Unheard Of Hope

Orcutt, Bill & Mabe Fratti

Almost Waking

Unheard Of Hope

Mabe Fratti is a Guatemalan cellist, vocalist, and composer based in Mexico City, celebrated for her experimental yet deeply melodic work. Blending cello, voice, synthesizers, and electroacoustic textures, she builds songs that move between improvisation, ambient soundscapes, and off-kilter pop forms. Emerging from Mexico City’s improvisational and experimental scene, she has become a key voice in contemporary avant-pop.Bill Orcutt is an American guitarist and composer known for his raw, highly individual approach to improvisation. A co-founder of the 1990s noise-rock duo Harry Pussy, he helped shape a fiercely abrasive aesthetic that drew from no wave, hardcore punk, and free jazz. Often playing a four-string guitar in unconventional tunings, he combines shards of melody, sudden silences, and surging rhythmic bursts, creating music that feels both primitive and structurally intricate. In parallel with his work as a guitarist, he runs the Palilalia and Fake Estates imprints and develops his own audio software, continuing to blur lines between avant-garde experimentation, song form, and DIY practice.Almost Waking:"I had known about Bill’s music for a while: since his 2017 release under his own name. I connected a lot with his music and I had no idea that years later we would be collaborating! It was a total surprise that we started chatting on the internet of collaborating!—we bounced ideas back and forth, all starting with a series of guitar solo stuff that Bill sent me. I had a great time with the pieces and in some of them had the honor to collaborate with I....

Titanic

Hagen

Unheard Of Hope

Titanic, the project spearheaded by Mabe Fratti and Hector Tosta (aka I. la Católica), return with a sumptuous and life-affirming new album.With Hagen, and their previous release, Vidrio, (2023), the pair are creating a distinctive signature sound in modern alternative pop music. Nobody else sounds quite like them. Both records have an open hearted nature and simple, winning melodies that play off against a taste for drama, spectacular orchestration and a feeling of otherworldly mystery. Hagen is the more ambitious, sometimes more mystical effort. From the opening handclaps of ‘Lágrima del Sol’, (a wonderfully uptempo playground chant translating as a tear from the sun but, surely, not referencing the brand of pineapple wine?), the record dances its way through various mid-to-late-eighties inspirations, lush and widescreen passages of melancholy and vertiginous contrasts.On Hagen, singer and cellist Mabe Fratti once again displays her brilliant knack of speaking to us directly. There is never the suspicion of her playing to the gallery, and the directness of many of the lyrics don’t allow it. Parallel to this, Fratti has an almost magical ability to give Hector Tosta’s melodies, and her and Tosta’s lyrics ones imbued with an insight and meaning that feels otherworldly. Tosta admitted it was “pretty wild to hear Mabe take the interpretations to a different place” and the listener can pick up on the delight Fratti takes in (literally) adding a voice to the many narratives.Like Vidrio, Hagen was partially and additionally recorded at Fratti and Tosta’s house, aka Tinho Studios...

Military Genius

Scarred for Life

Unheard Of Hope

Military Genius (aka songwriter/producer Bryce Cloghesy) delivers the follow-up to his atmospheric 2020 debut Deep Web. Scarred For Life is a genre-flexing mix of bass-heavy R&B, spaced dub, and jazz that is newly grounded within a more traditional rock framework and centered on lyricism. Lead single “Darkest Hour” reflects a head first journey into the unknown. The starting point for Scarred For Life—written, recorded, engineered, and produced by Cloghesy—was to try and make sense of ‘the toll taken by a life lived, and the complex beauty of a reality that can never be repeated or replicated.’ Cloghesy faced his creative crosswords by embracing raw acoustic sounds and a ‘human-first’ approach to the recording process. Ideas were formulated and initially recorded onto cassette tape with minimal editing. Blemishes and artifacts were welcomed, adding to the record’s realism and personal character. Thematically, the album can be approached on a number of planes. The title refers to a gruesome episode in his life in 2012, when he had a near-death experience after falling through a window. Add a debilitating series of panic attacks and depressive episodes to the charge sheet—followed by several significant life changes like a move from Canada to California, getting married, and becoming a father—and it’s clear the record has a lot of heavy lifting to do. The Mojave Desert is maybe the key to the record's soul. Cloghesy has been living in Joshua Tree since 2023, shortly after the birth of his son. A lot of the music feels...

Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water

s/t

Unheard Of Hope

Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water, the self-titled debut from the duo of trumpeter Will Evans and guitarist, synthesist, producer and multi-instrumentalist Theo Trump, arrives like a vault revelation. It feels like a decades-old yet newly unearthed masterwork of gorgeous ambient improvisation, the sort of thing scholars live to research and shepherd into deluxe reissue. The patient, crystalline chords that swell and resonate like a series of confessions; the textured brass murmurs that suggest a ’60s or ’70s Fire Music master at their most poignant. Provocative found-sound experiments threading arcane religious recordings through dystopian soundscapes. Ear-shattering free-noise tumult. Where and when did this music come from? Who are these voices? As it turns out, Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water springs from an engrossing human story, though it isn’t necessarily the one you’d expect. This work of stunning maturity is in fact an entrance by two little-known explorers in their early 20s, who grew up together in Virginia, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It documents one of those perfect, sparkling moments in post-adolescence when big decisions and responsibilities are right around the corner, but for a spell, two young artists are able to create among the comforts and nostalgia of their shared past. It also represents a reunion of sorts, as Evans and Trump connected as toddlers, became inseparable as boys, then pursued independent lives and creative paths as young adults. “Theo is my oldest friend,” Evans says, “and I feel like that’s what this band is—us...

