Mueran Humanos - A collage of horror and the occult

Two years after the release of their first official record, which drew the attention of a good deal of specialist critics, the time has come for a chat with the Argentine duo. Having just wrapped up their Italian tour, Mueran Humanos are on a quest for their own cultural identity, for a "folk" music that reflects their origins, so far removed from Anglo-Saxon rock and its mutations.

How did your project come about? What were the first steps, and what artistic goal were you aiming for?

Tomas: I always wanted to play with Carmen and be with her. We've always appreciated each other, both as people and as artists.

We started this project as soon as we moved to Europe, into an empty house. We wanted to explore and express our obsessions, our interests, and have fun, of course.

At the beginning it was much more abstract, a pure and formless sound to accompany our videos and collages, then we started writing actual songs and playing live.

Just bass, synthesizers and voice — these are the typical elements of many wave bands (including minimal wave acts), but in your music you can feel a very strong poetic soul. The spoken word style, the literary elegance of Spanish, shape dark and perverse poems...

Tomas: Well, it's not only that. Samples, percussion, theremin and tape. We're not a minimal wave project and we'd rather avoid labels and scenes, which we find boring. We've often been lumped in with minimal wave projects because we released our album right when there was renewed interest in the genre, thanks to labels like the excellent Wierd Records, or bands like Xeno & Oaklander. We respect these artists, but what we do is quite different.

We started in 2006 without knowing there were similar acts around. We simply applied our usual attitude. Before Mueran Humanos existed, I played in a couple of bands, and in both we were just bass and drums. Carmen has played piano since she was a kid, and before this project she played keyboards in Mujercitas Terror. So we picked up our instruments and brought Mueran Humanos to life. The idea is to use what you have, not to pick up instruments for their sound, but to alter what we have to create the sound we want. We don't play instruments, we abuse them.

“Horas Tristes” and “Leones En China” are the most structured, introspective compositions on the record. On the opposite end, “Cosmeticos Para Cristo” and “Monstruo” are more direct and aggressive. How would you define this dualism in your music? Where do these tracks come from?

Tomas: At the beginning we only did long improvisations, nothing else. We'd be locked in our apartment playing the same riff for hours on end. We'd start with a single sound, a single note, or a prepared tape, or a drum machine pattern, and from there we'd try to build the rest, improvising and letting things grow on their own. That's the origin of all our songs, which is why some turn out short and others very short. It depends — we treat each one as a completely different event, each one is a different creature and requires its own approach. We work in a cinematic way, each composition is also a sonic space, in a sense close to film scores. And like a film score, you choose different sounds and lengths depending on the scene.

Tomas: Religion speaks of trance, of ecstasy, transcendence, and communication with the beyond. Religion also tends to concentrate meaning and energy inside symbols, images and verses. Just like art. Religious art matters to us because it's a means of transmitting knowledge. We're interested in ritual, architecture, the art and philosophy of religion. Of course I'm aware that religion can be a tool of social control, but art is also used as a form of control, as propaganda, advertising... Neither Carmen nor I had a religious upbringing, but we're still interested in the spiritual world and the occult. I'm not baptized, and maybe that's also why I don't feel any rebellion toward religion. I like to freely explore interpretation and study within this huge container of knowledge. I feel very close to the approach thinkers like Jung or Philip K. Dick took toward religious traditions. One example of this is the first issue of my cut up and collage fanzine, “Mueran Humanos” (we took our name from it back in 2003). I had this vision: a cross as an inverted phallic symbol, a naked man hanging from it, but you can't see his genitals. The cross represents them. So I put together an upside-down cross with a mysil, a lipstick and a fragment of a drawing by Robert Fludd. And there I placed the words “Mueran Humanos”... We don't use these symbols for purely aesthetic purposes, we use them to communicate content.

Clock Dva, Suicide, early Ebm... your music follows many paths, but reworks them in a very personal way. What has been the evolutionary path of your project, and what roots does it draw strength from?

