Juana Molina - Paraguaya

Juana Molina was a very famous Argentinean comedian that gave up her fame at the peek of her acting career in order to pursue her real passion: music. She started as a folk singer, but her sound suffered changes with every new record and evolved to became a dark avant-garde experimentation that has gained her acclaim from the most important music sites in the world. It's funny to ponder that right now in 2017, the best music coming from Latin America is coming from two unusual figures: a 20 something queer Venezuelan (Arca), and an Argentinean woman in her mid 50's, both of them offering very experimental takes in electronics.

What this might suggest is that non-Anglo music, if it wants to stand a chance against the wide popularity of American or Brit musicians, should really think outside the box; and that's exactly what Molina is doing in what probably might be her best album to date, Halo. The lead single, Paraguaya, sees Juana taking a role that she might have suggested in the sound of her previous album, Wed 21, but that it's not until now that she verbalizes it and fully embraces it: a dark witch. The lyrics are casting a spell in a full moon night for a former lover, she wants to make him fall in love again so now she can be the one who disdain him and he can feel in his own skin the suffering he caused to her. But more interesting than this story is the haunting music that she crafted to go with it: full with dense atmospheres and accentuated creepy percussions that almost resemble a black cat's purr, we feel trapped in her dark mansion and in no time she has hexed us to participate in her macabre dance.

But witches most of the time have been women of knowledge accused for not following the traditional female roles assigned to them, so many female astronomers, mathematicians, doctors and herbalists have been hunted because of their threatening intellect. Molina is the same, a woman that just doesn't set for the suppositions of what a woman of her age should be playing and by breaking music standards she is bewitching the entire world and seducing them with the magic of Spanish language and the power of her minimal dark ambients.