Music

Concert review/photos: Juana Molina @ Boot & Saddle

Before Juana Molina started playing music, she was a comedian in her native Argentina. Although she gave up that gig years ago, her performance last night at the Boot & Saddle was flecked with humor as she responded to whoops and cheers from the audience with her own interpretations of those sounds: eeeeees so high-pitched they couldn't be disputed and other jarring alterations.

You'd hear her voice beckoning with hushed nonsense syllables that were painfully pretty until she stepped away from the microphone, her lips tightly closed, and the soaring vocals continued to soar. You felt like a trick had been played on you, but it was so clever that you smiled instead of feeling foolish.

Looping sounds were lobbed onto a wire frame like clay scraps until they grew into something monumental. Acoustic and electric guitars, indecipherable vocals, synthesized beats and keyboard melodies from the future melded together to form something unbreakable, something solid.

As the melodies and harmonies accumulated, it felt as if you were cutting your way through a jungle, hearing sounds coming from all directions, unsure if they were emitted by friend or foe.

What was clear was that the audience was being whipped into a frenzy by the performance, an increasingly complex medley of tropicalia, distortion, chanting and an expert layering of those disparate sounds. It was as much of a concert as it was a magic show.