UCSD’s own Carolina Galleguillos and Dennis Franco, two computer-science graduate students who perform and record together as Juna, insist that their dark, sensual synthesizer pop ‘mdash; a layering of computer-generated beeps and waves that wind in and out of Galleguillos’ cavernous, dangerously high pitch ‘mdash; is more a ‘mood’ than anything else. It’s a silky studio-basement study of massage-parlor pop that blueprints its atmosphere on moody greats like Portishead, Enya and chilled-out Bjork, picking up momentum for first-and-only EP ‘Heartbeat’ from car-commercial darlings like Telepopmusik and vague memories of the early-’80s American and Latin-American pop charts.
The pair argues that their live act transcends its parts (Galleguillos’ stories and Franco’s evanescent electronics) for an unexpectedly holistic experience, a ‘concept complemented by lights and visuals’ far from the acoustic guitar and unintegrated percussion that dominates their amateur basement genre. But the people have not yet spoken, nor heard: The duo’s first public performance as Juna will be Thursday, Feb. 12 at the Beauty Bar, where they will showcase material that’s been stewing for nearly a year.
The formation of Juna was an accident of proximity and circumstance, a casual union of the musically inclined. After Franco showed up at Galleguillos’ Carmel Valley home three years ago on a Craigslist quest for shelter and agreeable housemates, Franco moved an established library of electronic tracks from his long-running synth project Beat7 into his new room, then casually suggested that Galleguillos write some lyrics for a given track.
Their initial ease soon motivated a full-on, one-song-a-week summer project that unraveled over evenings behind microphones and mixing tables ‘mdash; until finally, last September, ‘Heartbeats’ was unleashed onto the cyberworld via MySpace.
The’ casually trained singer emigrated to Northern California from Chile in 2003 on a work scholarship from the Chilean government, eventually drawn to the archetypical paradise of San Diego for graduate school. Galleguillos still carries a curl of Latin accent that falls velvet-on-velvet into Franco’s undulating beat. Stacking, shifting synths evolve over the course of each track, new strains winding into a nebulous haze of electronics, at times flattening to elevator techno but never clearing the fragile shield of fog that keeps the crowd at perfect distance.
The beatmaker holds equal weight alongside Galleguillos’ commanding bedroom exotics, amplifying a larkishly ephemeral voice hardly expected from the throat of a UCSD kid hammering out her doctorate in computer science ‘mdash; a voice more likely to seep from some hazy, pillow-den harem girl than a face in the awkward research crowd inhabiting the basement computer labs in Warren.
Juna’s duet works as a hypnotizing pendulum, dark but never threatening, each hushed sex whisper slightly veiled in th beat’s xylophonic pulse ‘mdash; all in all, well-suited background music for a dimly lit, downtown club overflowing with lesbians and cigarettes, hardly a lovebird realizing it was actually the pair of geeks in the corner who set the ‘mood’ and smalltown light show for that cross-bar come-hither.
Juna will perform live Thursday, Feb. 12 at Beauty Bar in San Diego.