Juana Molina – Doga: An unexpected contender for the year-end rankings :: OndaRock Reviews

With the usual productive parsimony Juana Molina returns to the scene after eight years of silence. The Argentine author's dedication to the fourth art is well known, just as an iron will has always been evident in overcoming the boundaries of a sometimes aseptic songwriting style which has often imprisoned especially female creativity. Juana Molina's music is made of harmonic obsessions and possessions, of not only electronic but also acoustic dissonances, of abstractions and beat pulsating, a musicality that is as brutal as it is persuasive and enchanting. “Doga” is the most imaginative, imaginative and brilliant artistic effort of an artist who has already produced at least a couple of milestones in the recording production of the last thirty years (“Son”, “Un Dia”).
What further differentiates her work is the constant search for new sounds: Juana Molina, while not renouncing the Argentine musical tradition, has experimented with modern techniques and languages, introducing techniques such as loops well before other artists and training keyboards and other electronic devices with an avant-garde, minimalist but also prog vision. His recording career is marked by continuous evolutions and new approaches with the vast array of synths and modulators available. Thirty years of restless and compelling sequences of drone-music, loopsguitar transfigurations and bewitching vocals like the singing of sirens, a crescendo that never stops and which in “Doga” goes far beyond the premises.

Almost one hundred hours of recording preceded the creation of this new album. It took the expert hand of the young producer Emilio Haro to be able to bring order to a sea of ​​ideas, first reduced to 30 hours and then reworked into the final form, consisting of just 55 minutes of pure sonic alchemy.
Ambition and innovation are two recurring terms in the chronicles of contemporary criticism, lexical ploys often synonymous with a lack of ideas or excessive creative self-indulgence, but for Molina they are just two words in common use that have very little to do with the intense and pure beauty of these ten compositions. His music is ambiguous and seductive, solemn, majestic and otherworldly without ever wanting to show it off (the two enigmatic and complex tracks that open and close the album, “Uno Es Árbol” and “Rina Soi”), caressing and affable even when the sound remains cold and sparse like in an old Cluster album – “La Paradoja”.
“Doga” is a set of songs that do not disdain oblique pop strategies (“Desinhumano”), which dialogue with romanticism to the point of distorting its essence with a melody as simple as it is perfect (“Siestas Ahì”), and is moreover a continuous luxuriance of ideas and daring instrumental solutions: from the jazz-glitch of the pulsating and hybrid “Indignan A Un Zorzàl” to the guitar scratch that bothers the crescendo of “Va Rara” and the anthology of guitars that sound like a string section in the evocative and anarchic “Miro Todo”, a track that seems to come from one of Faust's first recordings.

With “Doga” Juana Molina confirms herself as one of the most innovative and stimulating artists on the contemporary music scene. In the hands of the Argentine musician, the avant-garde becomes accessible musical material and not necessarily cultured and intellectual: no tricks or triumphal announcements, just pure creation as an art form destined to last over time.