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AMAZING LIVE LOOPING SHOW: Argentina's Juan Molina in SF
Because I've produced the big loop fest in Santa Cruz for many years and
because
I've been fortunate to play several festivals in other countries over the
past five years,
I've had the great fortune to see some of the world's best live loopers do
their thing
in front of an audience.
Tonight, I saw one of the most impressive shows I"ve ever seen a live
looper play.
I drove up to San Francisco and saw the Argentine singer/songwriter Juana
Molina
play to a sold out house at Yoshi's, SF, the beautiful jazz club on
Fillmore Street.
Man, oh man, was it an amazing concert! I felt like jumping up and
down
after watching it.
This former famous television commediene in Argentina who gave up here
life
to return to music
was firing on all cylinders.
Using a very, very sparse setup that included a BOSS RC-50, a Lexicon
reverb (couldn't tell but it
looked like an older MXP-500), a Korg O1W synthesizer and a beautiful
steel
string
acoustic guitar, she had seemless mastery of her looping.
She also could go from playing almost childlike simple guitar/voice
compositions with a delightful and
very childlike voice to incredibly complex polyrhythmic multi-looped parts.
She also occasionally used really dense timbral loops against very simple
melodic parts and she also
used a lot of very, very complex modern and dissonant harmony against, yet
again, very simple
and memorable melodies.
Her rhythm playing was impeccable on both guitar, keyboards and voice.
She really did beautiful things with backing her voice up with loops that
were very wet, reverb wise against
a very dry initial vocal style.
She did tunes that were so simple as to almost be confounding and then
would
turn around and do a track that
have up to 10 or 12 loops on top of one another in a cacaphonous but
beautiful mass of sound.
She even attemped one song in English............fucked up the lyrics
(four
different times) and had the audience
shouting them to her (from the poem, The Love Song of Alfred Prusock by TS
Elliot) and yet
ended the song with the audience rooting for her and cheering that fact
that
she made it through.
I have to say I was incredibly impressed............as impressed as I've
ever been by anybody.
She's a killer guitarist, a great rhythmatist (and this comes from a bit
of
a rhythm snob here), a
beautiful and challenging timbralist (her synth designs were modern and
edgy
but always simple)
and an engaging and frequently humorous performer.
FIVE STARS on this puppy. Check here out
Juana Molina