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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