Tomas: Rock culture is Anglo-Saxon, and I'm not. So, ever since I started playing as a teenager, I've always wanted to create my own personal folk music, the music of present-day Buenos Aires. Tango is the music of Buenos Aires, but it belongs to another era — nothing has happened since the '40s, and it no longer reflects the city. I listened to things like Einsturzende Neubauten, Pil, Swans, Cabaret Voltaire, but I was always aware that they didn't belong to my culture. That's why we wanted to create something new. In the bands I played in before MH, we tried to write a folk music for our era — that was the main idea. Music that reflected our perception of the city and our experiences as kids of that historical moment.

What we've done with MH is less a reaction and more a construction — the construction of another space, a dreamlike logic, a space between Carmen and me. It's not a psychogeography of the city but a private space.

We don't have a style, a label, a code of conduct — I prefer the word "personality". It's an ongoing process over time, it never stops, and every point in MH's evolution is a different element of mutation. We don't follow anyone else's path, we want to create our own language. As I said, we started out playing long abstract tracks just for ourselves, exploring our instruments and our own alchemy. The roots are inside us, and beyond that only Suicide were truly important to us — for their expressive purity and freedom, the sheer frontal approach of their attitude, not for their music.

The album artwork is a piece by Carmen. What does it mean? A dark, cruel vision of female identity?

Carmen: Maybe, but there's also a chromatic purity and irony at work in it.

Tomas: It was clear to us that it would be our album cover two years before it was even recorded. It's part of the record just like the songs themselves — I don't know why we chose it. A lot of decisions happen without discussion or reflection, it just felt right.

Carmen: So many, from writers of past centuries like Lewis Carroll to comic artists working today like Charles Burns. One of my favourites is Dario Argento for his ability to condense elements that fascinate me.

Tomas: The list would be endless, but some of them are: Dario Argento, Kenneth Anger, Bergman, Max Ernst, Maya Deren, Jan Svenkmayer, Murnau, Kafka, Rilke, John Carpenter, Rimbaud, Austin Osman Spare, Philip Dick, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Maeterlinck, Ezra Pound, Debord, Wyndham Lewis, Borges, Roberto Arlt, Nick Blinko, William Blake, Bosch.

I saw on your website that you produced a short film titled "Mili The Rat", and your reworking of the "Seventeen" magazine cover... What was the purpose behind these projects?

Carmen: Visual art is, for me, a different language that I use to communicate things I can't explain with words. I can't talk about it, I just do it. These works exist and I hope they speak for themselves.

I've always made visual art... right now I'm more absorbed in our musical project, but it's part of my life and I try to integrate it into MH. My latest projects are illustrations for some of Lovecraft's poems for a Spanish edition, in collaboration with my Argentine friend Daniela Zahara.

One last question before I let you go. You've just returned from a long Italian tour that took you across the whole peninsula — how was it? Did you have any interesting encounters or feedback?

Tomas: The tour was fantastic, in this wonderful country. Very different from Argentina... in Argentina everything is new, there isn't much history, so going into the cradle of Western civilization was a psychedelic experience for me. People were very friendly and supportive. Wardance and Luca Grillo, and the bands we played with, were all very kind. In Genoa our support act was an absurd project called UR. I hope to come back soon and see many more cities.

What are your plans for the near future in terms of releases? After Burial Hex, will there be other collaborations?

We've just released a split 7" with the Argentine band Mujercitas Terror. We've also got a 7" planned with two new songs, coming out on the new label Louder Than War, launched by John Robb and Southern Records, and a 12" on Vanity Case that we're still working on. There will be many more collaborations, but they'll be a surprise. I'm starting to put together solo material again, and I'll soon be reissuing a 2006 cassette from London, all bass. I only made 10 copies originally, and now it will be put out by the Berlin label Noisekölln.

I hope we'll get to record the new album around November. We have a lot of new songs, but they still need to mature. What should you expect from them? That they'll drive you crazy, I hope...

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