Someone more articulate than I said that Juana Molina seems to build universes out of herself. The Argentine singer-songwriter is poised to release her 6th disc, Wed21, which arrives on Oct. 28 via Crammed Discs. For those who haven't encountered Molina previously beware the obligatory comparison: she's sort of a mixture between Tara Jane O'Neil and Andrew Bird. O'Neil because of the wealth of what she turns into music and Bird for the layering and looping which defines Molina's songs. But the truth is a good deal of it is only Molina's voice. As we listen to it swoop and swim in "Sin Guia No," it's hard not to be transfixed by the sheer energy of it. This vitality, Molina says, was linked to her life long fear of playing music. She told Rookie Mag:
But the thing you have to think about is the time you waste by not doing what you want to do. I think about the many, many years that I wasted because I didn’t dare to play music. There’s nothing that will repair that. Time has gone. Years pass by. And I started what I always wanted to do 20 years later [than I should have]. Twenty years is a long time. When you’re young, you can’t understand that. But not doing the things we don’t dare to do—it’s because we’re paying too much attention to what others say. And the question is: Who cares? Because if you don’t do it, someone else is gonna do it. And if someone else does or makes a thing you’ve thought about before and didn’t do, you will really hate yourself. You just have to make sure that what you’re doing, or thinking of doing, is a true passion, and not something that someone else wants you to do, or something that’s just fashionable. But once you discover what you want to do, do it as soon as possible.
Molina's sound, with its unique ability to create universes out of herself -- or, condense the universe into herself -- seems the logical ending for someone who's spent so long not doing what they want. Here Molina has let herself go and recreated the world through it.
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