Rina soi

Juana Molina has spent years exploring sound as if it were a territory without maps. In Rina soi, this journey reaches a point where what is repetitive is not repetition, but rather a path that opens and closes in on itself. The song lasts nearly ten minutes and doesn’t feel long: the loop of synthesizers and the voice that unravels and reconstructs seem to float between the hypnotic and the ritual. There are no conventional choruses or verses that repeat identically; instead, there are layers of textures that overlap as if time itself were being shaped in the studio.

The album Doga, which features Rina soi, is her first work with new material in eight years and the first since Rara (1996) in which she collaborates with an external producer. Recording began in 2020 at her home studio in General Pacheco, in Greater Buenos Aires, and extended until 2025. Before that, in 2019, Molina had prepared a series of concerts called Improviset alongside keyboardist Odín Schwartz, where they recorded over sixty hours of improvisation with analog synthesizers and sequencers. These recordings, captured on tape, ended up being the seed of what would later become Doga. What’s curious is that the song doesn’t seek to resolve anything: each repetition is a variation, each silence an active pause. It doesn’t sound like music that is played, but like music that is lived.