On a late Wednesday afternoon, the East London sun bends under Café Oto’s daytime awning through wood-framed windows and bounces off the chalk-white walls onto the bookshelf in the corner of the room. Guatemalan-born cellist and composer Mabe Fratti stands inquisitively over it, poring at the spines of essays and novels, pulling them out and placing them back on the shelf. More books are scattered across a big, circular mid-century table to her right – alongside near-novelty sunglasses and half-drunk drinks – while a smaller, more considered pile of books – Anthony Braxton’s Forces in Motion and Manon Burz-Labrande’s Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird – rest on the piano. Mabe’s tour manager, Max – a big Dutch man dressed like a cowboy – gently stops a café worker tidying them up as she clears the room of coffee-drinkers ready for soundcheck.

It’s the beginning of Mabe’s two-night residency in Dalston with her band, guitarist Héctor Tosta and drummer Gibrán Androide. The three of them mosey to a seat, speaking like old friends in interchangeable English and Spanish. Individually, they’re recognised players at the heart of Mexico City’s experimental scene, but it’s Mabe who’s become their overseas emissary. Her presence is immediately studious and warm. It figures, for her solo work to hold the inordinate capacity to venture deep and soar high: tracks like ‘Desde el Cielo’ and ‘Cada Músculo’ from her latest album, Se Ve Desde Aquí, revel in melody, where plaited strands of vocal and cello barely break eye-contact before shattering in a squall of brass and synth. Later this year sees the birth of two new collaborative projects: Titanic – which centres Mabe’s voice over Héctor Tosta’s compositions – and Amor Muere, where Mabe lines up with fellow Mexico City experimenters Gibrana Cervantes, Concepción Huerta and Camille Mandoki. “But we’re all here because of you,” grins Gibrán, as Mabe bashfully contests that she shouldn’t be these projects’ mouthpiece, before reluctantly grinning back.

Her journey to this point has been undulant – a cellist by design, after respiratory problems stopped her playing the saxophone. She started performing with the children’s orchestra in Guatemala, an academy attached to the Sinfónica, which advocated for the accessible learning of classical instruments. Her self-discovery can be attributed to a CD of new age wolf sounds and an evangelical church that taught her the meditative state of improvisation but thought that she had a demon trapped inside her. She emphasises, all-too-modestly, that she’s only found this measure of success by being available. She bought herself a cheap microphone, and after years of playing in local bands, a representative of the Goethe-Institut on the hunt for Guatemalan musicians stumbled across Mabe’s Soundcloud recordings and offered her a paid-for residency in Malinalco, Mexico.

“Your map is very limited when you get into a new place, right?” she says. “You cannot travel anywhere without feeling like you’re in a giant city. I knew I needed to go to concerts and learn about this new scene that we do not have in Guatemala. It was mind-blowing to go and see. To go to [Mexico City jazz venue] Jazzorca. To go to what was known then as Terraza Monstruo – all these DIY places with this very free music.” Her arms stretch out describing the scale of these clubs and the city’s improvisational scene, where spaces refuse to sell alcohol (it’s a distraction) and nurture musicians as artists rather than employees. She smiles and puts down her glass of wine. “That’s when I started to make friends and feel at home,” she says. “I have friends in Guatemala too, of course, but they’re cooks, one is a barrister, one used to work in a zoo. But these people [in Mexico City] were involved in this movement. That’s how I met everyone from Amor Muere, for example, and then a musician who connected me with Héctor from Titanic.”

Born into a Christian family, Mabe’s parents weren’t musical but her father used to bring home CDs to inspire her. “There was either Christian music, Disney music or classical music,” she laughs. “And then he sometimes brought home new age animal music. Like, wolf sounds. That was really nice. I enjoyed those CDs with the new age and animals. And then once he brought me a Ligeti CD. He didn’t know it was a Ligeti, he just saw the cello player on the cover and thought, ‘Oh this is for Mabe!’ And then when I listened, I was like, ‘What the fuck is this!’ I was ten years old but the first movement did something to me. I had some perspective of the whole.” When she started playing with the church orchestra as a teenager, her brain was hard-wired to traditional classical music. “It was nice to hang out with musicians, but it was a neo-pentecostal church.” She inhales. “If you don’t subscribe to an ideology it’s the worst to follow the etiquette of the thing. I started playing in the middle of my teenage years when I was quite rebellious. My parents were like, ‘Oh lost child’”– she creaks an impression of a stricter voice – “and then I was sent to evangelical school. You know, they thought [Japanese trading card game] Yu-Gi-Oh! was satanic. They thought that I had a demon. The band was hilarious – very good players actually. Very good musicians. And then I guess there was no demon inside me. I was exorcised.”

She’s quick to clarify that she’s not a teenager anymore who doesn’t care what her parents think. “My mother reads the bible every night,” she smiles, “they’re human – maybe this is their reason for being alive. I really respect that monastic reading.”