Brilliant Corners: Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly ‘MESTIZX’.

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Bolivian-born singer and multi-medium performer Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & renowned Chicago expat jazz drummer Frank Rosaly released their debut album MESTIZX (International Anthem / Nonesuch) in May, 2024.

The music creatively infuses Latin rhythmic patterns and oblong swing from pre-and post-colonial Latin America into a collision of avant jazz, art punk, Chicago post-rock, bomba, plena, cumbia, Andean, minimal, electronica, and folk. A wholly original but undeniably universal sound – both of-the-moment and alluringly futuristic – MESTIZX contains points of reference and resonance for fans of Juana Molina, Café Tacvba, Max Roach & Abbey Lincoln, Liquid Liquid, Arto Lindsay, Os Mercenarias, The Ex, Tortoise, Tom Zé, Elza Soares, La Mecanica Popular.

It’s a vast spectrum of sound, but at its core MESTIZX is a conscious collection of auto-biographical statements from Ferragutti & Rosaly on the personalized effects of colonialism on geography, history, and identity. Despite its heavy subject matter, however, MESTIZX finds a lifeline in communal, celebratory, soul-bearing and movement-inducing music. Partners in both marriage and art, the Amsterdam-based Ferragutti and Rosaly dove into the sounds of their respective ancestral roots in Bolivia, Brazil, and Puerto Rico to create a personal meditation on decolonization and the defiant power of ritual and protest. They chose the title MESTIZX – a non-gendered version of the sometimes-slurred Spanish colonial word for a “person of mixed race” – as a means of both challenging and embracing the liminality of their identities and artistic practices.

“MESTIZX stands out not just as a musical album but as an impactful cultural statement” – Glide Magazine

“unquestionably cosmic, but also grounded in the real lives and spaces of artists who refuse to be broken into cultural shards and instead understand themselves as many things at once” – Pop Matters