Ahead of her appearance at The Barbican tomorrow, Guatemalan experimental cellist and composer Mabe Fratti talks Alan Pedder through the pivotal songs in her life.
Since launching with their first week-long event in 2008, Polish music collective Unsound has become a global institution and almost unrivalled champion of the experimental and avant-garde.
Alongside their annual October festival in Kraków, the Unsound brand now includes a record label, booking agency, fashion collabs, publications, and worldwide programming of special ‘dislocation’ events often featuring specially commissioned new works from leftfield contemporary musicians and composers.
For the latest of these special events, Unsound returns to The Barbican tomorrow night with a headline performance from London-based artist and composer Mica Levi alongside the groundbreaking Polish chamber ensemble Sinfonietta Cracovia. Joining them on the bill are Raphael Rogiński, an extraordinary guitarist whose most recent album was put out through the Unsound label last year, and experimental cellist, guitarist, and singer Mabe Fratti, who has emerged over the past 5 years as one of the contemporary music scene’s most charismatic and inspiring young composers.
Looking back 10 years later, Fratti recalls that time as being “a very psychedelic experience” that expanded her horizons in every conceivable way. “It was my first experience of being invited to come and play somewhere, and I got to meet all these like-minded and incredible musicians who were very influential to me,” she says, smiling down into her camera phone from a noisy café in Guatemala City, where she’s been visiting friends and family for the holidays.
Among her new friends at the sound camp were German music legends Gudrun Gut and Joachim Irmler, who at the time was a member of Faust, as well as other Latin American noise and experimental artists like Julian Bonequi, who introduced Fratti to the music of [South Korean cellist] Okkyung Lee. “I was pretty much like a sponge during that whole experience,” she says. “And I still feel like I am in that learning process. Even though it’s been 10 years, it’s gone very fast, and while I’ve learned so many things it always seems like not enough. Time is very weird!”
Having fallen hard for the Mexico City lifestyle, it wasn’t long before Fratti had packed up her life in Guatemala and moved there, where she met Tosta and made a point of absorbing as much of the local music scene as she could possibly manage. From there, the inspiration came in spades. In the 5 years since her self-produced, open-hearted debut Pies Sobre La Tierra, Fratti has released three further solo albums – including last year’s groovy Sentir Que No Sabes, a Best Fit album of the year – plus acclaimed collaborations with Gudrun Gut and Mexican artist Concepción Huerta, and albums from her other bands Amor Muerte and Titanic, a duo she formed with Tosta at home.
Her reputation as a live act is even more towering. On stage, she’s a riveting presence with a clear mastery of her instrument, whether playing powerfully loud and dirty or wresting the most gorgeous, quivering beauty from its four strings. Tomorrow’s show at The Barbican will be Fratti’s fourth time playing an Unsound event, following on from performances in Kraków, New York City, and Adelaide, Australia – each one in a different configuration. In Adelaide, it was just Fratti and Tosta playing as a duo; in the US, they were joined by improvisational drummer Chris Corsano; and in Kraków, they played with Warsaw-born percussionist and composer Hubert Zemler, alongside the contemporary music ensemble Spółdzielnia Muzyczna.
For tomorrow’s performance, she’ll be joined by her “OG drummer” Gibrán Andrade, who she describes as one of her teachers. “He became a very good friend when I’d just arrived in Mexico City, and we’ve been playing together a lot over the years,” she says. “I’m excited that he’s coming to the UK this time.”
Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, Fratti says she feels like things are more defined and stable than they’ve been since her debut. “I was telling Héctor the other day that this year seems to be like a ‘reap year,’ if that makes sense,” she says. “It’s very crazy for me to see a whole year already planned out.” Good news for Titanic fans though – she and Tosta are keen to put out their second record later in the year. “It’s more song-based than the first one, a little bit more traditional in that sense,” she says. “It sounds so good, so beautiful. I’m very excited about it.”
When choosing her Nine Songs, Fratti says she wanted to tell a more or less chronological story, from her first exposure to contemporary classical music as a 12-year-old through to one of the more recent obsessions filling her ever-curious mind.
“Diálogo” by György Ligeti
BEST FIT: György Ligeti was a contemporary classical composer who grew up in Romania but spent most of his life in Vienna. I know he’s been a big influence on you, and I love the story of how your dad introduced you to his music.
MABE FRATTI: Yeah, it was very weird because he was coming back from somewhere and bought the record in an airport. My dad doesn’t really listen to much music, so he didn’t know what it was. He’s an engineer so he has quite a cold mind. He just saw that it had a cello on the cover, and I was learning cello at the time, so he was like, ‘Oh, maybe Mabe will like this.’
