Interview
by SashaS
21-9-2004
   
   
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In the world increasingly looking like a Legoland Park constructed by dystopian kidults, where can you escape? Into fictitious three-minute relationship with Natasha Bedingfield or, God forgive, Ronan Keating? There are too many babes proudly plying their ware but it is sex-appeal wrapped up as pop music, strictly entertaining without any deepness and integrity of Patti Smith, for example, but that strategy has never sold many records.

Has iGen completely lost its critical faculty or it has simply given up on free will? It is so discouraging to witness, week-in/week-out, products of music factories that are as relevant as a bargain bin to a fashionista. The true root to dousing one’s depression/anxiety/stress, we find by dipping into some dub [Sly & Robbie’s recent ‘Version Born’ is sonic manna from Jamaica] or, we strongly recommend - Juana Molina’s third disc, ‘Tres Cosas’ (‘Three Things’).

Hailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ms Molina is an incomparable singer/songwriter/ producer who created her new disc in a spare bedroom. She additionally explains that it isn’t a studio but a laptop she uses with a four-track to record additional instruments [although there are not many]. This is naked music, minimal tonally but brimming with emotions and imagery made more magical by being sung in her native tongue that insinuates some nocturnal activities.

Juana Molina has tried many a thing in her life - when I suggest “many talents” she dismisses it with a passionate wave of a hand. She is in fair command of English - after living in Los Angeles in 1998 where she started work on ‘Segundo’, Molina’s first album to be heard outside her native borders. A petite lady with longish hair, looks a bit at odds with the modern café décor just off East London’s Brick Lane.

“After two years of working on ‘Segundo’,” she explains above the din of the lunch crowd, “a record based on songs with a lot of layers of sounds, my need was to make a simpler record, only based on guitar and vocals. There are less instruments and less arrangements that make music sound more crystalline, transparent, brighter than ‘Segundo’. Harmony is defined with the guitar and vocals. I wanted to get back to the essential: a molecule of me.”

This “molecule” juggles motherhood with creativity, outside interests with music, and claims to need about a week to start working on ideas, to get disconnected from the banality of everyday living and enter that sweet spot that is away from carpentry, painting, embroidering, tailoring dresses for her daughter - she names as her hobbies…

When I compliment her on individuality of a Bjork proportion, this time of World music but with sexier songs, she is genuinely pleased and shocked at the same time that she protests vehemently about the comparison.

Another take

Ms Molina is a known comedienne in the Spanish speaking world who had her own successful TV sketch show, ‘Juana and Her Sisters’ and Argentineans can’t apparently forget it and keep on asking years later - whether she’d ever return to the small screen. But, to their disappointment, her TV celebrity status belongs to some bygone day…

Having designed clothes [although not trained], making ’em [her mother was a haute couture designer/ her grandmother a seamstress], Molina wants to do even more in the future but confesses to often feeling like a “lazy person”. As a teenager in Buenos Aires, Juana sang in various bands but kept on feeling like she needed to brush up her guitar playing and she sought employment to raise money for lessons.

“My uncle worked in TV production,“ she instructs us on her unusual artistic path, “who asked if I wanted to do a small part in a pilot. I didn’t know to act and thought that this character, a wife of the male lead, should have a moment of her own after her husband had gone to work. I created five different characters and performed without any make-up, props… Nothing happened with the pilot and I wanted to live on my own but to do that I needed money, as well as wanting to learn to play guitar better. With those five minutes of my failed debut, I approached a comedy show and they took me on. It evolved into work on another show for two years and then, my own programme, that lasted three years.”

“I then got pregnant and had to stay in bed for three months which gave me enough time to think and realised that I was away from my original goal and decided to stop everything. People couldn’t believe I was planning to do that but after seven years my musical aspiration had to come first, again.”

“My fans are different people from my TV fans who don’t listen to music. Perhaps people who like my music don’t even know I had a different career before.”

The former mastermind of Talking Heads turned World music ambassador, David Byrne, certainly was impressed enough to personally invite her to open his huge US summer tour.

Knitting a web

‘Tres Cosas’ follows Molina’s debut album ‘Rara’ almost five years later and its 13 tracks [there is a bonus on a limited edition] are sumptuous and yet pensive, droney but mesmerising songs, quietly sexy and distinct as if by someone who is well aware of the global heritage and not only inspired by a handful of artists, one-too-few genres…

“My father [tango player Horacio Molina] taught me to play guitar when I was five,” she recalls her childhood, “and I’ve been in a musical ambience all my life. One summer we lived in the same house with [Bossa nova legends] Vinicius de Moraes, Toquinho and Chico Buarque; my father played with them and they were always improvising songs to cheer up the kids. When a military coup d’etat seized the country our family fled to Paris. We lived there for six years and came back to Argentina when democracy was restored.”

Thus, the final track on the album, ‘Insensible’, is sung in French; being exposed to European culture, the motherhood and seeing the world as a performing artiste, her songwriting is informed by many more inspirations than a mere list of musicians…

“My songwriting has certainly changed but the style…” she muses, “you can’t tell the difference when each song was written. But, structure of songs has changed and it is like knitting a web that brings it all together but it is never too concrete. I don’t know what my influences are and feel that we are vessels of certain shape we find perfect things to fit in. Influences, for me, are brothers and sisters; I have a sister who is also a musicians and we compose in a totally different way despite of listening to the same records as kids.”

“Influence is not something learnt, it is something you have…” Juana pauses for a second before telling a story about a droning lift sound that took her [infant] self to the 10th floor of her grandmother’s skyscraper. “I used to sing along to it and it was like a mantra… Then, when I was 14 my family went to visit friends in Ibiza and they were hippies and I was hypnotized by Indian music they were listening.”

“I didn’t want to leave the house because of the music and the great music is capable to touch your core. When people ask me what I’m listening at the moment, I don’t know what to answer; I don’t listen to music really because there isn’t much I really like.”

“But, earlier today I remembered a record, ‘The Rhythmatist’ (’83), by [former Police drummer] Stuart Copeland; it is a major record and so full of emotions and imagination and it is just amazing. Life is actually what inspires me the most, inviting me to join in, to jump in…”

Live date:

23 September - Bush Hall, London [supported by Gravenhurst]


SashaS
4-2-2005
Juana Molina’s album ‘Tres Cosas’ (‘Three Things’) has been released on 13 September 2004 by Domino Records