Mueran Humanos: Street Punks from Latin America
Mueran Humanos are Carmen Burguess and Tomas Nochteff: a counter-cultural force of street-wise punks from Latin America.
With roots in the DIY underground rock and experimental music circuit in Buenos Aires (where both Carmen and Tomas were born), the pair have been central to the burgeoning scenes across Mexico, Columbia, Chile, each playing in bands and putting on DIY shows and tours that helped to kickstart and culminate collectives and movements in the region.
Originally conceived as a radical art group in 2006 after the pair moved to Berlin (their first show including a funeral installation with a corpse), music started to infiltrate more and more into their creative practice, and a sound characterized by different approaches to tape experimentation, samplers and synthesis working in constant flux.
Reemplazante, their fourth album and the first one released on their own Sterbt Menschen Records, was composed with a simple keyboard nicknamed "The Shark" (which they picked up online for 20 euros) and the bass plugged into a toy amplifier found in the street. The band have utilized this Spartan set-up to maximum effect, with each song put together and then, little by little, "translated" to the electronic arsenal that has formed the sound of the band, with the beautiful and raw voice of Carmen (who wrote the lyrics this time) and the highly melodic bass of Tomás acting as the central elements.
The duo say that each of “our songs aim to evoke different feelings, like rage, melancholy, or love”, which is something that’s evident in the powerful emotional core of this record. For all the sharp edges and punky undertones of this record, though, there’s always a sense of the ecstatic. It’s not so much happiness, as a deep and—to use a dictionary definition—“mystic self-transcendence”. You can hear this in the triumphant woop at the end of ‘El Camino Del Dolor’ as well as the clubby techno rhythms that pepper some tracks, to the immersive churn of ‘Dentaduras’. There’s a reason the pair cite Egon Schiele, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leonora Carrington, Dario Argento (Carmen illustrated the cover of his autobiography) and Mariana Enriquez (with whom the pair have collaborated) as influences: these are all artists who render deep, complex feelings in an uncompromising way.
Despite the different methods and the evolution of their sound, there is a constant cohesion that has been maintained since their debut single in 2008 and through the three previous albums, starting out with the self-titled Mueran Humanos (Blind Prophet Records, US, 2011), through to Miseress (ATP Recordings, UK, 2015) and the album-film Hospital Lullabies (Cinema Paradiso, UK, 2019). For the Hospital Lullabies album they were remixed by the likes of Silent Servant, members of The Horrors, Alessandro Adriani and others.
As a live band, Mueran Humanos harness the intensity and experimental methods into a cohesion and rare intensity that has seen them play from a WWII bunker, Berghain’s main floor and to the stage with the likes of Swans, The Fall, Martin Rev (Suicide), Silver Apples, Royal Trux, Psychic TV, Michael Rother (Neu!) and contemporary peers like Iceage, The Horrors, Anika, Molly Nilsson, Xeno and Oaklander, KVB, Rakta.
Condensing down years of underground practice and DIY aesthetics, Reemplazante is the duo's strongest statement yet. An album of great emotional depth and intensity that places them alongside the tradition started in Warhol’s factory in the 1960s, through the prism of the Latin American underground and beyond.
