Words by Justin Turford

The search for understanding about heritage, history, spirituality, land and people continues to narrate the odyssey that real life and creative partners Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly travel through. Their brilliant debut album for International Anthem, ‘MESTIZK’ (my favourite record of 2024), accumulated their extraordinary musical talents and explorative personalities into a singular sonic world of experimental groove, ritual and magic. Immersive experiences in their ancestral lands combined with a lifetime of creative boundary-pushing released a flood of incantatory power and opened up new possibilities in post-colonial Latinx music.

They haven’t stopped since with both of the duo involved in multiple live and recorded projects (often independently of each other), including international ‘MESTIZK’ performances and a very recent performance in their ongoing home Amsterdam, at Bimhuis with fellow musical travellers Jeff Parker and Rob Frye. They also continue to co-run the community led artists space, The MOLK Factory and its occasional record label, MOLK Records.

So, it’s a delight to welcome a new six-track E.P. release from the pair. Whereas ‘MESTIZK’ drew together a wealth of musicians from the wider improvisational and jazz scenes, ‘O’ keeps it tighter, with only live band member and multi-instrumentalist Ben Boye and the Brooklyn-based experimental artist and trumpeter Chris Ryan Williams joining them on selected tracks. It doesn’t sound or feel like a continuation of the album either, although the single letter songs, ‘O’ and ‘X’ share a certain kinship to it. This new E.P. has a different energy if that’s the right word. Stranger, a deeper scouring through the soil into the otherness of Puerto Rico this time around. Although born and raised in Arizona, Frank has taken on his previously suppressed Puerto Rican identity and it is a shared trip to the island that illuminates this release in many ways when perhaps the album looked more towards Ibelisse’s Bolivian-Brazilian cultural inheritance.

“The land unfolded and revealed itself.. Insects, amphibians, waterfalls, deep jungles, and massive green landforms offered poignant insight to my ancestry.. The territory plays an ancient game of telephone with my three-times great grandmother, through the jungle’s canopy.” - Frank Rosaly

Nobody else that I’m aware of moves around a drum kit like Frank. Drummer and percussionist in one, he uses sticks, hands, brushes and hammers, barrelling intricate polyrhythms that seem to circulate like audible dust devils. And he’s in full flow on the opener ‘Escondida’. Both musicians are talented sound designers alongside their instrumental abilities and throughout the E.P. hallucinatory sounds and discordant textures replace ‘traditional’ instrumentation. Whilst the drums keep its circular timekeeping, ‘Escondida’ is awash with crepuscular chimes, undefined field recordings, Ben’s autoharp and unsteady synthesis, assembling and repeating into something between a jungle’s natural cacophony, a refracted gamelan ceremony and something far older and intangible. Like much of their music, together or in separate projects, a sense of ritual is present, the trance state quite often reached whether planned or not.

There’s nothing more precise than coordinates and ‘18°14'46.3-N 65°47'08.3-W’ pinpoints the direct inspiration for this sonic exploration of the Río Blanco in Naguabo, Puerto Rico. Close to the El Yunque National Forest, its waterfalls and atmospheric landscape appear to have triggered an emotional, even transcendent response in the pair as they carve an otherworldly groove from epic synths, distant voices and bells over the simplest of straight ahead drum patterns that vibrates with the subtlest of dub treatments.

The vintage electro-mechanical keyboard, the Hohner Pianet, gets its moment on the pulsating ‘X’, its rarely heard Rhodes-y tone (played by Ben) adding a retro edge to a song that sounds like an organic techno tune at points. I love Ibelisse’s voice and thankfully, she is front and centre here, her syncopated voz cantadas en español weaving across and through Frank’s hyperkinetic drum groove as layers of tender keys and synths throw splashes of wild colour onto the clouds.

(Check the video below!)

A rhythmic sibling to ‘X’, the title track stretches out over near nine minutes of atmospheric groove, its bomba-inspired polyrhythms and undulating basslines tracing the outlines of mountains and valleys (‘O’ is the Taíno - the region’s original indigenous people - word for ‘mountain’). Vibing like a Latino ‘In A Silent Way’, spacey reverbed trumpet and Ibelisse’s powerfully delivered incantations bring a heightened theatre to the percussive sorcery. It’s a hell of a song.

With lyrics co-written by Frank and Ibelisse. ‘Liberta’ muses on freedom, slavery, ancestral communication and the land’s memory. Spare synthetic chords and natural field recordings are joined by interstellar noises, galaxian messages and broken lullabies. An unsettling sound bath that is too weird to be meditative, it’s a very visual piece of music.

‘Sueño’ behaves as a closing salutation to the ceremony. Bells, group drumming and chanting, the sounds of the street, the experience of their immersion into the home country distilled into a fragmentary memory. Or the beginning of a new ceremony maybe?

Extraordinary stuff from one of the most interesting double acts making musical art on the planet currently. Naturally inclined to experiment and explore, researching and activating their multi-heritage cultures has infused a magic into their music which is undoubtedly, theirs alone. These six enchanted tracks have set high demands for the next album. 10/10.

BUY HERE! https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/o