Mabe Fratti was a fan first. In a 2024 Baker’s Dozen feature with The Quietus, the Guatemalan cellist espoused her love for Bill Orcutt’s self-titled 2017 album. “His style of playing is aggressive but he has tone, he makes melodies, he likes notes. But he also brings a bit of scratching to it,” Fratti said of the experimental guitarist’s work. Orcutt himself stumbled upon the interview and emailed Fratti about collaborating, though he’d first heard of Fratti through one of his longtime collaborators, drummer Chris Corsano, who had previously performed with the cellist and sung her praises. From there, the duo began sharing files and ideas over the course of a year, one from her adopted home of Mexico City and the other from his longtime San Francisco base.
The result is Almost Waking, a suite of eight texturally rich tracks that unite two singular artists with shared compositional affinities. All of the songs stem from freeform guitar improvisations that Orcutt sent to Fratti, who worked alongside Héctor Tosta (AKA I. La Católica), her Titanic bandmate and romantic partner, to embellish with cello and occasional vocals. Fratti and Tosta would listen back to Orcutt’s submissions to excavate the “harmonic possibilities” that lay within, as Fratti describes in press materials. She let those interpretations guide her melodies, and the results are remarkable.
The album’s opening diptych of the title track and “El inicio es cuestión de suerte” lays the groundwork for the ensuing six pieces. On the former, Orcutt’s prickly guitar announces itself immediately, and it’s only a few seconds before Fratti joins him with legato bowing. The sharpness softens when Fratti briefly leaves the mix and Orcutt’s six-string dots the space like stars. Before long, the pair shifts toward granular textures together, picking up in volume and intensity along the way. Though Fratti and Orcutt are never playing in the same room, it sounds like they’re actively responding to each other, rising and falling in tandem, listening and adapting to the atmosphere they’re creating in real time.
Meanwhile, “El inicio es cuestión de suerte” introduces Fratti’s hypnotizing vocals, the only track here in which she layers harmonies over her voice and one of two in which she sings at all. Here, the roles reverse. Orcutt resigns himself to the supporting role, supplying a guitar ostinato that curls around Fratti’s double-tracked vocals like smoke. The spacious production gives Fratti’s vocals a dual identity: she sounds both close-mic’d and like she recorded in a resonant chamber. “Forced & Forced & Forced” sounds anything but; it’s two musicians submitting to intuition and letting their core emotions emerge. Over a guitar line that gradually morphs over the course of four minutes, Fratti drives her cello into the red and delivers one of the record’s most frenzied performances. It culminates in an outro where Orcutt dips out entirely, and Fratti attacks her instrument with such ferocity that you can practically see the strings fray as the piece nears its end.
“Arise from Graves and Aspire” works on a similar level but as the preceding track’s inverse. Fratti’s cello colors the mix with smooth padding, and Orcutt’s spiky guitars tower over the stereo field like peaks in a jagged mountain range. The effect is most striking at the beginning, when the two let their instruments ring out into oblivion for a brief spell before returning to the fore with fierce riffing.
Both artists are compelling enough on their own, but together, they manage to exhume new possibilities within their respective catalogs. They soften and sharpen each other’s playing, and that symbiosis reaches a zenith on the penultimate track, “Todo puede ser error,” the other piece to feature Fratti’s captivating vocals. In C major, the composition assumes a tenor of resolve and optimism, countering the pessimism rooted in the lyrics. Fratti’s tone sounds spectral yet grounded, thanks in part to Orcutt’s guitars that curl around her voice. She sings the song’s title, roughly translating to “everything could be a mistake.” But the words contradict the music that surrounds them. Nothing here sounds like an accident. [Unheard of Hope]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.
