Buzzin Electronic Music

Un Día is Juana Molina’s fifth album, in a career dedicated to following a most inspired and inspirational muse. It’s twelve years on from her debut, ‘Rara’ and, if that album perhaps struggled at first to find an audience, then that audience has grown surely and strongly with the albums that have followed.

But it’s not that Juana Molina has made concessions to the marketplace, or chased a more accessible sound; as is often the case with visionary artists, instead the world has caught up with her, the pop landscape shifting to create a new context, where the joyous ‘pop’ elements of her music make immediate sense.

Juana Molina’s new album is something of a peculiar experience for its listeners, as well as, perhaps, for its creator. The album is best listened to as a whole, and as in its title, meaning ‘One Day’, there arises a great sense of joy and hope from the album. At just eight tracks, the fifty minutes of music, though not particularly varied in style or pace, transport you into Juana Molina’s world, and help you to imagine your own.

The songs move seamlessly from one to the next, the human voice being their primary instrument. At one time, Juana Molina can be heard as an accompanying drone in the background, in offbeat notes more rhythmic than tuneful, and singing both melody and harmony (Listen to ‘¿Quién? (Suite)’ and ‘Vive Solo’). This is human music, coming from a human background, offset against a digital, electronic background. But it’s not a clash of sounds; on ‘Un Día’ electronica finds its place alongside the human voice – both are inextricably and hypnotically intertwined, so much so that at times it is difficult to tell what is human and what is electronic.

Being Argentinian, I guess it would be easy for Juana Molina to be pigeon-holed into the neglected ‘world’ genre, where great music ferments in a sub-underground before being released into the underground, then possibly making it into the mainstream. However, artists such as MIA, Amadou & Mariam and Sigur Ròs, for whom this to a greater or lesser extent has been the case, have severed the barriers between Western pop music and so-called ‘world’ music, and this may allow Juana Molina’s actually quite Western music to be less indiscriminately sidelined.

Juana Molina sings in Rioplatense Spanish on all of her five albums, which even if you can speak, is fairly difficult to understand in her lyrics here, as her voice tends to get lost in the mixes.

However, not understanding appears to be the point. Take these lyrics from the subtle title track ‘Un Día’: “One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics and everyone can imagine for themselves if it’s about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato.”

It is for the listener to take from it what he will, and the multitude of layers of electronica and voice means that you will most probably find what you want on this record. Think an earthier, more rhythmic version of Sigur Ròs.

‘Un Día’ is out now on Domino Records