Carthage was a seafaring empire, combining a fearless approach to travel and trade with an impregnable base. Mabe Fratti’s world is also one that seeks new things in new places, whether they be new sounds, performances, interactions, or collaborations. But Fratti is keen to point out: “the cello was [and is] always part of things.”

In less than a decade, the Guatemalan cellist has built up an impressive body of work. These include four solo records and two with her partner Héctor Tosta, AKA I la Católica, (including a release slated for August 2025) under the moniker Titanic. 2023’s Amor Muere project joins the list, as do collaborations of various hues with Claire Rousay, Concepción Huerta, Gudrun Gut, Belafonte Sensacional, Efterklang, amongst others. This activity points to Fratti’s ability to assimilate the salient points of her life in her recorded work, and quickly move on to something new.

Her earliest releases - 2019’s Pies Sobre La Tierra and 2021’s Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos - show many styles, experiences and attitudes creating a rich, “Sebaldian” patina of atmosphere. Key tenets of Fratti’s sound are in place: lush, often experimental arrangements, slightly offbeat instrumentation and tales of longing, sung in Spanish. Listen to ‘Hacia el Vacío’, on Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos for example, where a tendrilous form of sonic vegetation takes root on the structures Fratti has carefully built up. The mix of experiences and memories often fuse into surprising moments; maybe an updated take on Popol Vuh’s modern-devotional sound can be heard in the electronics in ‘Direccion’ on Pies Sobre La Tierra.

Key throughout are the sonic investigations conducted by the cello. This is heard through plucking techniques, the use of loops, or the resonances provided by long draws of the bow, seemingly from tip almost to ferrule. The cello: “always part of things.”

Mexico City plays a role at two points in Fratti’s musical development. Firstly in 2015, as part of a Goethe Institute residency, where Fratti got to know the city and an eclectic wider community of inspiring musicians and spaces, all spanning a gamut of styles and attitudes. The city’s vibrant creative ecology eventually inspired her to move there. Eventually, she got to meet her partner and collaborator Héctor Tosta by chance at a friend’s house there in 2021. Over time, the pair found big chemistry in each other’s creativity and have been working together closely since, and founded the band ‘Titanic’ in 2023.

The intellectual stimulation of meeting new people in new environments and the foot-to-the-floor thrill of touring, and working around Europe’s alternative network of spaces and festivals eventually played out in her work. Her next solo record, 2022’s Se Ve Desde Aquí, hinted that Fratti’s musical muscle had been stretched by these experiences. A busy 2023 made this progression manifest with the releases of three very different works: Vidrio, the debut of her and Tosta’s project, Titanic; and A Time to Love, a Time to Die, the spoken word and musical collaboration known as Amor Muere. Fratti’s latest solo outing, Sentir Que No Sabes (2024) and Titanic’s new release, Hagen (2025), are bold and investigative, inclusive and very poppy. It is a sound full of colour, light and possibility; underscored by Fratti’s cello, (as we now know, “always part of things”), a refreshing antidote to very uncertain times.

All these records, as well as other recent music, such as 2025’s collaboration with Lucrecia Dalt (Cosa Rara) and other pieces made for installations, exhibitions and film, are born of discussions, jams, rehearsals and stage time. They all have an easy swagger about them. For Fratti’s part, her playing, once quietly investigative and more akin to chamber music, is now - literally - amplified and transferred to a bigger setting. The music is suddenly theatric, epic, public, baroque. Akin to this, there is a noticeably open embrace of her fascination with alternative 1980s pop music. All angles and spaces used to create heightened, dramatic effect.