An acclaimed new voice in experimental music, the Guatemalan cellist swapped scaling literal and creative peaks for a more exploratory mindset, finding community and fertile collaborations in Mexico City’s improv scene
When Mabe Fratti turned 18, she decided she wanted to celebrate by climbing a volcano in her native Guatemala. “I had climbed a couple of small ones and I wanted to climb a slightly bigger one,” says Fratti, now 31. On the ascent, she and her friends got robbed. “We were so alone, it’s such a juicy situation!” Since then, she realised, “maybe I’m not so much of a hiker. I just like to play in fields or go into the forest.”
The revelation foreshadowed a similar shift in Fratti’s approach to playing the cello. Even as a teenager borrowing a communal instrument covered in stickers to indicate the correct finger placings, she had bristled against the academy and craved an experimental approach. Still, her aim was to create an era-defining masterpiece. But now, she says, “instead of trying to find the beautiful and amazing piece that is meant for history to keep, or whatever, I changed my mind into more of a discovery path. What would happen if I would like to make something groovy? Or an album with only cello automatised with voice? A very distorted cello album with vocals that are super heavy? This is the kind of thing that I want to discover more.”
