Cello from the other side: Guatemalan experimentalist hits a groovy sweet spot Nobody can make a cello honk, slither, twang and gurgle like . In just a few short years, the prolific Guatemala-born, Mexico City-based musician, singer and composer has built an impressive international profile in experimental pop circles. (which translates as ) is her fourth album under her own name since 2020.
Last year, she also released an album as half of Titanic, a jazzy avant-chanson duo project with her musical and life partner (AKA I La Católica), and another with the improvisational quartet Amor Muere. The 32-year-old Fratti has also worked with a promiscuous gallery of collaborators from Berlin post-punk legend to Danish indie-rockers , British post-folk singer and sometime Björk/Thurston Moore drummer . Howard likens Fratti’s performance style to “watching a sunbeam” while Corsano calls her music “a continual opening of possibilities.
” Following in a rare lineage that includes , and her current personal hero, South Korea’s , Fratti uses the cello as wide-open sound laboratory as much as solo instrument, fusing acoustic chamber-pop with analogue electronics, improvisation with more composed pieces, vocal-led songs with instrumental audioscapes. Crucially, even the most obtuse music she creates with Tosta (credited here as arranger, producer, co-writer and multi-instrumentalist) mostly falls on the sweeter side of wonky, the sunny side of abrasive. This is art-pop in the.