Mueran Humanos Are Very Serious About Having a Sense of Humor

Photo courtesy of Mueran Humanos

Mueran Humanos (Die, Humans!) make passionate, deadly serious and deeply wry music for living in the city. They capture the sound of the buildings looming over the individual and the sound the individual makes in response: the sound of shivering and getting free. Their music ostensibly cold, but it’s full-blooded. It’s art for the thoroughly modern drowner who declines the world’s invitation to be entirely subsumed. It’s honestly pretty boss.

The band consists of Carmen Burguess (vocals, drum machines, synths) and Tomas Nochteff (vocals, bass, drum machines). The two are originally from Buenos Aires, where they played in the bands Mujercitas and Dios respectively. They formed a duo in 2006 and currently call Berlin their home.

Mueran Humanos’ debut album came out in 2011 on Blind Prophet, the label run by Sean Ragon from Cult. The new album, Miseress, is forthcoming from ATP, the label of the long running and revered All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals. While their debut was a decidedly stark affair, Miseress (recorded in part with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Jochen Arbeit) is sonically fuller. It throbs along the autobahn, encompassing the emotional gamut of modernity—from joy-tinged dread all the way to dread-tinged joy. They call their music, in an amusing nod to musique concrete, “Rock Concrete.” Sly humor aside, this is an accurate term. The band was kind enough to let Noisey premiere their new track, “Mi Auto,” and talk to me a little about art.

Noisey: Four years is a stretch between albums. What the hell have you been doing?
Tomas Nochteff: Well, to begin with we never said that we wanted to have a “career”, so we are not following the steps you are supposed to follow, and that includes the one-record-every-year-or-two rule. Having said that, before we started to record Miseress ourselves, we did it in a studio. We almost finished, but we didn't like it. So we discarded it and started again. That took almost a year, so that's part of the reason. We would never record or release something because external pressure. If something takes time, it takes time. We are not in a race; we do what we want.

If you think about it all, do you consider yourself a Berlin band or a band of ex-pats? Your sound feels like a balanced sound between your two Buenos Aires projects, the pop of one mixed with the starkness of the other. Does Mueran Humanos feel like a continuation of the music you've been making all your lives or something entirely new?
We are a Berlin band—it's a fact—but if we were living somewhere else it would be the same band, I'm sure. I see bands as a combination of personalities. This is the one thing I'm very conscious and deliberate about. I don't think “I need a drummer.” I think “this person is interesting, I feel attracted to him/her, so what would happen if we do a band together?” And then we'll see who plays what, and the instruments we'll use and the sound we'll get will be a product of that. So from that point different personality combinations produce different bands and different sounds and different ways of playing the instruments.

The moment I saw Carmen I knew I needed to do something with her. I am the same person as I was with Dios, but combined with Carmen it produces something different. Dios were these young men—very angry, very nihilistic. The concept was very strict, and each one has his definite role—bass, drums, voice, martial, repetitive riffs, almost spoken word voice. Very dry, short songs, the lyric is done and the song ends, no repetitions, no instrumental parts. With Carmen enters an element of sensuality, eroticism, intimacy, also synths, long songs, no fixed roles. Compared with Dios you can say I jumped from the street to the bedroom and started to explore the dream world.

Continued below…

How did you end up working with Jochen Arbeit?
It was strange that one of the first persons we met in Berlin was Jochen. We met him in a bar. A friend of ours started to talk to him because of his bands Neubauten and Die Haut, and we ended having some drinks with him. He started to come to our gigs, which was funny because nobody else was. And at some point he said, “when are you inviting me to play?” And I said, “next record.” So he came to the studio, we showed him some songs, and he played his parts. It was done in one day. He was amazing. Musicians who move to Berlin usually have one idea in mind before moving, one mythical music from the past—usually techno, or Bowie and Iggy, etc. For me Berlin was all about Einstürzende Neubauten, Crime and The City Solution, The Bad Seeds, Die Haut, the late era Gun Club, that small clique of people who produced so many of my favorite records. That's what I liked about Berlin before moving here, so the support from Jochen meant a lot to me. He's a great guy and a tremendous guitar player.

