MESTIZX

Chronique

The perspectives of multi-instrumentalists Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly converge in a place a bit more complicated than just catch-all "Latin music." The Bolivian-born, Brazil-raised Ferragutti and her partner, the first-gen Puerto Rican-American Rosaly, have spent much of their musical careers using their art to come to terms with the way their cultural heritages intersect, diverge, and get subsumed into something more indistinct. MESTIZX was inspired by the Amsterdam-based duo’s efforts to sort this out while simultaneously expressing the breadth of their experiences and those of their ancestors. The range of sounds on the record are enough to bear that out on their own. Ferragutti, who sings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, has cited Chilean-Bolivian folk ensemble Inti Illimani and MPB/Tropicália legend Gal Costa as among her more formative childhood influences, while Rosaly recalls the revelatory effect of seeing Tito Puente perform as a child whose parents still expected him to assimilate.

The weight of the traditions those artists drew from, which then evolved to represent their own updated traditions, supports MESTIZX 's atmosphere of contradiction-battling engagements with their cultural identities. There is a tense, guarded, searching sense to some of its more vulnerable moments, whether it's the way Ferragutti's voice calls down her roots over the mbira-and-piano ruminations of "Invocação" ("I will search/ For the seeds that/ Carry them/ The voices of the grandmothers") or how the meditative cast to the acoustic guitar-driven, analog-synth-laced title cut paces inside the mind of someone who recognizes their background as both colonizer and colonized ("I am the conquered, I am the conqueror"). While not every conflict can resolve itself, these acknowledgements still reveal that they've spent enough time engaging with those struggles, and the work is all the more compelling for it.  Those self-consciously contemplative moments have strong counterparts in the songs that tap into something more outwardly defiant: it drives the conga-roiling, scowling-yet-humane Os Mutantes-style psyche of vulture-capitalist condemnation "Balada Para La Corporatocracia," the '70s Afrobeat-adjacent questioning demands for a solution to our societal dissonance in "Turbulência," and the analog-jungle rumble of "Descend" and its anticipation of a new way of being: "The future will come forth/ An opportunity to shape-shift." © Nate Patrin/Qobuz