JUANA MOLINA - Un Dia

Argentina's Juana Molina made an inauspicious debut in the mid-’90s, with an album that went practically unnoticed (“Rara”; self-released, 1996) and a string of US dates played to empty venues. The long hiatus that followed gave her time to become aware of just how powerful her music was – one of the most original voices of the digital-folk era, built on a vocal approach that verges on pure sound and a loosely expressionist songwriting (with lyrics in Argentine Spanish), able to turn into an alien harmonic sequence through her whispered cries, or into a simple folk ditty that is instead warped by the nuances of her singing (often close to childlike chatter, nonsense rhymes, or the incantatory phrasing of a mystic).

Building on this advanced reshuffling of genres, Molina released “Segundo” (2003) for Domino, “Tres Cosas” (2004) – arguably her peak – and “Son” (2006), more focused on the electronic treatment of the voice. “Un Dia”, her most ambitious mix yet (with particular attention paid to rhythmic framework), is thus an ideal summary of her earlier work.

Right from the start, an almost obsessive vision of dance takes hold. “Un Dia” would be one of the most faithful homages to the Suicide sound, were it not for the Wyatt-ian overtones (vocal rhythm dotted in 2/2, sinister percussive touches), and the heap of dissonances – vocal, electronic, minimal – gradually piled up and used as a perpetual pulse. Above all, here Molina lays out a compelling hypothesis for what a “Moon in June” might sound like in the 2000s. After this burst, “Los Dejamos” is euthanasia in musical form. A minimal, irregular beat and a hushed voice accompanied by metallic resonances (joined by a dark swirl) morphs into a steady ambient-techno throb, with an absorbed chant and a suspension of abstract sounds. Growing ever more rarefied, the piece arrives at a faint, swooning dance that barely takes shape before it vanishes, almost unconsciously.

A mysterious wind then introduces “Los Hongos De Marosa”, which opens with a rhythmic graft in which the voice becomes a siren-like drone while the keyboards brutally remix the harmony. Suddenly a digital-rodeo variation kicks in, as the atmosphere grows ever more intense, brushing against the – once again Wyatt-ian – heights of “Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road”.

From “¿Quien?” onward, things change. A polyphonic folk oasis (with electro counterpoint) hosts diaphanous lyrical solfeggios reminiscent of Enya, which quickly dissolve. The flood of voices that follows has the power to turn the song inside out, like a concert within the concert, built on an extremely delicate raga-rock polyrhythm. In “No Llama” a music box steeped in flamenco guitar is the ghost of a loop serving as the backdrop to wordless choral voices; but her “concerts” no longer even hold together, now aimed purely at a cartilaginous, layered soundscape, entirely dominated by the voice – the thousand voices of the artist – an endless threnody over apathetic throbs and faded percussive tempos. And “Dar” is a gothic sprint full of screeches, with vocals at first whispered, then again multiplied endlessly across several stereo channels, which even allows itself to parody the arrangement (nothing more than a muted, scribbled swing).

As interludes within the imperceptible yet inexorable evolution running through the record, Molina places “Vive Solo” and “El Vestito”, two anti-love-songs that seem simple and disconnected on the surface, but are actually integral to the album's larger discourse. “Vive Solo” proceeds through successive variations (or rather additions), but its pivot is the performer's accumulated vocal ambience. In “El Vestito”, instead, the voice hides behind an intricate arpeggio; little by little it emerges to the ear through a lyrical folk melody, only to end up playing the role of conductor via nonsense nursery rhymes, sound effects and rhythmic drive.

Spectacular and anti-spectacular at once, what we're hearing is a fabulous deconstruction of minimal singer-songwriter music via ethnic, pan-ethnic, humanist and post-humanist inflections. The sequencing of the tracks is already telling in itself, almost as if it shifted from a condition of organic structures endowed with a life of their own (high chaos) to a perpetual irradiation of vital energy (low chaos). It is, then, more than a skilful album of music applied to theosophy: it's a representation of the spirit of the times, of our times, or of a crystallized time. Juana Molina (Buenos Aires, 1967), once a minor actress in South American TV comedies and a support act for Feist on her 2008 tour, has found her own path to the zeitgeist.

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28/12/2008