Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly’s album for International Anthem, ‘Mestizx,’ Turns Borders to Dust

Andy Moor, guitarist of Dutch anarcho-punk legends The Ex, shreds “Balada para la corporatocracia” apart and rebuilds it.

The current anti-immigration regime in America isn’t just enforcing illegal and draconian policies — it’s actively and illegally strangling the flow of culture, ideas, and histories that have always shaped the world. It’s a narrowing of vision, a forced erasure, and a refusal to recognize that art, music, and identity are inherently borderless. This comes into sharp focus as a new remix from Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly’s album Mextizx arrives, a vivid testament to how music transcends borders even as governments try to tighten them.

Mestizx, released last year, is built on the same principle. It’s an expression of heritage in motion — Bolivian, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, American, Amsterdam-based — but never confined to any single label. The title itself reclaims mestizo, stripping away its colonial weight, removing gender, and turning it into something fluid and unbound.  

Recorded at International Anthem Studios in Chicago, the album features contributions from musicians including Matt Lux, Avreeayl Ra, Ben LaMar Gay, Daniel Villarreal, Bill MacKay, Rob Frye, and Mikel Patrick Avery. The music moves seamlessly among avant-jazz, bomba, plena, Andean folk, cumbia, post-rock, minimalism, and electronic. It doesn’t just acknowledge the messy intersections of identity — it revels in them. If you’ve got 22 minutes, the documentary short above on their work is a revelation.

Ferragutti’s approach is inseparable from the histories she carries, the traditions she reclaims, and the futures she envisions. As she describes it in her website bio:  

My work is deeply interwoven in post-colonial justice, the paradox and beauty between grief and celebration, Andean Cosmology as a source of reclamation, resistance, and resilience. Embodiment embedded in sonic fabrics while speculating myths through word oracles. I am a neo-mestiza, a spiritual activist, a femme defender, and a Moon lover.  

Percussionist Rosaly describes Mestizx as the first time he has truly explored the liminal realms he’s lived with. “I grew up quite Puerto Rican in my home, but was taught to mask it outside my home,” he said in release notes. “This record is the first time I actively give voice to the nuance within myself, allowing me to take ownership of this in-between.”  

Since 2017, Ferragutti and Rosaly have also run Molk Factory, a DIY art and music space in Amsterdam. The space is an extension of their ethos — open, collaborative, fiercely independent — allowing artists to create without borders or compromise.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the two connected with Andy Moor of Dutch political punk band the Ex, a group known for its own commitment to radical creativity and global collaboration. On Monday, International Anthem released Moor’s remix of “Balada para Corporatocracia” (“Ballad for Corporatocracy”). It’s a furious reworking.

This isn’t their first work together. Last year Moor, Rosaly, and baritone saxophonist Giuseppe Doronzo released Futuro Ancestrale, an album that, like Mestizx, dismantles cultural boundaries, weaving ancient traditions with raw improvisation and modern experimentalism.

In a time when governments are intent on shutting doors and building walls, Mestizx serves as a reminder that culture moves how it wants to. It slips through cracks, spills across lines, and refuses to be erased. It’s both resistance and celebration, past and future, an assertion of presence that won’t be denied.