I have always found it difficult to explain Juana Molina’s music: complex, intricate, full of layers and nooks, but still accessible to those who listen to it with an open mind. Molina creates sound labyrinths that overlap and intertwine like impossible puzzles. There is no music the same. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most original, peculiar, distinctive and cool musical proposals of contemporary pop. It has been since 1996, and it remains so 30 years later.
The one who was a comedian in Juana y sus Hermanas, and later an experimental pop singer committed to researching her own sound approach, deploys her creative process live, where Molina is her own center of operations (she plays guitar, keyboard, sampler and loop pedal), accompanied only by drummer Diego López de Arcaute. Molina does not use a stand microphone, since he could not handle it, and wears a headset microphone through which his voice is emitted with a metallic and distorted filter.
At the beginning of the concert that Molina offers at the Upload room in Barcelona – the second in the city in a week, sadly the last of the tour – it is difficult to distinguish whether the Argentine artist is singing live, given the apparently low volume of her microphone and the aforementioned filter. His voice almost blends in with the rest of the instrumental textures, but this is, logically, a deliberate aesthetic decision. Obviously, Molina sings live while performing different musical operations. The repertoire of ‘DOGA’ (2025) makes up the bulk of the setlist, which also includes cuts from ‘Halo’ (2017), ‘Wed21’ (2013) and ‘Un día’ (2008), and none of the first three.
Molina, initially in his typical hieratic pose, becomes looser during the concert, perhaps unable to resist the groove of his own songs. The entire set maintains an intense rhythm, with metronomic patterns similar to krautrock, evident in ‘La paradoxa’ and especially in the explosive and progressive finale of ‘Miro todo’; a genre that is also close to the electric guitar riffs that Molina plays occasionally, some sampled to add additional subtextures. The string and percussion arrangement of ‘Caravana’ is especially beautiful.
It is fascinating to witness the construction of the songs live, in all its complexity, at the same time that you barely see two people on stage: Molina samples his own breathing in ‘Ay no se offenda’, converted into percussion; It also samples his singing voice; The programmed beats emitted by the machines are accompanied, with a hypnotic effect, by the hits on Arcaute’s turntables. And when the audience claps rhythmically in ‘One Day’, reaching the end of the set, the sound seems like another layer of Juana Molina’s instrumental range, to the point that the audience takes a while to stop clapping because it seems to be contributing to the concert. And the effect works. It even crosses my mind that Molina could sample it.
With some almost imperceptible live failure, related to the electric guitar – only evident to the audience because Juana Molina tries to solve it live while singing through her vocal filter that she is “having problems” -, Molina introduces the performance of ‘Desinhumano’ to say that she is selling the 14,000 frames that make up the completely handmade video clip of the song. All of them are unique frames, of course: a commitment to craftsmanship and absolute care for the most individual and creative musical creation, something that is also evident in their live performance.
