Few things stunt our creativity as much as an obsession with what others think of us. Fortunately for her, and for fans of her dreamy folktronic music, Juana Molina turned the obstacles of preoccupation with image into stepping-stones of self-confidence, and a musical career that comes into fuller fruition with each new recording.

The 46-year-old Argentinean guitarist, singer and sonic experimentalist, who returns to San Francisco, for the first time with a band, Friday, Feb. 13 at the Great American Music Hall, recently released her fifth album, "Una Dia" (Domino Records), a collection of mesmerizing textures and undulating rhythms that has inspired comparisons to Bjork, Feist, Lisa Germano and Beth Orton.

Upon a foundation of acoustic guitar, voice and the deep tones of the Argentinean bombo legüero, drum, Molina adds synths and electronics, looping and layering the elements, bending pitches and distorting time and space to fashion a seductive and delicious sense of disorientation.

Although she sings mostly in Spanish, and the music has what Jelly Roll Morton called a "Latin tinge," Molina owes as much to Fripp and Eno and the late John Martyn as to the indigenous sounds of her homeland. And that speaks to the cosmopolitan identity she has cultivated for herself since childhood.

"All my rhythms probably have roots in Argentinean folk, certainly," Molina said in a phone call last week from Vancouver, where she had played a concert booked as part of a traditional music series. ("I don't know if it was what people were expecting," she says. "What I did was not very traditional, so I don't know if people were with me.") "But it's hard to tell what belongs to you. I am still surprised when people say 'her South American rhythms,' because that's not what people in Argentina think. People in Argentina don't see anything local in what I do. So it must be something in between. I wish I could be from somewhere else and hear myself, to see what it sounds like from the outside."

Molina has had plenty of opportunities to deal with other people's opinions of her. In 1976, in the wake of Argentina's military coup, she moved with her family to Paris. Molina was 12 years old. "I remember my sister and I, our only concern was to try to fit — to fit in there, and not be just foreigners, not to have an accent in school, not to be the different ones," she recalls. "At that age, you don't want to be the different one. We succeeded in that because after a year we were just one of them. They sometimes thought we weren't from Paris but they never thought we weren't French.

"The interesting thing is that at the same time, which completely contradicts this, the fact of living in Paris made me be an individual, different from anyone else," she continues. "In Argentina, when I was 12, I would go and buy the same shirt, the same shoes, the same trousers that everybody else had, and in Paris I would go to the flea market and buy the dress that no one else could have."

That need to be unique eventually drove Molina back to Argentina when she 18. "I had to leave France because I just couldn't stand French people anymore. I was already doomed because I couldn't fit anymore anywhere."

Molina found herself marginalized in Buenos Aires, as well. "People in the street actually screamed things at me," she says, "because I was dressed in a way that no one would dress in Argentina. I remember wearing a black skirt, very long, with little flowers, and an apron and a black sweater my mom had made for me, and braids. I probably looked Amish. And people were screaming things at me like, 'Where are you going, widow?!' In Argentina, it was a big deal to be different."

From the time she was 5 years old, when her tango-singing father taught her to play guitar, Molina had dreamed of being a musician. But she got sidetracked by a successful career as a comedic actress on Argentinean television.

"This was a means to a goal," she explains. "I really wanted to play music, but I was too fearful to do it. I wanted to keep taking lessons, and I wanted to live on my own, so what I needed was a job that paid well and didn't take me much time. So I thought and thought and said, 'TV.' And then for a month I watched TV to find the right show I could fit in, knowing what I could do. I found the one and introduced myself to the people. It took a little while, like two months, before they tried me, and once they tried me, they hired me."

Initially, the television gig was one day a week and paid enough for Molina to cover her rent, her bills and her guitar lesson. "I was in heaven," she says. "But then I was called to play in another show and then another one and another, and then I had my own show ["Juana y sus hermanas"]. I didn't realize what was happening because everything was so fast — everybody was talking about the meteoric career of Juana Molina. Everything came suddenly."

TV success came at the cost of Molina's first passion. She would work the eight-month TV season and then spend the summer holidays doing concert cafe and theater work at beach resorts. "I really never stopped for seven years. I got trapped in my own idea.

"Then one day I realized it was going to be too late, that I had gone too far away from my first goal without noticing." What woke her up? "I got pregnant and I had to stay in bed. I couldn't work, so I had the time to think. I thought, oh my god, where am I? What did I do? What the hell am I doing here? I think it was so immediate. After a week of being in bed, I said, what's this, what has happened? This is not what I wanted, and I better do it before it's too late. So I quit."

In 1996, Molina launched the recording and touring career that has yielded five increasingly acclaimed albums and has included tours with Jose Gonzalez and Feist, as well as recording sessions with Andy Cabic (Vetiver) and Devendra Banhart.

