\n<\/p>\n
J<\/span>uana Molina answers our video call from a hospital bed, reclining in a green T-shirt with two cannulas in her hand. She has done her back in while also playing Whack-a-Mole with hernias, two last year, and two new ones now. \u201cDo you know those toys, made of little pieces of wood, and you press the bottom and it goes\u201d \u2013 she makes herself floppy, mimicking a push puppet \u2013 \u201cthat\u2019s exactly how I was yesterday.\u201d But now, says the 64-year-old Argentinian musician, \u201cI have so many painkillers, that I \u2026\u201d She wobbles her eyelids, gurns and gives me two thumbs up.<\/p>\n For the avoidance of doubt, Molina seems entirely with it, and insists we continue when I offer to reschedule. She is ultra precise on the technical odyssey she undertook to make her new record, and also extremely funny company, cheeky and withering about anyone who\u2019s too serious \u2013 or worse, boring<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the early 90s, Molina was one of Argentina\u2019s biggest comedians with her sketch show Juana y Sus Hermanas (Juana and Her Sisters), in which she portrayed a series of outre characters with some degree of John Waters in their DNA. (Some of them still go viral on TikTok, which she doesn\u2019t let herself use because it\u2019s too addictive.) But in 1993, on bed rest while pregnant with her daughter, she realised that if she didn\u2019t pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a musician, she would one day be a bitter old woman railing at the pop charts. So she quit. It was as much of a shock to the nation as it would be if Kristen Wiig swapped SNL for MTV.<\/p>\n It worked out, winning Molina ardent fans such as David Byrne and Feist, and a good chunk of her career signed to Domino. Next year marks 30 years since her musical debut, Rara. For three decades, or at least since things solidified on her 2000 breakthrough, Segundo, she has minted her own unique sound, made of dry, rhythmic guitar loops, drones, low pulses and incantatory voices rich with mystery. It\u2019s enveloping in a comfortingly spooky sort of way.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Juana Molina: Siestas Ah\u00ed \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n To record, Molina says, she has to get out of her own way to enter \u201cthe world of pure music. There\u2019s no thought, no concepts or pre-ideas. It\u2019s flowing, and I am driving and being driven at the same time, tourist and guide.\u201d Nothing gives her more pleasure than working alone at home in Pacheco, outside Buenos Aires, surrounded by her three dogs, cats and the plants she \u201ccohabits\u201d with. The house once belonged to her grandmother. \u201cI sometimes spend 14 hours in the studio and I don\u2019t even drink a cup of tea, nothing!\u201d she says. \u201cAll of a sudden, I hear birds. The whole night has gone by and I didn\u2019t realise because I\u2019m in a tunnel where the only language is music.\u201d<\/p>\n That may also be how Molina ended up in this hospital bed. \u201cI think what\u2019s happening to me is because I am all the time bent over, playing and looking for things, and I don\u2019t even think about my [posture],\u201d she says. For her eighth album, Doga, her first since 2017\u2019s Halo, she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don\u2019t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. \u201cYou can do whatever you want, and you need to know a lot,\u201d says Molina.<\/p>\n She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. Doga is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on Miro Todo (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that \u201care somehow out of tune, but in a very nice way, like played as if the player wasn\u2019t feeling like playing.\u201d She makes a beleaguered, twitchy face to illustrate. Often the experimentation was truly analogue: Molina would play guitar while Haro moved knobs, \u201cwhich is something you can\u2019t do while playing\u201d, she says, \u201cunless you have extraordinary feet\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Molina photographed for the Guardian in 2007.<\/span> Photograph: Eamonn McCabe\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Recently, Molina tried to re-record her first album, having lost the rights to a former label. Rara is an outlier in her catalogue, her only full-band record: she says most people who love that album don\u2019t like her others. \u201cI recorded half of it and when I started singing it, I felt it wasn\u2019t right,\u201d she says. The problem was that although it was recorded in 1995, it featured songs she had written as a young woman in 1983. \u201cThose lyrics, they\u2019re so romantic and suffering,\u201d she says, rolling her eyes. \u201cThe first song talks about a girl that has a picture of a boy in her book, she thinks of him and wonders if he thinks about her. Then we go to his story and he\u2019s put her photo in an old jacket, he checks the pockets and throws it away. He doesn\u2019t even remember her!