The auditorium is full, chatting loudly to an undercurrent of swampy organ. Everyone cranes towards the stage attempting to identify the large misshapen objects that populate it.
Suddenly she is there, stepping into the small circle of light almost apologetically. Dressed in a wide floral dress with buckled shoes, she peers at the audience. ?Problems with electricity?, she mutters, and everyone laughs.
Juana Molina?s performances provide a stark contrast to her personality between the songs. Seemingly so timid, her acerbic comments through side glances are given meaning by a bright infectious laugh. But during her songs she is quite different. She wields a clear rhythmic mastery of guitar and a voice of immense power: comic, tragic. All the while she adeptly operates her keyboard and small bank of electronics, pushing at pedals with her buckled feet.
Anyone who has not seen her live before cannot fail to be startled at the ease she demonstrates in using her array of equipment solo. She plays or sings a riff, magically catches it to make it repeat, and layers voice and sound over it in mosaic artistry.
The set is enigmatic, and manipulated expertly by light. There are three or four huge ambiguous structures, two sets of gongs, Juana in the middle. At times she appears Alice in the clearing of a colourful cloth forest. At times she is upright on a lone wasteland of stark termite mounds against a maroon satin skyline.
She operates her guitar and machines, her scats always surprising against her own repetition and gripping bass lines. She explores the genres of folk, triphop, blues, and even country with her clear riffs, before spinning you out with a subaqueous organ cadence. Counterpoints tread the border of dissonance.
The set transforms into a textured rusty red Nevada desert. ?Una debi? perder la verg?enza hace tanto? (?Un Beso Llega?), she wipes the slate clean with occasional comic feelings. ?Como va?? she asks the audience. There is a silence. Everyone is sheepish to break into the self-contained world she has created. ?Bien?? she asks, and laughter breaks out. ?Two years? she sighs, talking of the time it took to create her new album, Son.
It is time well spent. Blame and faith, and renewal, are among its themes. Molina appeals in her appearance to a childlike innocence and crystalline memory of pure love. Her voice at times feels persuasive, at times avenging. ?No quer?s ser desordenado? she accuses as dawn breaks behind her in strips of blue light.
As the audience become more comfortable, less distanced, heckles are met with her shy laugh and vestiges of her comic characters, well known in Argentina from her comedy sketch show Juana and Her Sisters. She fires out her Buenos Aires street schtick to more laughter.
The satin backdrop is removed and suddenly two backing boys are standing with handheld percussion, looking strangely delicate and shy in the world she has created. She tends to forge the environment of her song first, with subaqueous and murmuring womblike sounds, before cutting into them with her guitar, clear and chocolate.
?No seas antipatica con tu mama? she implores. ?Luminoso?, she sighs as orange light fills the stage, splashing shadows of sequins across the back. ?Valoroso?, she sings, horse riding rhythm, quixotic against the desert background.
In a middle part we find ourselves in a whistling madrugada. Juana is in the blackness at the piano and the strange gong structures are tenderly employed by the boys, moving slowly. We get the idea of a careful experiment in the subconscious. All at once the middle structure on the stage appears as a prehistoric bird with grinning teeth, before lapsing back into the ambiguous mound it was before.
The boys have gone when she reinhabits her role as murmuring angel of vengeance. ?Quiero ver las culpas sobre la mesa / De otros que no son yo?.
Programming beats on her keyboard to repeat, using rhythmic strumming patterns, she mixes from one of her songs to the other, using repeated licks in different contexts. Adds reverberation effects to her voice, shakes her head jauntily to spray her words out to the audience. ?Elena? gives us a heaving chorus, an eclectic beatbox with the backing boys to rapturous explosions from the audience.
?Thank you for coming,? she says. Imagine if I sorted all this out and then you didn?t come?. Imagine if we didn?t.
Rainbow streaks give way to the terrain of another planet, with the stage structures gravestones, or alien obelisks, the two men greenish, and Juana becomes a human spectre screaming for communication ? is it pain or growth?
For a short encore she is back and the set has reverted to the cloth forest of the beginning. ?Tengo una idea dando vueltas hace tiempo? she sings into a breathy conglomeration, jerking scat, intense rhythm. You never know where you are but are thrilled to be there.
Have a look at Juana Molina’s website at www.juanamolina.com for her discography and upcoming dates.
