Juana Molina Halo

Halo is Juana Molina's seventh album, and it pursues the experimental path she began years ago, marking a new milestone in the evolution of her own, unmistakable voice. She's "on an evolutionary journey of her own devising" (Pitchfork), and pushes once more her "eerie, hypnotic" music "to increasingly haunting heights" (as written by Spin magazine about her previous record). The 12 tracks in Halo abound with hypnotic rhythms which seem to draw their energy from immemorial rituals; with timbral explorations and ever-changing soundscapes; with mysterious lyrics often touching on witchcraft, premonition and dreams, always used as metaphors for emotional states; with voices which sometimes move away from word and meaning to be reduced to abstract phonemes and onomatopoeia.

Juana approaches music in a very physical, intuitive way: every instrument and electronic resource is an extension of her body, and is used to express feelings and moods. It's magic, in its oldest sense: art or techné, which articulates knowing with doing, in order to produce something which didn't exist before. Halo was recorded in Molina's home studio outside of Buenos Aires, and at Sonic Ranch Studio in Texas, with contributions by Odin Schwartz and Diego Lopez de Arcaute (who have both been playing live with Juana for a number of years), and Eduardo Bergallo (who has taken part in the mixing of her previous albums), with Deerhoof's John Dieterich making a guest appearance on a couple of tracks.