When I first played it, I thought ‘Wow, this is very crazy music.’ There are so many movements in that piece but the first movement really touched me. I would go back to it constantly, and I still think about it now. I still remember when I heard it first and how it sounded like all of these different techniques that combined into one sort of amphibious piece that was kind of experimental but also had some very melodic parts that made it not feel extremely detached for me. Listening to “Diálogo”, you’re not like ‘Oh, this requires very deep listening,’ because you can also just enjoy it without having to think too much about it. It felt like a very balanced experience when I first listened to it.
My cello teacher was very classically minded, very traditional, and he didn’t really like any of the twentieth century composers. He was like those people who say that Bach is everything. Like, there’s nothing beyond Bach. So, for me, listening to Ligeti was like a door opening for me, showing me what was possible.
I checked out the whole sonata and, wow, that’s pretty advanced listening for a 12-year-old.
[laughs] That’s why I tell you that the first piece is the one that really struck me, because it’s the most digestible.
I’ve watched a lot of videos of other cellists playing it, and that led me to discover people like Oliver Coates. And through that I found out about Mica Levi. So I feel like there’s this big network of things that this piece brought me to, so it’s really nice to go back to it.
“Unison” by Björk
BEST FIT: The next song you've chosen is “Unison” from Björk, which I absolutely love, but it’s not one that people seem to talk about all that much. What makes this track so special to you?
MABE FRATTI: Oh my. Well, in those days, even when I had a CD that I would play again and again, I wasn’t too aware of what was a single or not a single, and I didn’t care too much either. I would find my own single and “Unison”, for me, was absolutely my single of that record [Vespertine].
Björk is the teacher of many, right? And she was definitely a teacher of mine. And she still is. With this song, I feel like the arrangements are super graceful. It’s kind of fun, kind of romantic, and the voices in it are so beautiful. There’s a live version that I was obsessed with too, which might have been the Royal Opera House recording with the choir and the orchestra.
I was at that show! It was mind-blowing.
I would have loved to see that. Can you believe that she also played in Mexico with an orchestra and I missed it?
Vespertine is such an addictive album, full of really beautiful songs. It’s so crazy to me that “Unison” is the last song on the record because – and I might be wrong – I feel like people used to put their least favourite song at the end of their albums. I feel like that’s a very classical way of thinking, maybe because the fidelity of the vinyl gets worse as the grooves get closer to the centre. Maybe things changed with CDs. I was a big Radiohead fan and the last songs on their albums were often super special, or there would be some silence and a hidden track, like on Kid A.
Björk is a name that often comes up when people are writing about your work. Do you see any similarities in the way that you create?
I only have a narrow perspective on the way that she works. I feel like, from what I’ve seen, one thing that we might have in common is that she has fun with it, and I like to have fun with making music too. I feel like I can also relate to the way that she seems to be into this hybrid of making songs that are a bit edgy but also melodic. People have also told me that there are some similarities in our voices, but I don’t know about that. Björk’s voice is super special, super different. Maybe they just say that because she doesn’t do this vibrato kind of singing, and that’s also how I sing. Anyway, I think she’s amazing. She’s the mother.
“O Trem Azul” by Milton Nascimiento & Lô Borges
BEST FIT: Your next song is from a super influential album from the Clube da Esquina collective led by Brazilian artists Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges. What a great record, full of incredible musicianship.
MABE FRATTI: Yeah, for me, this record was on repeat for a long time. I feel like it’s one of those albums that really transformed me as a musician and that I still think about as a reference. I first listened to it after I saw Daniel Rossen recommend it on Twitter, ages and ages ago. I looked it up, heard it, and was just amazed. I became addicted to it.
One of the things that I really like about Brazilian music in general, and particularly bossa nova, is that the songs have this harmony to them that just seems so natural even though it can be so complex and so beautiful. I find the melodies amazing, and I really want to learn how to write bossa nova songs myself.
What about this particular song? What is it that you love about it?
The arrangement at the very end, with the organ, is so cool. I also love that it’s a motif that repeats itself in another song, later on in the record. I think that’s a really nice thing that they did – taking the organ arrangement and applying it to strings and then using it in another song. They knew it was good!
I also like the melody of Lô Borges’ voice as well. I have never looked up the lyrics to this album, but Portuguese is very similar to Spanish so I can kind of assume what some of it means. I would try to sing along to the record anyway, but I only knew some of the parts. That happens to me a lot with songs in English, too, because it's not my first language.
