by Aly Eleanor (@purityolympics)
Mabe Fratti is chasing something. It seems to be made of sound but it persistently evades clarity. Over five years, the Mexico City-based composer, cellist, and vocalist has remained restless in the musical ground she explores, like sand shaking alongside hidden tremors. Each record she makes shimmers with her curiosity. Sentir Que No Sabes is one of her most direct, but it is no less invested in experimenting and rerouting the conduits of her music. She relishes in the joys of building unique universes, only to pull apart the mysterious gravitational threads and see what might collide or be born.
With childhood roots in classical, Pentecostal worship music, punk, avant-garde, and almost the saxophone, Fratti had run much of the genre gamut before ever releasing her own music. Her early solo work wields ambient formlessness in search of implacable truth. Prolific in writing, recording, and collaborating — at least an album per year since 2019, four since 2022 — she embraces the spiritual abandon of creation, reorienting her charismatic upbringing within the space of experimental music. A partnership with Héctor Tosta aka i.la Católica has been particularly fruitful. Fratti’s voice is the spiraling core of 2022’s Se Ve Desde Aquí and 2023’s proggy Titanic record (with Tosta), Vidrio, while the pair continually coaxes each other into making more challenging and beautiful sounds.
Sentir Que No Sabes finds bliss in confusion. Opening yourself to creative unknowing makes you open to change, newness, and potential transformation, but doesn’t guarantee it. Fratti rests in that liminal space for the duration of the record. She has cited “Juego y Teoría del Duende” (“Theory and Function of the Goblin”), an early 20th-century lecture by poet Federico García Lorca, as a key clue for how to define what she was chasing. As amusing as it may be to imagine a cat-and-mouse game with a strange imp, the “goblin” serves as a synecdoche for the invisible trait “that distinguishes great art…from what is merely competent.” Listening to the album, you’ll intrinsically understand what makes the ephemeral so personal, even without reading (very interesting) Spanish art criticism from the 1930s.
The first seconds of not-quite-Lenny-indebted opener “Kravitz” are full of distortion. Fratti’s music escapes categorization, but hardly can be described as riff-driven — this song, and much of the album, upends that. Rhythmic repetition anchors the freely flowing compositions. Bass digs underneath floating vocals and dancing light beams of piano chords; off-kilter trumpet intervals bounce off the “stainless steel skin” of the lyrics; drums pound the downbeat like a stake into the dirt. “Parantalla azul” (“Blue screen”) follows a similar path of entry with radically different energy. The grit is replaced by underwater plucks and crosshatched guitar triplets. Fratti’s dance of voice and low-end takes on a surprising reminiscence of ‘80s pop while still holding together a song unlike any other. She sings, “Quieres apagar la luz / Olvidar la ciencia / Ejecutar el poder / Efusionarte con tu sombra,” making a mirror for unembellished yearning, elasticity, and shadowy uncertainty, rejoicing at a sudden blue screen of death rather than cursing.
“Quieras o no” (“Whether you like it or not”) and “Alarmas olvidadas” (“Forgotten alarms”) echo splinters of the vocal processing found on earlier releases — they recall late-period Oneohtrix Point Never minus the digital brainmelt, and the gurgling acid undercurrent of Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, with cello and tremulous singing hovering above it. An almost threatening atmosphere is barely offset by Fratti’s sublime vocals. She sounds heartbroken while quietly descending through the final lyrics, “Llegó el final, que triste que esto deba ser” — “The end has come, how sad that this has to be.” Even as her compositions soar heavenward in melodic glory, bursting out from the inside of a melting pop structure, or venture into the amorphous familiar (“Elastic II” and “Elastica I”), Fratti stands firm at the center, brave in her unknowing. Sentir Que No Sabes is transcendent, beautiful, haunting, and truly original.