Juana Molina

Japan became the launching pad for the Argentinean songstress’ career

When used in reference to Western artists, the phrase“big in Japan” usually means someone who—in Spinal Tap fashion—has lost all respect in their home country and is eking out a career based on their continued popularity here (witness Michael Jackson’s recent soft landing in Tokyo).

But for Buenos Aires native Juana Molina, Japan became the springboard to international popularity. “Everything started in Japan,” she recalls in an interview at her local distributor’s office in trendy Nakameguro. “I used to be an actress, so people in Argentina didn’t want to listen to my music, because they thought it was a whim. Even now, ten years after I started, I get emails from people admitting they didn’t come to my music until now because they thought they wouldn’t like it.”

The star of her own television comedy, Molina ironically only went into TV as a way to support her musical endeavors. “I needed a job that paid enough and left me free hours, so I thought TV would be the answer. Then I got bigger and ended up having my own show and got caught in my
own trap. When I realized that a lot of years had gone by, I decided to cut everything and go back to music.”

Molina left television a decade ago, but it wasn’t until the last few years that her unconventional blend of acoustic singer-songwriter material with digital sampling and effects found an audience. The key figure turns out to be a Japanese importer of South American music. “Someone told me there was a distributor in Japan who was interested in my music, so I sent him my second album, Segundo. He asked me to send him 25 copies, and then 100, and then 500, and then 1,000, and then I started to sell a lot, and then the people at Domino heard about me.”

It turns out that American singer Will Oldham had bought the record while in Japan and showed it to Lawrence Bell of influential independent UK label Domino (Arctic Monkeys, etc.), who signed Molina. “And that’s how the record made the tour from Argentina to Japan to England,” Molina sums up. “After starting to work here, the Argentinean audience began to catch on.”

The next day at her packed Liquidroom concert, some of the qualities that first found her a Japanese audience are on display. Performing solo with a guitar and a battery of keyboards, effects and samplers, her girlish yet independent demeanor seems just right for a fashion/lifestyle spread in a Japanese women’s magazine. At the same time, Molina’s cool, uninflected voice and ability to draw unearthly qualities from it through digital processing is sure to strike the right note with Japan’s music otaku.

Trained in both classical and jazz guitar, Molina delivered a straight acoustic affair with her first album. She was initially appalled by the idea of working with synthesizers. “I remember playing with bands that had keyboard players, and it was always horrible. But one day I met a guy, and he said, ‘I have a few songs you might like,’ so I invited him home. When he got there I saw him coming with a keyboard, and I thought it was going to be horrible, but he started to play and it was very beautiful. He told me that he had programmed the sounds, and so he woke me to keyboards. I bought one and learned to program my own sounds.” Even now, she resists applying the term “electronics” to her music. “I don’t like the word, because I used to not like synthesizers.”

On her new and fourth album Son, dreamy vocals give way to passages of challenging digital dissonance that sometimes sound like a catfight. It’s an approach that evolved over the past few years. “Three years ago I began applying new ideas to the old songs, to keep it interesting to myself. Then I realized that all these new ideas were going to get lost, so I started to record in-between tours. I just poured out everything I had, and when I sat down in October thinking I was going to have to write a whole record from scratch, I found that I had a lot of work already done.”

Molina likens her music to trying out a new, challenging kind of food. “It’s like eating natto for the first time. There are a lot of apparently disharmonious notes, but those are the notes that I precisely like the most. My previous record was chosen by a school for children with disabilities, and apparently the songs had a healing effect even though they were discordant.”

The biggest validation for Molina as a musician has been translating her fame in Japan back home to Argentina. “I had a big show at a public theater. I was very worried because I was certain I would not fill the room, but it was sold out. One of my friends heard a fan say, ‘What happened? Where are all these people coming from?’”

Son is available on Domino Records, distributed in Japan by Hostess Entertainment.

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