JUANA MOLINA - Doga

What further sets this work apart is its constant search for new sonorities: Juana Molina, without ever abandoning Argentine musical tradition, has experimented with modern techniques and languages, introducing techniques like the loop well before other artists and training keyboards and other electronic contraptions with an avant-garde vision, minimalist but also prog. Her discography is marked by continuous evolutions and unprecedented approaches to the vast array of synths and modulators available to her. Thirty years of restless, gripping sequences of drone-music, loops, guitar transfigurations and vocals as bewitching as a siren's song, a crescendo that never lets up and which in "Doga" goes well beyond expectations.

Almost a hundred hours of recording preceded the making of this new album. It took the skilled hand of young producer Emilio Haro to bring order to a flood of ideas, first whittled down to 30 hours and then reworked into their final form, consisting of just 55 minutes of pure sonic alchemy.

Ambition and innovation are two terms that keep recurring in contemporary critical writing, lexical escamotages often synonymous with a lack of ideas or excessive creative self-indulgence, but for Molina they're just two ordinary words that have little to do with the intense, pure beauty of these ten compositions. Her music is ambiguous and seductive, solemn, majestic and otherworldly without ever flaunting it (the two enigmatic, complex tracks that open and close the album, "Uno Es Árbol" and "Rina Soi"), caressing and affable even when the sound stays cold and bare as on an old Cluster album – "La Paradoja". 

"Doga" is a collection of songs that doesn't shy away from oblique pop strategies ("Desinhumano"), that engages with romanticism only to upend its very essence with a melody as simple as it is perfect ("Siestas Ahì"), and is, on top of that, a constant flourishing of ideas and daring instrumental solutions: from the pulsing, hybrid jazz-glitch of "Indignan A Un Zorzàl" to the guitar scrape that intrudes on the crescendo of "Va Rara", to the bouquet of guitars that sounds like a string section on the evocative, anarchic "Miro Todo", a track that could have come straight off one of Faust's earliest recordings.

With "Doga" Juana Molina confirms herself as one of the most innovative and stimulating artists on the contemporary music scene. In the hands of the Argentine musician, the avant-garde becomes accessible musical material, never forcibly highbrow or intellectual: no gimmicks, no triumphant announcements, just pure creation as an art form built to last.