From what I’ve read, the album as a whole is quite political but “O Trem Azul” is a more personal song, quite wistful. It’s a song about memories, I think.
Oh I didn’t know that! That’s interesting, and adds another layer of meaning to it.
“La Ruta del Tentempié” by Charly García
BEST FIT: Next up is a song by Charly García, who I know you have talked about in the past as being this huge icon of the Spanish music community. What is it that you love about Charly and this particular song?
MABE FRATTI: I was hanging out with a band I knew in Guatemala one day, and one of them was playing something by Charly García. I remember hearing it and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is crazy good at his lyrics.’
For me, the idea of using Spanish language in music that isn’t necessarily associated with Spanish is so good because it opens up so many spaces for the imagination. I mean, there are hegemonic songs in Spanish. I don’t know how to express it, really, but there’s a lot of Spanish music that is quite traditional stuff. But then this guy, Charly García, comes along and he’s like, ‘I’m going to make rock music in Spanish’ and that became a thing.
For me, that was very inspirational, and I feel the same way about some of the Argentinian rock musicans from the ‘70s, like Luis Alberto Spinetta, who was in a band called Pescada Rabioso. Their album with the green cover [1973’s Artaud] is amazing. The lyrics are pretty surrealist.
With Charly, I love that he can be extremely political and so good at telling it like it is. The lyrics can be really in your face, you know? He has these songs made with synthesisers and drum machines, and it’s almost like he’s screaming at you but somehow it’s cool. He has one of my favourite voices in Spanish music. He’s also had these crazy rock and roll moments, really reckless. Like, there’s this famous video of him jumping out of a hotel room into a pool [from the ninth floor] in front of a load of TV journalists. Everyone rushes into the hotel thinking he’s dead but they come into the back yard and he’s just, like, swimming in the pool and asking for a Coca-Cola.
I’ll have to look that up. Sounds like I need to listen to more of this guy.
Yeah, do it, he's super great. There’s actually a corner of a street in New York named after him now [where the cover image for his second album Clics modernos was shot]. He recorded that album at Jimi Hendrix’s studio, Electric Lady, and it’s amazing. Just super cool, if you like the ‘80s vibe.
“I Like You!” by Arthur Russell
BEST FIT: Next you’ve chosen a track by Arthur Russell from his Calling Out of Context album, which came out in 2004, 12 years after his death. I read on Talkhouse that it was your art school friend Carlos who first introduced you to Arthur and sent you down a YouTube rabbit hole of his music. What happened from there?
MABE FRATTI: Oh Carlos, yeah. He’s not here in Guatemala right now but I always try to see him every time I come here because he’s such a character. He’s also a big Charly García fan. He was in the same friendship group as the band I was talking about earlier.
The first Arthur Russell song he sent me was “This is How We Walk on the Moon” and listening to that I was like, ‘Whoa! This is super cool.’ From there I just dived into his discography, and that’s how I came across Calling Out of Context, which was released late on, right?
Yeah, it came out more than a decade after he died, and it gathers together some previously unreleased stuff.
Yeah, that's right, and it all kind of came from the same era of his life. For me, it’s pure dancing music. It’s so good. The effects that he used on the cello are just, like, wow. I love the way he would distort things. Actually, I asked Richard King [author of recent Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling] about the equipment that Arthur used to use. Some of it we kind of know, like he used a DX7 synth and recorded on four-track or something, but a lot of the sounds he made on this record are so special. It's a real ear candy experience.
For me, Arthur Russell is a life changer, as he had been for many I would say. He was such an original guy and I became such a big fan. It’s been very touching for me that after learning about him I started to meet some of the people who were related to him somehow. Like Phill Niblock, who shot and directed two films with Arthur.
I was sad to hear that Phill passed away recently. He was a real original too.
He was. He was a big original, and he was so much fun. I remember meeting him in Oaxaca, at a festival, and he was screening some of his video recordings with a live soundtrack using ProTools on his computer. He was so, so loud. I was like, ‘Whoa man, you’re, like, 80-something and you’re so rock and roll!’
He had such an excellent energy, so I was grateful to meet him and we talked about Arthur. I also got to meet Peter Zummo, who played trombone on Arthur’s records. So I've met this little network of people that knew him, and that for me is a mindfuck kind of thing. I always asked for stories about him.
When Travels Over Feeling was released last year, there was a tribute concert at The Barbican and Arthur’s partner, Tom Lee, was there on stage introducing some of the music. It felt really special to be there.
