, as Fratti varies the inputs of minimalist electronica, jazz, ethereal chamber music and torch song that feed her vision. Tosta is again involved here, yet Sentir Que No Sabes (‘Feel Like You Don’t Know’) is her most song-based record, sometimes reminiscent of a beats-free Portishead; Tropicália queen Gal Costa is another touchpoint for this smouldering, sensual noir music, though a suspenseful tension and mystery hovers in the spaces. Further enriched by the palate of Fratti’s cello and Tosta’s brass, Sentir… is an extraordinarily possessed, uncanny world of its own.