Tracklist
1 | Con Esfuerzo | |
2 | Desde El Cielo | |
3 | No Se Ve Desde Aqui | |
4 | Esta Vez | |
5 | Cuestion De Tiempo | |
6 | Algo Grandioso | |
7 | Cada Musculo | |
8 | Deja De Empujara | |
9 | Siempre Tocas Algo |
Guatemalan cellist and composer Mabe Fratti's new LP marks another step in a remarkable run of releases. It is possibly her most revealing one to date; showcasing a sinuous and tensile sound coupled with a confident and clear-eyed worldview.
»Se Ve Desde Aquí« is a decisive shift away from Fratti’s most recent works, which were more enigmatic in tone. Fratti sees her new music as “drier” in texture and more on the front foot in terms of setting out emotion: she describes the results as “less protected”. According to her, the sound is “informed through the aesthetics of rawness, and a ‘dirtiness’”: sampling expressions within improvisation, or extreme hi-fi dry sound. This noisy instrumentation is set against “the tools of melodic lines and harmony”, leading to a trademark richness, but one now more judiciously applied to set up a moment: “I did layering but it's more in specific moments. Basically my whole idea was to be as raw as possible and try to avoid overdubbing the same instrument as much as I could, of course always leaving space to break my own rules in the process.
Mabe Fratti is always on the lookout for new ways to express herself and to reflect her surroundings; she sees this as a process of continual “sonic transformation”. Not that she sees her method as unique: “I believe this happens to a lot of musicians, that in the interim when you finish a record and you release it you learn [new] things and change your philosophy towards what you want to sound like.”