Argentine experimental music legend Juana Molina: ‘One of the things I hate most in life is being sober’ | music

Cuana Molina answers our video call from her hospital bed, lying in a green T-shirt and with two vials in her hands. She’s back in the game while also playing Whack-a-Mole with hernias, two last year, and two new ones now. “You know those toys, made of little pieces of wood, and you press the bottom of them and they go”—making themselves flexible, imitating a doll being pushed—“that’s exactly what I was yesterday.” But now, says the 64-year-old Argentine musician, “I have so many painkillers that I…” She shakes her eyelids, grumbles and gives two thumbs up.

For the avoidance of doubt, Molina seems to be all for it, insisting that we continue when I offer to reschedule. She’s meticulous in the artistic journey she took to record her new record, and she’s also very funny company, sassy and grouchy about anyone who’s too serious – or worse. boring.

In the early 1990s, Molina was one of Argentina’s biggest comedians with her sketch show Juana y Sus Hermanas (Juana and Her Sisters), in which she portrayed a series of eccentric characters with some degree of John Waters in their DNA. (Some of them still go viral on TikTok, which she doesn’t allow herself to use because it’s too addictive.) But in 1993, while on bed rest while pregnant with her daughter, she realized that if she didn’t pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a musician, she would one day become an embittered old woman topping the pop charts. So she resigned. It was as much of a shock to the nation as it would be if Kristen Wiig replaced SNL with MTV.

It worked, winning Molina such ardent fans as David Byrne and Feist, and signing off a significant portion of her career with Domino. Next year marks 30 years since Rara’s musical debut. Over the course of three decades, or at least since things solidified with her “second” breakthrough in 2000, she has crafted her own unique sound, made of dry rhythmic guitar loops, droning drones, low beats, and incantatory vocals rich in mystery. It encapsulates in a comfortingly creepy way.

Molina says that in order to record, she had to go out of her own way to enter “the world of pure music. There are no ideas, concepts, or preconceptions. It flows, and I am driving and being led at the same time, tourist and guide.” Nothing gives her more pleasure than working alone in her home in Pacheco, outside Buenos Aires, surrounded by her three dogs, cats and the plants that “coexist” with them. The house previously belonged to her grandmother. “I sometimes spend 14 hours in the studio and I don’t even drink a cup of tea, nothing!” She says. “Suddenly, I hear birdsong. It’s been all night and I didn’t realize it because I’m in a tunnel where the only language is music.”

This may also be the reason why Molina ended up in that hospital bed. “I think what happens to me is that I’m hunched over all the time, playing and looking for things, and I don’t even think about it [posture]” she says. For her eighth album, Doga, her first since 2017’s Halo, she’s trying to master the incredibly difficult world of analog synths, bending over machines that resemble old telephone keyboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. “You can do whatever you want, and you need to know a lot,” Molina says.

She recorded everything she made but was overwhelmed by hundreds of hours of tape. This prompted her to work with producer Emilio Haro for the first time since her debut. Duga is deeper and more expansive than its predecessor, with synthesized orchestral touches: the guitars on Miro Todo (I See Everything), Molina says, sound like violins that are “somewhat out of tune, but in a very nice way, like playing as if the player doesn’t feel like playing.” She makes a beleaguered and disturbed face to explain. The experience was often truly analog: Molina would play the guitar while Harrow moved the knobs, “which is something you can’t do while playing,” she says, “unless you have unusual feet.”

Recently, Molina attempted to re-record her debut album, having lost the rights to her previous label. Rara is an outlier in her catalogue, her only full-length record: Most people who like this album, she says, don’t like the others. “I recorded half of it, and when I started singing it, I felt like it wasn’t right,” she says. The problem was that although it was recorded in 1995, it included songs she had written as a young woman in 1983. “Those lyrics, so romantic and so suffering,” she says, rolling her eyes. “The first song is about a girl who has a picture of a boy in her book, and she thinks about him and wonders if he’s thinking about her. Then we go into his story and he puts her picture in an old jacket, checks her pockets and throws it away. He doesn’t even remember her!”

Molina seems upset that she told such a story. (She has since regained Rara’s rights.) But other than that, she says she remains closely connected to herself at all ages, challenging 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 how she was starting to feel like she was alienating young people. “Maybe it’s a matter of survival, where you need to mate with someone your own age in order to have children and all that,” she says. “But the weird thing is that I can be with eight-year-olds, and feel as if I’m eight. If I’m with 16-year-olds, I feel as if I’m 16. It doesn’t mean I’m just 64; it doesn’t mean all those ages disappear. It’s just the way people calculate ages. Age has become very important to society, and it becomes painful when you get older. You feel rejected.”

She recently attended her 60th birthday party and lamented how “extremely boring” much of the talk about politics and economics was. “One of the things I hate most in life is being sober,” she says. “Solemnity is for burial. But when you are solemn about life, things must be done From here And you can’t wear clothes that way And you can’t Eat with your hands“There is so much boredom,” she intones in a dark voice.

As evidence of the ever-renewing qualities of curiosity, Molina prefers to “talk about a chair, or how a glass is made, or why the handle of a cup is that way, things that are not important but are very interesting to talk about,” or to learn how things work so that she can fix them herself: “If I fix the window, it will feel good.” She recently co-founded a brand called Sonamos, and is thrilled by the enthusiasm and knowledge of her partner, Mario Agustín de Jesús González. “His curiosity knows no bounds,” she says. “Although sometimes I’m a little like, ‘Let’s talk about pizza.’

When people tease her that Argentina needs to get her back on TV (even though she had a small role in Netflix’s women’s prison drama En el Barro), she wonders why they don’t catch on to those online comedy clips We are New TV. On her Instagram account, she often addresses her fans in the guise of a new filter — perhaps as an elderly woman, or a field of seven children wearing strawberry hats. “When I think I’ve spent hours with wigs and makeup, and now I’m scrolling and there’s an unexpected character there, it makes me so happy that you can bring it to life right away,” she says. As with the music she leads, “the filters tell me what to do with it, it’s like an instant impersonation.” Likewise, the cover of Doga shows Molina convincingly photoshopped as a very fluffy dog.

Perhaps this resistance to describing itself as Serious artist This has limited Molina’s deserved legacy outside of South America a bit. But her sensitivity to gravity and even the concept of legacy feels refreshing; She mostly seems intent on giving listeners the same feeling of “pure music” that she experiences. At her concerts, she avoids visuals, “because I thought if the music doesn’t give you enough visuals, it’s a failure,” she says. She hopes to still be making music in another 30 years “if my body lets me,” and just hopes she gets more help in the studio. “I would love to have help to help me get whatever sound I want, instead of breaking my back on instruments,” she says.