“MESTIZX” is the debut album from Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly—their first as co-composers and musicians, though they’ve both played with many, many other folks. It’s a remarkable album: searching, morally and politically outspoken, wildly entertaining. Folk songs that stylishly blend three or four traditions of music from the Americas at once; big noisy jams that zig and zag while Ferragutti sings about connecting, or wanting to connect, with ancestors whose lifeways she feels separated from by modern society and extractive capitalism; imperious clattering declarations, songs of camaraderie and fellow feeling, beautiful and energizing defiance. An album of exploration that also draws inspiration from legends like Violeta Parra, Victor Jarra, Gal Costa, and others.
A good listen and a shot in the arm. So many of the songs on the album are emotionally affecting—even without (for me) an easy understanding of most of the lyrics, which Ferragutti sings in Portuguese, Spanish, and English—just the marriage of the music and Ferragutti’s singing is an incredibly potent combo. And Ferragutti’s singing communicates many moods with changing tones, dynamic, character: You can feel her passion, her yearning, her anger, her dissatisfaction, her wonder, her condemnation.
The album starts with “Invocação.” Percussion, gorgeous mbira phrases, synths, piano, and Ferragutti’s gentle, wistful vocals. She sings here about searching for the voices of her grandmothers and wanting to understand their lives as they lived them—their fears and their dreams and the things they did in their daily existences. “I just want to see/their eyes and let them/transport me to their/life time.” Ferragutti sings this initial part of the song with such strong, sorrowful, moving desire, and it shifts into an even more direct wish—almost like a command to the universe from Ferragutti—in the latter part of the song, when the synths come forward and she declaims about “opening the doors of forgotten times, erased by shame, by blindness,” to witness those lives in the past.
“Destejer,” the second song on the album and the first single, seems of a piece with “Invocação,” as Ferragutti sings about the present conjuring forth the past and informing the future, and also how tentacular roots connect her to her ancestors. She also sings here about how she’s not “raw material,” one of the first instances (of many) on the album where she and Rosaly—through lyrics and sound choices—express their ecological ethic and opposition to resources extraction and exploitation. Musically, “Destejer” is a wonder: a field of sounds blooming and receding, so many minute touches of percussion, the interplay of cornet (the great Ben LaMar Gay) and flute (Rob Frye), Farfisa organ and other keyboards.
The last part of this album is a juggernaut: “Descend,” “Writing with Knots,” and “Sirinus” are all powerful statement songs. Ferragutti sings in English on “Descend” and “Writing with Knots,” the only two on the album where she does this, and in these both you get the same sense of her preoccupations, her concerns: thinking about the land, about people’s relationship with the land now and in the past, and the struggle to create a better world for those on the outside looking in. “Writing with Knots” is a massive song, probably my favorite on the album for how Ferragutti sings, which is with all-out commitment. The song is both light and heavy, a galloping, floating anthem. “To break/to allow/to feel electrified/to breath/to not know/to future/to root/to change/to enter subterranean places that feel like home.” And with “Sirinus,” you get this sort of delicate, buzzing tune, a song that feels like it could have come from a thousand years ago, and Ferragutti’s folded-up vocals, where she’s whispering and singing along with a lower-pitched version of herself, a barely hidden double. It’s an otherworldly ending to a truly astounding album.