One senses Juana Molina finds sound every bit as captivating as songs and in fact, when not seamlessly conflating the two, may find the former more fascinating than the latter. On each of her beguiling albums, Molina has dissected and detailed the individual components of songs not just as rhythms or melodies or words, but as malleable sounds-- sounds that collide, connect, and complement one another. Her music is pop song as bricolage, the whole greater than the sum of its sometimes conventional, often unusual parts.
Yet at the same time, Molina's works, for all their intricacies and novel intersections of electronic and organic, are undeniably subtle, and, like a complex collage relegated to the background, potentially ignored other than by those few curious enough to stop and take a closer look. As successful as she's been, Molina's likely at least a little frustrated that the easy on the ears results perhaps overshadow the discipline and invention behind them. Molina possibly designed her fifth album, Un Día, to counter that perception.
Unlike its predecessors, Un Día is less a dinner-party record and more of a conversation piece itself. Here Molina further abstracts her songs, emphasizing more than ever dense hypnotic repetition and the forceful impact of sound itself, sometimes at the expense of the more traditional elements that have always rooted her music. The title track features layers of cascading noises and sonic elements added until the track approaches a cacophonous din. "Vive Solo" is more toned down, but Molina's vocals are still almost subsumed by the rhythms, at once indebted to South America and the 70s minimalists. Her singing here serves as a sort of breathy thematic thread linking the various polyrhythms, a living loop changing and modulating itself without veering too far out of range..
Molina's singing ultimately takes an even more supporting role on "Lo Dejamos", which tosses in jazz and rumbling sub-woofer friendly drones. It's the perfect lead into "Los Hongos de Marosa", one of the disc's highlights, which is propelled along by a circular acoustic guitar pattern as Molina ladles on the effects and electronics, not unlike the best techno deconstructionists, only from a more tactile perspective. Here, the laptop is the key, not the door itself, and Molina uses the technology to open new passageways through which to slip, leading the listener along with her by the hand. Certainly she sounds as engaged as ever with the intersection of man and machine, as heard in the entrancing overlap of synths and looped cooing that ends "¿Quién? (Suite)", nearly mushed together into one intriguing compound patch.
Un Día is as warm and welcoming as it is weird, but it's also something of an experiment, as delineated by the irresistible statement of purpose conveniently included within the title track (and, translated, in the press notes): "One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics," Molina sings, "and everyone can imagine for themselves if it's about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato." Un Día marks one firm step forward in that regard. It's like sentences with the punctuation marks left out, all the more rewarding for its contradictory incompleteness. Everything's in its right place, but your ear-- and brain-- still struggle to make total sense of even the simplest ideas. It's not perfect, but it's progress.
