Juana Molina discovered her muse while visiting her grandmother’s apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a young girl. A nine-story elevator ride did it.
“It took about 30 or 40 seconds to get up or down,” the electronic pop-folk singer and guitarist said on the phone from a tour stop in San Francisco. “I was always happy when the elevator was empty so I could sing songs with this very loud sound, like a drone, in the background. I would be totally transported to somewhere else. So I was into this one-note thing without even noticing.”
Molina’s unique sound is more than a one-note thing these days. Yet the same sensibility that drew her to her grandmother’s empty elevator continues to inform her dreamlike music decades later. It permeates the otherworldly, trance-inducing rhythms of her new CD, “Un Dia,” that enfold her sweetly melodic songs and Spanish lyrics.
Most of the time, as on her recording, Molina is a one-person electronica operation. For her Thursday visit to the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, though, she’s experimenting again by bringing along a band.
“It’s a risk, but fortunately it works,” she said. “But I was a little nervous.”
Like her recordings, Molina wants her live shows to be slightly rough around the edges.
“When I was recording, I had inspiration and there were some errors, but it really didn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing is really perfect, and I like that.”
Molina’s inspirations are as unpredictable as that elevator ride. One of her songs is inspired by a small dove native to Argentina that sings in pairs, which moved her to use two loop machines to create her own interpretation of their sound.
“They’ll sing together, and then separately for about 10 minutes and then hook up again,” she said.
Now in her mid-40s, Molina has spent the past 15 years pulling away from what turned out to be unwelcomed fame. The daughter of a tango singer father and actress mother who fled to Paris when she was 12 to escape Argentina’s repressive political climate, she eventually returned to Buenos Aires and became a TV comedy star beloved throughout Latin America.
And then, pregnant with her first child, she decided to call it quits.
“I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this anymore, bye.’ ” she said. “I started working in TV to make money to be able to play music, and I was caught in my own trap. I decided I had to go for it before it was too late.”
Her producer threatened to sue and fans of her TV show insulted her music, but Molina never looked back.
“I remember watching MTV and thinking that I’d be watching it in the future and say, ‘I should have done that, I could have done it better.’ ” she said. “I had a very clear picture of the future that made me go back to my music.”
Juana Molina, with Faces on Film, at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, Thursday. Tickets: $18; 617-876-4275.
