Watching Juana Molina speak is like watching a one-woman show. She gestures broadly. She bursts into momentary song. She demands audience participation (“How do you call … ?” is a frequently spoken phrase for the Argentina native who didn’t start speaking English until the late ’90s). Molina isn’t creating melodrama out of molehills as she discusses her music in a hotel on New York’s Lower East Side. She’s just inherently entertaining both in person and, as she reveals in the interview below, on record.

Welcome to Juana’s weird and wild world. It’s a place she arrived at by rejecting fame. (Molina starred on Argentine sketch-comedy TV hit Juana Y Sus Hermanas in the ’90s before turning her back on acting.) It’s a place where having a child didn’t hinder, but rather fostered, a career in music. (She credits her complicated pregnancy, which had her bedridden for months, for giving her the time to rethink her life’s direction and the courage to take the aforementioned musical plunge.) It’s a place nowhere near archetypal singer/songwriter territory. Molina’s lightly subversive concoction of guitar and electronic ambience pushes the importance of production to the forefront. (More in line with Kate Bush than, say, Bob Dylan.) Don’t expect any confessions from her words and arpeggiated guitar; in fact, unless you speak Spanish, don’t expect to understand any of her lyrics. And since most of Molina’s listeners live in North America, there’s a shared bond over the language barrier. The bulk of her fans are forced to hear music the way she does.

Molina’s fourth album, Son (Domino), is based on the sounds of nature. The chirping of crickets, the gurgling of frogs and the howling of pesky neighborhood dogs all figure into Molina’s design. It’s a consequence of recording in her Buenos Aires home that Molina has come to embrace. But more than that, Son’s electronic layers (which often sound detuned, like the queasy, dissonant score of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) mimic nature’s imbalance—the way animals’ calls and responses interlock and come apart as they repeat, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in a melodic clash. Using layers of loops, Molina aims to re-create this random repetition.

Are you always writing?
No. I can’t write while I’m traveling. I am thinking about soundcheck and where to put my suitcase in the hotel. And I think I couldn’t do that if I didn’t have a time to be home and be there for a while and work on something for a while, because that’s the way I did the other two records. It was a very nice surprise when I was listening to all I had recorded and I was liking it.

Did that method affect Son in terms of sound?
Totally. I came with all the strength and spirit of the live show, so what I was doing was just putting myself together and play and press “record.” So everything sounds much like my live set. And then, of course, I added things and took away some others and polished and added vocals. But I had a lot of work done, so I think it’s very fresh. I can feel that in the record, that it’s very alive and very present.

It’s alive to the point of being unpredictable. Like the way the animal sounds will break out.
One song has a background [track] of dogs and crickets and frogs. There’s a very annoying dog that my neighbor has, and that night the dog was crying and crying and crying. I changed the song, and the notes he was crying were speaking so well to the song that I said, “Oh, finally this dog is good for something!” So the dog is there crying his pains.

Do you record the field sounds that are on the record?
Yeah, or they come into the mic from the outside when I’m recording. The first time that happened was on (2004’s) Segundo. I was singing a song very close to the window and [the dog] sang and I said, “Aw!” But then I realized it was beautiful and recorded more. So it started by accident because there’s no way to have total silence at home. There’s always a little bit of ambience. Sometimes it’s birds because it’s during the daytime and sometimes it’s crickets because I record during the night.

You’ve said that you’re inspired by animals.
Their randomness, yeah.

Right, the random repetition, you might call it. Do you think your music has an animalistic quality?
I think it has a nature quality. A natural and nature quality. Things happen but you never know when. You could repeat loops because, for instance, there’s a bird that sings only in the afternoon when it’s warm. It’s kind of a pigeon but its singing is so much nicer. It’s like, “Whoo whoo.” And the only thing he does is that, but if you have two of them and the other goes, “Whoo, who-ho,” if you did a loop of those, they would be like…I don’t know how to explain this. At some point, they sing together, and then they will be apart again. This is a huge loop until it starts again. So that’s what I did, I played some loops, very long ones over very short ones with different melodies. So what the difference of the length does is that you never got the changes in harmony because on the first beat, you can have an A, and then next time, the first note can be a C. So it’s the same mode, but something is moving. The feeling I have is that everything’s a little bit floating and I really like that. And I am totally enchanted by the way nature behaves, rhythm-wise.

That’s risky from a musical standpoint, because those overlapping notes may clash.
Yes. And I like that. When you hear that clash several times, it becomes a beautiful thing.

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