You might not understand what Juana Molina is singing, but I can guarantee you’ll be intrigued, regardless.
Molina is an actress turned experimental songmaker who hails from Argentina, though it’s taken her home country audiences some time to warm up to her even though she was a musician first. Of course, they didn’t know she started working on television so she could afford to play music. They only knew her from TV; she rose to fame in 1988 as the cast member and writer of a sketch comedy show El mundo de Antonio Gasalla (Antonio Gasalla’s World), then earned even more accolades starring in her own show, Juana y sus hermanas (Juana and Her Sisters) in 1991. For a few years, Molina was among Argentina’s most popular comics, winning awards and acclaim and generally hailed as A BIG DEAL (the press called her “the new Niní Marshall.”) In 1993, she was pregnant and laid up in bed and doing that thing you do when you’re pregnant and laid up in bed—examining all your life decisions, past and present, figuring out what you could have or should have done differently (or so I imagine her soul-searching went)—when she realized she hadn’t been doing the one thing that had gotten her into TV in the first place: making music. She told Todoshow: “There was a moment when I imagined myself watching MTV as a decrepit old woman (like MTV would last a lifetime), thinking ‘I could have done that.’ I pictured myself feeling an infinite grudge, hatred, envy.”
She canceled the show in 1994, and began fleshing out her first album in 1995. No one was happy to see her go from TV to music—how many US actresses do you know who’ve transitioned from the screen to rock stage gracefully, and been embraced, other than Jenny Lewis?—but she soldiered on despite Argentine critics panning her 1996 debut, Rara (it didn’t fit properly into any marketable category and never got any airplay), moved to LA in the late 1990s, picked up some electronic music skills, and released Segundo (and moved back to Buenos Aires) in 2000.
Of course, five LPs and 18 years later, she’s proven her artistic worth and breadth of musical talent. Last year’s Halo showcases the most recent iteration of her sound: off-kilter, complex, hypnotizing, and stunning experimental indie rock and folktronica laced with elements of ambient music, psychedelia, and art-pop. All of this is marked by Molina’s layering and looping of acoustic and electronic sounds and multi-tracking of her mellow-sweet vocals and (mostly) Spanish lyrics.
She plays an all ages concert at Triple Door tonight.