Oh my god. I’ve heard so many beautiful things about Arthur’s partner. He’s been super generous with the archive and has become like an open door for musicians to immerse themselves into Arthur’s life and work, which is so great. I saw another thing related to the book last year, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I went to see the Wordless Music Orchestra playing the whole of Arthur’s Tower of Meaning, which is instrumental music that he originally wrote for a play. It was super cool. So great.
“The Seventh Seal” by Scott Walker
BEST FIT: You’ve previously talked about Scott Walker’s Tilt album being a perfect 10 for you. This track, released in 1969, predates that album by more than 25 years. What makes “The Seventh Seal” such a memorable song for you?
MABE FRATTI: I think because it was my first time really hearing Scott Walker. Scott 4 was my first Scott Walker record, and this is the first song on it. And actually the reason I listened to it was because of Radiohead. I have a friend called Fernando here in Guatemala who I used to be in a band with, and we were very big fans of Radiohead – I still am – and because of that we would listen to everything that the band would recommend. There was this documentary on Scott Walker [30th Century Man] that Radiohead were in, so we had to see that when we learned about it.
After that, Scott Walker then became a very big thing for us. I just love the way he handled his career, and how his music just became weirder with time. I’m a fan of those kinds of people. Like, the way he just stopped making music for, like, 15 or 20 years. I don’t know if this is true but I heard Scott’s manager once called him while he was on that break and asked him where he was, and Scott said he was in Ohio or somewhere like that, painting. The manager was like, ‘Oh nice? What kind of paintings are you making?’ and Scott said, ‘I’m painting houses.’ [laughs] I think that’s amazing. He had this moment of restructuring himself, of silence, which I think is very, very brave. He was such a character and he’s been like a guiding star for me.
It's interesting with “The Seventh Seal” because I feel like the arrangements sound Spanish somehow. I don’t know how to explain it. I remember also being quite analytical about the record at some point and noticing that there’s no bass drum throughout the whole record. I’m not sure if I am totally correct, but that was my impression. I also really like the way he created these very complex arrangements and just sang over them so freely. He was very good at making something so complicated sound so natural. I really feel at home with this song, and it makes me want to do better with my own music. Listening to Scott Walker makes me feel like I still have a way to go, because he is, like, the god. The North Star.
Have you ever watched the Swedish movie by Ingmar Bergman that this song is based on?
I’ve seen other Ingmar Bergman films, like Persona, but I haven’t seen The Seventh Seal. I’ve only seen a few scenes and some pictures, like the famous one where the knight is playing chess with Death. But I have to see it. It’s a classic, right? That’s what it is.
“I Wear Your Ring” by Cocteau Twins
BEST FIT: I know you are a big fan of Heaven or Las Vegas, on which this track features. What makes “I Wear Your Ring” stand out for you?
MABE FRATTI: For me, it’s the modulations that they make between the chorus and the verses. Again, it’s quite a complex thing that Cocteau Twins do but it sounds so natural. You can just sing it without really thinking about what is going on between the lines, that you are modulating when you are singing. The way that Elizabeth Fraser sings… just wow. She’s another North Star for me, and Cocteau Twins in general. They’ve been a big, big influence on me. They’re like Ligeti and Scott Walker. Just these resonating musicians that last for a lifetime. I haven’t stopped listening to them. They came to stay.
It was actually Carlos who introduced me to them. There are two big things that he’s given to me musically, Arthur Russell and Cocteau Twins. He was kind of casual about it, just like ‘Hey, listen to this,’ and I was like, ‘Yo, this changed my life!’ I really appreciate the friendships I have with people like Carlos and Fernando, and that we can share this very special music each other.
Another thing I like about Cocteau Twins is that they had no fear of being playful with words and non-languages. At first I was like, ‘Oh maybe I want to do that as well,’ because it’s a whole other vibe, and also because I always write my lyrics later. So I did kind of work in that way at the beginning but eventually I adopted words, just as they did, but I really liked their openness to doing things that are unusual. I would really like to read a history of Cocteau Twins. Maybe a good biography, because I’m very curious.
Simon Raymonde from the band put out an interesting autobiography last year, which talks about his experience of the Cocteau Twins days. I hope Elizabeth writes hers someday.
Oh man, me too. I’ve heard that she’s super shy, but I don’t know how true that is. I really would like to see her live someday, even if it’s just one song with Massive Attack or something.
I got lucky and saw her at the Royal Festival Hall in London, way back in 2012, as part of the Meltdown Festival curated by ANOHNI. She played a whole set and ended with “Song to the Siren”. It was amazing to see.
