The music of Mexico Metropolis-based collective Amor Muere stretches between dream states and the waking world. The group—comprising cellist and songwriter Mabe Fratti, singer and sound artist Camille Mandoki, violinist Gibrana Cervantes, and digital musician and tape manipulator Concepción Huerta—constructed their mission on a basis of friendship and artistic collaboration. The 4 ladies have been performing reside inside the native scene for years, sitting in on one another’s units and collaborating in a larger-scale multidisciplinary piece written and directed by Mandoki. As Amor Muere (translation: “Love Dies”), they search free expression inside a democratic setting. On their debut album, a time to like, a time to die, they faucet into the reaches of their conjoined minds and extract avant-garde compositions grafted from gritty digital textures, discordant strings, and hovering vocal melodies. Even of their most summary sketches, every musician retains a definite fingerprint. However their work additionally appears hewn by a single set of arms.
To create their debut, Amor Muere expanded and refined materials developed over a number of jam classes lately. Some songs spotlight the dynamics of texture and silence: The wordless “Shhhhh” captures a frantic, creaking dialog between Fratti’s cello and Cervantes’ violin. The dialogue is sparse at first, however whips right into a tangled frenzy as Huerta and Mandoki goad the string gamers with digital blasts and distorted washes of synthesizer. Fratti sings the lead vocal on “LA,” a sun-dappled counterpart to the moody “Shhhhh” that tracks the interaction between bowed strings and digital atmospheres. Her tone is mottled however reflective, like barely smudged glass. “Suave aire sobre la cabeza/Sabe a dónde llegar” (“Comfortable air over our heads/Is aware of the place to reach”), she sings. Measuring the impulse of a breeze that drifts naturally but with seeming goal, Fratti’s lyrics—steeped in dream logic—may be an ode to improvisation itself.
“LA” shares DNA with Vidrio, a brand new album Fratti made with Héctor Tosta below the title Titanic. That report is lighter, extra historically melodic, and depends on Fratti’s delicate, watercolor voice to light up the duo’s vibrant, roving jazz compositions. However with Amor Muere, Fratti is free to wander throughout craggier terrain, and her voice provides a dulcet reprieve from the unusual noises she and her bandmates conjure. On “Can We Provoke Reciprocal Response,” Fratti’s vocalizations intertwine with Mandoki’s smoky timbre, repeating, “Oh, this life/I need all of it once more/I light out,” atop plucked strings and wailing synthesizer. The ambling, round rhythm mimics the music’s inspiration: a each day stroll. Amor Muere deal with the quotidian exercise with a way of marvel, peppering the music with springy, metallic, jaw-harp-like noises, injecting a way of playfulness into the sense of repetitive movement.