Fratti, Mabe

Sentir Que No Sabes

Unheard Of Hope

Received an 8.4 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. A sense of destiny hangs over Sentir Que No Sabes, Mabe Fratti’s fourth solo-credited album released in a five year span. Her work has always possessed a finely tuned sense of drama capable of expressing a range of emotional states, and across this new album, she conveys the struggle to process various relationships or situations–and the actions that come next. Sentir Que No Sabes, is urgent and clear, poppy, generous and approachable, while showcasing a considerable emotional hinterland. It is also, as Fratti is quick to mention, “groovy.” Written and recorded with her partner, multi-instrumentalist, and co-composer Héctor Tosta (I.La Católica, Titanic), Sentir Que No Sabes, is the result of an intense, detail-oriented process. Fueled by a new confidence gained in their collaborative project, Titanic, and its critically acclaimed 2023 LP, Vidrio, the two hunkered down in the familiarity of their studio (aka Tinho Studios) to bash out the initial sonic coordinates of her new record. “We talked and talked, and discussed ways of playing and recording, until things became inevitable,” Fratti explains. “We recorded a bunch of demos at our home studio and that meant we had a lot of time to re-edit and experiment. We really dug in. We were super focused on detail.” Tosta also took up the controls as producer and arranger-in-chief for all additional instruments. The album was later completed at Willem Twee Studios in Den Bosch in the Netherlands, and Pedro y el Lobo...

Phet Phet Phet

Shimmer

Unheard Of Hope

Shimmer's tones are unexpected, the combinations of instruments far off the beaten trails of familiar genres. It's not quite jazz, not quite neoclassical, not quite soul, but something all its own. Saxophone, clarinet, glockenspiel, cello, pedal steel, synths, guitar & human voice merge in ethereal counterpoints that nod to chamber music, while the rhythm section drives the whole thing forward with an uncanny propulsion that feels cool, self-possessed and hyper contemporary. All the while Shimmer makes sure to keep one foot outside of time—stepping alone toward the ageless inward horizion. Its A-side contains four tightly orchestrated tracks recorded in Mexico City in 2023; the B-side is a single long experiment in texture, which Jarrett Gigore began writing at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 and finished remotely in 2023. Think Jacques Brel's "Je suis un soir d'ete." Think Chicago fusion a la Tortoise. Think the wall-of-sound production of David Axelrod. Think Steve Reich's organs in polyrhythm. Think Arthur Russell's neo-classical Tower of Meaning. Think them all at once, then forget all that and open yourself to something new. Features Mabe Fratti on vocals, cello; I. La Catolica on electric & acoustic guitar, bass, percussion; Marc Miller on electric & acoustic guitar; Gibran Andrade on drums; and Susan Alcorn on pedal steel guitar.

Zummo, Peter

Deep Drive 2+

Unheard Of Hope

Peter Zummo, known for his work alongside Arthur Russell shares a new sonic exploration titled Deep Drive 2+, a revisit of his 2014 album Deep Drive. The record exudes a magisterial air of calm and also boasts what can be described as an elemental quality. Diving deep and soaring high, Deep Drive 2+ can float equally effectively through air and water. This new take on the Deep Drive material feels utterly different. One which—to use a nautical metaphor—finds itself in balmier waters and much more pleasingly adrift from its moorings. The album showcases the talents of Peter Broderick (violin, drums, synthesizer), Joe Carvell (acoustic and electric bass), Mabe Fratti (cello) and Sebastian Rojas (synthesizer and electric organ).

Titanic

Vidrio

Unheard Of Hope

Titanic debut album Vidrio is the collaboration between composer I la CatoIica (Hector Tosta) and Guatemalan experimentalist Mabe Fratti. One could call Vidrio a jazz hybrid record, though once upon a time this music would have been called postmodern; an answer to pop's pre-packaged form, adopting maybe more classical structures to tell a story. In that, this record is reminiscent of Derek Jarman's 1980s contemporaries, The Blue Nile, who made widescreen post-pop that ached with longing for resolutions that seemed to be just over the horizon. And for all the deconstructions, the deliberate raucousness of the sax and the rhythms of the percussion (like waves riding up a shingle beach outside Jarman's cottage), this is still a music that can thread a line back to classical opera whilst nodding along the way to the likes of Terry Riley, or bebop. Over time, and by dint of working closely together, Fratti and Tosta have reached a state of grace that only comes rarely to artists. In this space they can do no wrong: the touch, the decision-making, the clarity of the instrumentation, the knowledge where to apply the emotional press, is nothing short of breathtaking. They need to remember these moments.