In Krakow, Fratti and Tosta have taken on an ambitious challenge. At the behest of Unsound Festival and with Polish governmental funding, they will perform Fratti’s music—mostly songs from Se Ve Desde Aquí—accompanied by local players: the percussionist Hubert Zemler and a quartet of flute, trumpet, and two French horns from the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna ensemble. (“I love French horns—they sound like Pegasus,” Fratti marvels. When the festival directors offered them the possibility, she says, “We were like, No mames, we have to use the fucking French horns.”)
I sit in on the first of two long days of rehearsals. The process is not always smooth. Fratti and Tosta, accustomed to improvisation, sit ensconced in their banks of effects pedals, facing the other players. They have arranged the wind section’s parts digitally, working with MIDI instruments in their rough sketches, but certain parameters—physiological limits, like how long a flutist can play without running out of breath, or how quickly the blood drains from the French horn players’ pursed lips—offer novel complications. There are cultural clashes, too, though whether it’s a case of Central Europe vs. Latin America, or academics vs. improvisers, nobody seems quite sure. (Later, Fratti tells me, the whole ensemble will go out drinking together, and all the 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; she’s aiming for doom-metal gravitas. No matter how strained things get, though—the syncopations that she and Tosta have arranged are remarkably tricky—she remains an upbeat leader. “Can you play louder?” she asks the musicians. “This last part is really epic. What do you say, shall we try it?” Zemler—a de facto mediator for the group, helping to translate Fratti’s requests into Polish for the other players—switches up his drumming at her behest, sacrificing propulsive drive for “packets” of rhythmic bursts; the French horns remove their mouthpieces and blow airy white noise through them. Fratti saws at her strings and sings without amplification; Tosta lays down woozy feedback while his vocoder fills out the harmonic horizon. The songs evolve in fits and starts. “We’re getting to the goblin,” says Tosta by way of encouragement. “Did you feel it?” asks Fratti, beaming. “I felt it too.”
The next night, they open for vaunted UK electronic duo Autechre—a daunting, and perhaps incongruous, pairing. Autechre make their music with arcane digital processes intelligible only to them; Fratti and her players avail themselves not only of largely acoustic sounds (voice, cello, vibraphones, winds) but thoroughly human means of communication—not the precision of MIDI, but the supple, even fallible timekeeping of a stealthy glance, a subtle nod. As fraught as the rehearsals have been, in performance, they hit all their marks—the complex syncopations, the doom-metal force, the moments where the ensemble falls silent to let Fratti and Tosta soar according to their own flight coordinates. I feel like I am witnessing her become a completely different artist as she lights into a noisy bowed cadenza, her foot stomping firmly down on her pedals, rendering familiar refrains into incendiary new shapes.
In following the rapid evolution of Fratti’s career, I have begun to suspect that she is not the artist—a singer of reassuringly melancholy avant-pop—that I once thought she was. I have begun to suspect that she is more audacious, less controlled, more visionary—and becoming more so all the time. In the cavernous hall where Autechre will soon unleash their unsettling, algorithmic assault, I am struck by the idea that she is splintering 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 jagged vectors of her playing bring to mind exploding suns seeding new worlds. “We are made of star stuff,” I scrawl in my notebook. The goblin is loose.