Oh wow, yeah, I would have cried. I would have cried so much. I hope to see her too someday. I really hope so. I’ve seen that Kate Bush maybe wants to play live again. I read that somewhere and I was like, ‘What?!’
Can you believe it’s already been 10 years since her London shows?
Wow, that’s crazy. I wish I could have seen that. These women are amazing. I really hope that Elizabeth Fraser makes a comeback album or something.
Did you listen to her sort-of-new band Sun’s Signature? They put out an EP a few years ago.
No! I didn’t! I need to Google that right now. Wow, it’s crazy that I didn’t know about it. There is just so much music all the time.
“Ascension Day” by Talk Talk
BEST FIT: On the subject of artists who are quite free with language, let's talk about Mark Hollis and Talk Talk now. I know that their album Laughing Stock has been an important one for you over the years. What draws you to “Ascension Day” in particular?
MABE FRATTI: I think it’s so nice that that’s the name of the song. Because of the way it goes up and up and up and makes you feel so excited, and then it ends so suddenly like they just cut the tape or there was some kind of technical problem.
But, yeah, Laughing Stock is very important to me. I became such a fanatic of this record, and the more that I read about its history the more obsessed I became with it. I think I’ve said this before but like there’s a Reverb article written by Nick Zanca that talks about the technicalities of how that album was made, like how they recorded [Lee Harris] playing drums for 8 hours or something, non-stop, and then just cut out little parts of that. They had this very big and meticulous process of editing, and I really like that style of creating. It’s interesting to me that you can listen to a song like “Ascension Day”, which has this amazing guitar solo, and be like, ‘Was this guy playing nonstop for hours before eventually getting to that part and what came before or after that?’
I love Laughing Stock as a whole, but “Ascension Day” is my favourite song from it. If I want to listen to something that is going to nurture me a lot, this is definitely one of the songs that I will listen to. It makes me feel powerful somehow, and I love how the sound becomes kind of feral at the end. The drum sound is so cool too, and I feel like the way that the album was mixed is, for me, a really good reference. The drum snare sound is amazing. It sounds very loose and I really like that.
I’m probably going to say that everything on this list is like a North Star to me, but Laughing Stock is also like a mixing map for me. I even decided to use the U87 microphone because I read that it was the mic that Mark would always use for his voice, so I wanted to use it for my voice as well. So, yeah, I’m obsessed, and, again, I love how Mark Hollis kind of just got weirder with time. I like the way explored different ways of making music, like how he went through a process of moving away from using synthesisers because he didn’t really like them. I’m not anti-synthesiser myself, I actually really like them, but I thought his approach and his language was so interesting.
“Oasis” by Abdul Wadud
BEST FIT: This track comes from Abdul Wadud’s only solo cello album, 1978’s By Myself, which was reissued in 2023 after his death at 75 years old. How did you first come across Abdul’s music, and what’s your reason for choosing “Oasis” here?
MABE FRATTI: I first came across Abdul when I was in Mexico doing a workshop with a couple of improvisers, including [Mexican-American saxophonist] Tony Malaby and a double bass player [Jason Roebke]. I was in the room with Tony and he was a very tough teacher, but in a good way. He challenged me to play louder, and he recommended that I listen to this album.
For me, it felt like such a powerful way of playing the cello and I come back to it a lot as a reference because of the way he mixes melody and noise. It’s very unusual, very weird, so it was really a learning experience for me. Especially with “Oasis” and the first song “Camille”. Those are the two that I keep coming back to and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, what is he doing here?’ It seems like he’s using other kinds of tunings as well as playing in this unusual way. So in that way he became another voice that I really want to learn from. Improvisation can be so challenging. I see other people who are very, very into that kind of music, like free jazz and all that, and I find it really interesting.
I still feel like I am learning from all of the people we’ve talked about, essentially, but I put Abdul at the end because I feel like he’s the latest input in my learning experience, which, you know, feels so infinite.
I was reading around about this album and I saw that other cellists like Tomeka Reid and Lori Goldston also really love this record, and Lori especially described Abdul Wadud as a huge influence on a whole generation of improvisational cellists.
Lori Goldston said that? Wow. I mean, he really was amazing. You listen to By Myself and it’s powerful, it’s groovy, it’s noisy, it’s melodic – there are so many things going on, even though it’s just him and the cello and probably just one mic, I would say. So I definitely agree. A big, big influence. You should definitely listen to “Camille” as well, because it’s also so, so good.
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