There's a lot of feeling similar feeling to Suicide's “Frankie Teardrop” in the album. Were you trying to evoke that? Both the band's name and referring to the genre as "rock concrete" indicate a fair amount of, admittedly dry, humor. Is that an important part of the music?
We never tried to evoke nothing else but our own. We both love Suicide, though, and sure there is an influence. But not in the sense of “let’s sound like this, let’s dress like this” but more in the sense of “wow these people are so brilliant and so free and they don't give a shit. I want to be like that, I want to be that free, I want to reach that intensity with music.” Humor is a big part of what we do—sure it is—and we have fun doing this.

I think all good art has an element of humor, of playfulness and fun. You can be deadly serious and expressing yourself with humor. But it's not humor as in a joke, it's not to make you laugh. A joke and a song are exactly the opposite. A piece of music like “Frankie Teardrop” will grow over different listenings and it will work over time. It adds something to your life, and every time you listen to it something different will happen to you. A joke, on the other hand, will work just once. It's all impact and then nothing—next time will be not funny. And that's my problem with goofy or ironic bands; it just doesn't work, it's embarrassing. Besides, there's too much “ironic” stuff out there. People really need to start meaning it for a change. The “ironic” culture nowadays is like a disease: ironic consume, ironic bands, ironic publications. It's lazy and shallow because it's never more than a comment on other stuff instead of being something in itself. It’s derivative by definition. And it’s ultimately conformist.

As two non-Germans in a scene that can be sometimes less than welcome to those not of the, uh, non-Aryan persuasion, have you encountered any problems? Do you think some of minimal synth/neo folk's reputation is undeserved, or does it seem about right?
Well, despite of being ¨non-Aryans¨ we are more or less the same race as most Europeans. So in any case we would not be discriminated by race or nationality, but because of our origin. Argentina is not a well-known country, and so many people are afraid of the unknown and don't know how they should react to us. More than discriminated I think we are underrated sometimes because we sing in Spanish. I realize there's people who think that if you are singing in a language they don't understand, you are not singing to them. They imagine you are talking some specific things that are outside their experience. Which is not true, we sing in Spanish because why not? It's our language. But not because we are talking only to Spanish-speakers.

The strange thing is you said these scenes have a reputation of being racist, but these are the people who embraced our band first, so obviously there's no more racism on those scenes than outside. We don't consider ourselves an industrial or a minimal synth band, despite the fact that we have played on those circles, as we have also played anarchist squats, art galleries, noise shows, and corporate festivals. We don't fit anywhere, so we play almost in all places. Basically we play where we are invited to play. We don't pursue any “scene.” We don't like “scenes.” And no, I don't think we ever encounter a right winger or racist person face to face in those circles, and we never have a problem.

What happens now is something that happened in punk before. Some early bands toyed with fascist symbols as fetishism or provocation. It's something we found very, very silly, but it's artistically genuine. And then some other idiots come in and take it seriously. And also some fashion victims thought that they have to do it too, without any understanding of what those symbols represent. So there's a lot of confusion. And the confusion will continue until people speak up and be very clear. I'm afraid this shit will only get worst because fascism is on the rise in the whole world now, which is something very scary and ugly.

We are not a political band, but we don't have anything to do with that. Everything we stand for is opposed to fascism, in any form. We are antifascist to the core, always have been and always will. Which doesn't mean I can't enjoy the work of people whose political ideas I despise, as long as their art is not an expression of their political ideas, like in Celine, Lovecraft, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis or our own Jorge Luis Borges.

Miseress can be pre-ordered from ATP here.

Zachary Lipez is a writer who does nothing ironically. Follow him on Twitter.