The biggest challenges came early. "Absolutely everyone, including my family, was against it," she says of the career change. "It was a very very very tough time. But we have a saying — to die with your boots on. It means it's better to die in battle than to die hiding, trying not to die. It means to go for it. I really had that image in mind. If I didn't go for it, I could imagine myself being very old and so angry and frustrated for not having even tried."

Stage fright was an even greater hurdle. Molina calls it her "tremendous huge fear."

"I was shaking, trembling, crying — I just couldn't sing in front of people. Couldn't couldn't couldn't couldn't couldn't. I needed to go very slowly until I could win that battle. That was the hardest one to win.

"I also had to deal with people telling me I couldn't sing, because I sang very quietly. As you can see, I don't have a very strong voice. So at the beginning, what I was doing was just to sing as I speak. I didn't like to pretend I was someone else when I was singing. You meet some people who are a certain way in person and then when you see them singing you don't recognize them. It's like a character they are impersonating, and I didn't want to do that, because I was already doing that by acting — impersonating all sorts of different people. To make music the way I liked it, I really needed to be only myself. So I wouldn't force my voice to make it sound louder or bigger. That's something that came with confidence."

Molina's confidence might ultimately stem from her faith in music's power to transcend cultural boundaries, including language. "Music has its own language," she says, "so there's not really a big need for words. I think sometimes words are just an excuse to be able to sing the melody. I'm more and more focused on the music and I feel freer now to not write lyrics all the time, and just to sing the notes. Some melodies can't be sung without a lyric, but sometimes when I write the lyrics the whole song loses its abstract images and everything becomes too concrete to my taste."

The fascination with music as a soundscape in which the imagination can freely roam has been with Molina since childhood. She was 11 years old when King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" came out on LP. "I was a very huge fan and I really felt the need to put one speaker on each side, lie down and just go for a ride with the record. At a certain point in the music I always saw a window, from the outside. The curtain was down and I saw the shadow of a woman and she was begging for something from a man you couldn't see or hear. I didn't know exactly what it was, but it was the sound of a desperate woman. The interesting thing is that when I heard the remastered CD of that record, that part [she sings the melody into the phone] was just a guitar, and the whole magic was gone. That was very sad."

But as Gusteau says to Remy in "Ratatouille," "If you're focused on what you've left behind, you will not be able to see what lies ahead." As an artist, Juana Molina has found equilibrium in a fluid sense of self so that her music can make good on the promise of an otherwise overworked cliche: the future is now.

Parting note: As I was planning the next Hear & Now column — a chat with James Blackshaw, the phenomenal British acoustic 12-string guitarist who has taken the legacy of Davey Graham, John Fahey and Leo Kottke into the 21st century — I was told that this one with Juana Molina would in fact be the last.

As my long-lost astrologer friend Lance Ferguson always says, times change, and they have been changing fast in publishing and media of late. Economically, the tap has run dry for the Hear & Now, which has been around since 1997 and has allowed me to talk to a range of musicians that boggles my own imagination in retrospect.

Before departing, let me express deep gratitude to George "Mr. Enthusiasm" Shirk for recruiting me into this enterprise and to my two chief editors, Jeanne Carstensen and Karen Reardanz, for shepherding the column in its evolution from premature blog-style rants, raves, ruminations and recommendations to a more (or less) grounded series of profiles and conversations with everyone from David Thomas of Pere Ubu to Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem. Thanks as well to the Gate technical staff for formatting text, processing audio and posting my KPFA playlist.

Above all, I've treasured the opportunity to introduce you to musicians (especially from the Bay Area) I've thought deserved your attention, and to probe for insights (as much as possible in their own words) into the musical minds of Nick Lowe, Chris Smither, Tomasz Stanko, Robyn Hitchcock, Roscoe Mitchell, Iva Bittová, John Hiatt, James Talley, Mathew Shipp, Rokia Traore, Charlie Haden, Graham Parker, Chip Taylor, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, Brian Wilson, Solomon Burke and the late Steve Lacy, to name just a few highlights. I'm told the archive won't be visible but will be accessible if you figure out and remember how to get there. In the end, the journey is everything.

Juana Molina performs with her band (Martin Iannaccone and Gregor Hilde) Friday, Feb. 13, at the Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell St. S.F., 9 p.m., $16. Charles Atlas opens. For more information, call (415) 885-0750, or click here. For Juana Molina's itinerary, click here.

On his way to the Hear & Now, Oakland native Derk Richardson nearly finished his Ph.D. in history, wrote a guidebook to Thailand, jerked sodas at Ozzie's in Berkeley and taught scuba for underwater scientific research. He has written about music since 1978 and is host of "The Hear & Now," a free-form music show (every Thursday, 10 p.m.-midnight) on KPFA 94.1 FM.