\u201d<\/p>\n Molina looks stricken that she ever told such a story. (And she has since got the rights to Rara back.) But otherwise she says she remains intimately connected to herself at all ages, in defiance of the idea that there are certain ways she should be at 64. On her 2013 album Wed 21, a song called Las Edades (The Ages) was about starting to feel that she repelled younger people. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s a survival thing that you need to mate with someone your age in order to have children and all that,\u201d she says. \u201cBut the weird thing is that I can be with children, eight years old, and feel as if I\u2019m eight. If I\u2019m with 16-year-old guys, I feel as if I\u2019m 16. It\u2019s not that I am only 64; it\u2019s not that all those ages disappear. It\u2019s just a way that people count ages. Age became so important for society, and it hurts when you get older. You feel the rejection.\u201d<\/p>\n She recently attended a 60th birthday party, and lamented how \u201cincredibly boring\u201d a lot of the conversations were, about politics and the economy. \u201cOne of the things I hate the most in life is to be solemn,\u201d she says. \u201cSolemnness is for a burial. But when you are solemn about life, things need to be done this way<\/em> and you can\u2019t dress that way<\/em> and you can\u2019t eat with your hands<\/em>,\u201d she intones in a dreary voice, \u201cthere\u2019s a huge boredom\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/span>Juana Molina: Cosoco \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n Proof of the eternally rejuvenating properties of curiosity, Molina would rather \u201ctalk about a chair, the way a glass is made or why the handle of a cup has that shape, things that are not important but are so much fun to talk about\u201d, or learn how things work so that she can mend them herself: \u201cIf I fix the window, it feels good.\u201d She recently co-founded a label, Sonamos, and thrills at the enthusiasm and knowledge of her partner Mario Agust\u00edn de Jes\u00fas Gonz\u00e1lez. \u201cHis curiosity has no limits,\u201d she says. \u201cThough sometimes I get a bit like, let\u2019s talk about pizza.\u201d<\/p>\n When people bug her saying that Argentina needs her back on TV (even though she has a small part in Netflix women\u2019s prison drama En el Barro), she wonders why they don\u2019t realise that online comedy clips are<\/em> the new TV. On her Instagram, she frequently addresses fans while disguised by a novelty filter \u2013 maybe her as an elderly woman, or a field of seven babies wearing strawberry hats. \u201cWhen I think I spent hours with wigs and makeup, and now I just scroll and an unexpected character is there, it makes me so joyful that you can bring them to life immediately,\u201d she says. As with music leading her, \u201cthe filters tell me what to do with them, it\u2019s like an instant impersonation.\u201d Similarly, the cover of Doga features Molina convincingly Photoshopped as a very fluffy dog.<\/p>\n Maybe this resistance to branding herself as a serious artiste<\/em> has constrained Molina\u2019s deserved legacy a little outside South America. But her allergy to gravitas and even to the concept of legacy feels refreshing; she mostly seems intent on giving listeners the same feeling of \u201cpure music\u201d as she experiences. At her gigs, she eschews visuals \u201cbecause I thought, if the music doesn\u2019t give you enough images then it\u2019s a failure\u201d, she says. She hopes she\u2019s still making music in another 30 years\u2019 time \u201cif my body allows me to\u201d, and only hopes she\u2019ll have some more help in the studio. \u201cI would love to have assistance to help me with whatever sound I want to get,\u201d she says, \u201cinstead of being there breaking my back on the instruments.\u201d<\/p>\n Doga is released via Sonamos on 5 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Juana Molina answers our video call from a hospital bed, reclining in a green T-shirt with two cannulas in her hand. She has done her back in while also playing Whack-a-Mole with hernias, two last year, and two new ones now. \u201cDo you know those toys, made of little pieces of wood, and you press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[18245,9441,1738,18246,2011,337,18247,686,18248],"class_list":{"0":"post-31300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-argentinian","9":"tag-experimental","10":"tag-hate","11":"tag-juana","12":"tag-legend","13":"tag-life","14":"tag-molina","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-solemn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}