Mabe Fratti – “Quieras o no”

Andrea Ballesta

Mabe Fratti – “Quieras o no”

Andrea Ballesta

Mexico City’s Mabe Fratti has a new album Sentir Que No Sabes coming out this Friday. After sharing the song “Enfrente” last month, the avant-garde cellist is releasing one more single called “Quieras o no,” which arrives with an accompanying interactive website.

“Quieras o no” (“Whether you want it or not”) first came about as an improvisational live performance, which Fratti and her songwriting partner Héctor Tosta then fleshed out into a full recorded song. Being a cellist who sings, Fratti has been likened to Arthur Russell ad nauseam at this point, but the track’s spare instrumentation, eerie vocoder, and free-flowing melodies warrant those comparisons. Here’s what Fratti said about “Quieras o no” in a press release:

Héctor and I started working on it as the last song we were going to record and came up with the idea of the outro of the song: he was thinking of the old Godzilla theme song and from there we created the fast melody. The lyrics talk about everything around being super complex and chained to unavoidable entropy and how trying to hang on to something fights with the nature of chaos (our human nature of trying to hang on to things, and make things permanent through artificial means most of the time). We’re all super neurotic in the end, as Gibran (Andrade) would say.

That aforementioned website, MabeFratti.World, is described as an “interactive landscape” where “impenetrable disaster runs amok.” Poke around on that website here, and check out the music video to “Quieras o no” below.

Sentir Que No Sabes is out 6/28 via Unheard Of Hope.

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