Singer songwriter Juana Molina, has had a not altogether ordinary musical career. Up until the mid-1990s when she chose to concentrate on making music she was better known in her native Argentina and across the Spanish speaking world, as a comedic television actress. Since then however, she has produced five albums of increasingly intriguing and experimental music.
Her music is refreshingly hard to pigeonhole; i-Tunes assures me this is `world music' (surely the most unhelpful of all labels?). Certainly her music is folk-tinged; acoustic guitars tend to feature heavily in all her work, and Un Día is no exception, however she also employs an array of electronic tones and effects, that ensures her work is far from traditional folk and nearer the work of bands like Psapp, Tunng and Adem (who she toured with as part of the excellent Zero Degrees of Separation tour in 2007).
Un Día progresses naturally from it's predecessor, the excellent Son (2007). Some of the tracks would not sound out of place on her previous releases, however others make more use of electronic effects than previous efforts This is particularly notable on the opening title track and Lo Dejamos, which begins with woozy sounding keyboard squelches that wouldn't be out of place on a Boards of Canada album. Molina also seems to be making more and more use of her voice as an instrument, often heavily layered and treated (reminiscent of Björk's Medúlla).
Molina has produced another very fine album, perhaps a little less immediate than Son, but which repays repeated listens enormously. There are numerous highlights, but ¿Quién? (Suite), which reinterprets a track from previous album Segundo (2000) is hard to beat. She is perhaps not Domino's best known or most obvious signing, but her beautifully crafted and unique music is something to treasure.