The best creative partnerships rarely start with a plan. Bill Orcutt and Mabe Fratti’s first collaborative album, “Almost Waking,” released May 22 via Unheard of Hope, Tin Angel, and Meat Machine, began with a shout-out in a music magazine and a cold email — and it sounds, improbably, like two people who have been playing together for years.
The origin story is almost too good. In a 2024 Baker’s Dozen feature with The Quietus, Fratti — the Guatemalan cellist, vocalist, and composer based in Mexico City — cited Orcutt’s 2017 self-titled solo album as a key inspiration, praising his playing as aggressive yet melodic, with a scratching quality that cuts through. Orcutt, the San Francisco guitarist whose work with the noise-rock duo Harry Pussy and his subsequent solo acoustic recordings have made him one of the more genuinely uncompromising figures in American experimental music, stumbled across the interview and reached out. He’d already heard of Fratti through drummer Chris Corsano, a longtime collaborator who had played with her and spoken highly of her work. From there, the two began trading files across roughly a year, Orcutt from San Francisco and Fratti from Mexico City, the album taking shape at Tinho Studios in CDMX and in what the credits simply call “the Living Room” in San Francisco.
The process was asymmetric in the best way. Orcutt sent freeform guitar improvisations; Fratti, working with her Titanic bandmate and partner Héctor Tosta (who records as I. La Católica), excavated what she describes as the “harmonic possibilities” buried inside Orcutt’s raw submissions, then built cello arrangements and occasional vocals around them. Tosta receives arrangement credits on tracks 1, 3, 4, and 6. The album was mixed by Santiago Parra and mastered by James Plotkin. The result is eight tracks — six instrumental, two with vocals — clocking in at just over thirty minutes and feeling, somehow, both complete and like it could go on forever.
What makes “Almost Waking” work is that neither artist tries to smooth the other out. Orcutt’s guitar on the opening title track is immediately, recognizably his: prickly, percussive, with clusters of notes that feel less composed than excavated. Fratti’s cello enters within seconds, bowing long legato lines that don’t soften the guitar so much as orbit it. The album’s second track, “El inicio es cuestión de suerte,” flips the dynamic entirely: Orcutt retreats to a curling guitar ostinato while Fratti layers harmonized vocals — the only track on the record where she, in her own words, goes “on with the idea of harmonizing shamelessly” — that feel both intimate and cavernous. It’s one of the album’s most immediately striking moments, and one of its most patient. On “Forced & Forced & Forced,” the cello takes on something closer to distortion, cutting through Orcutt’s repetition with an urgency that almost tips the track into rock music before pulling back. “The Heaven of Our Misery” does something quieter and stranger — a haunted opening that builds toward what might generously be called a chorus, Orcutt’s guitar flickering at the edges while Fratti’s cello carries the weight. When Fratti’s voice returns, on the spare and beautiful “Todo puede ser error,” Orcutt opens up more space between his arpeggios, letting her vocal performance carry the emotional weight without the layered harmonics of the earlier track.
Fratti has described the record as having “a nostalgic vibe” — which is accurate but undersells it. There’s grief in “Steps of the Sun,” something spectral in “Arise from Graves and Aspire,” and something almost pastoral in the closing “A Rural Pen,” and the album’s brevity gives it the shape of a dream you’re trying to hold onto after waking. Which is, of course, the whole point. Two artists, thousands of miles apart, sending each other pieces of sound and trusting that the other person would know what to do with them. Somehow, they always did.
