In Krakow, Fratti and Tosta took on an ambitious challenge. Commissioned by Unsound Festival and with Polish government funding, they will perform Fratti's music—mostly songs from Se Ve Desde Aquí— accompanied by local players: percussionist Hubert Zemler and a quartet of flute, trumpet and two French horns from the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna ensemble. (“I love the French horns — they sound like Pegasus,” Fratti marvels. When festival directors offered them the possibility, she says, “We were like No moms, we have to use the fucking french horns.”)
I'm sitting through the first of two long days of rehearsals. The process is not always smooth. Fratti and Tosta, accustomed to improvisation, sit anchored on their banks of effects pedals, facing the other players. They've arranged the parts of the wind section digitally, working with MIDI instruments in their rough sketches, but certain parameters – physiological limits, like how long a flautist can play without getting out of breath or how fast the blood flows from French horns ». pursed lips—offer new complications. There are also cultural clashes, although whether this is the case of Central Europe vs. Latin America or academics vs. improvisers, no one seems sure. (Later, Fratti tells me, the whole ensemble will go out drinking together and all tensions will dissolve.)
At one point Fratti wants to know what it might sound like for the French horns to try a sweeping downward glissando. aims for doom-metal gravitas. No matter how tense things get, though—the get-togethers she and Tosta have arranged are extremely difficult—she remains an optimistic leader. “Can you play louder?” he asks the musicians. “That last part is really epic. What do you say, let's try it?' Zemler—a sort of go-between for the group, helping to translate Frati's requests into Polish for the other players—turns on his drums at her behest, sacrificing thrust for “packs” of rhythmic bursts. French horns remove their mouthpieces and blow airy white noise through them. Fratti saws her strings and sings without amplification. Tosta declares abominable feedback while his vocoder fills the harmonic horizon. The songs evolve into fits and starts. “We're getting to the goblin,” Tosta says encouragingly. “Did you feel it?” Fratti asks, beaming. “I felt it too.”
The following night, they open for acclaimed UK electronic duo Autechre – a formidable, and perhaps mismatched, pair. Autechre make their music with arcane digital processes intelligible only to them. Fratti and her players benefit not only from acoustic sounds (voice, cello, vibraphone, woodwinds) but also entirely human means of communication – not the precision of MIDI, but the flexible, even imprecise timing of a furtive glance, a subtle nod. As fraught as the rehearsals were, in performance, they hit all the marks – the intricate syncopations, the power of doom-metal, the moments where the ensemble falls silent to let Fratti and Tosta soar to their own devices flight coordinates. I feel like I'm watching her become a completely different artist as she lights up in a raucous arching cadenza, her foot firmly on her pedals, rendering familiar refrains in incendiary new shapes.
Watching Fratti's career soar, I've come to suspect that she's not quite the artist—a singer of reassuringly melancholic avant-pop—that I once thought she was. I'm beginning to suspect that she's bolder, less controlled, more visionary – and she's getting bolder. In the cavernous room where Autechre will soon unleash their unsettling, algorithmic onslaught, I'm struck by the idea of her breaking her own songs into novel forms, rebuilding each one from the ground up, note by pulverized note—and doing much the same thing with her own career, record after unexpected record. The game's jagged vectors bring to mind exploding suns seeding new worlds. “We are made of little stars,” I write in my notebook. The goblin is relaxed.
