Tete-a-Tete
Milena Muzquiz
Cator Sparks chats with Milena Muzquiz of Los Super Elegantes about the duo’s nascent superstardom
The night after Los Super Elegantes’ record release party for Tunga’s House Bar: A Group of Kids Sitting Around Talking About the End of the World, I sat down with one half of the duo, Milena Muzquiz, in a cozy parlor at the National Arts Club to chat about the rising LSE stars, the story behind their new album and what the future holds for the music and art worlds’ new Sonny and Cher.
Milena Muzquiz: Oh, I am loving the birds surrounding us in this room! We should podcast this interview so people can hear how lovely the background twittering is.
Cator Sparks: We should definitely work on that. At your album signing last night, who were the other two people signing your album?
MM: Oh, one was just a friend; he had nothing to do with it. We just thought it would be fun to have someone sign who had nothing to do with it at all. The other, Jenna, was one of the actresses in the original musical of [our record] Tunga’s House Bar.
CS: I am impressed with all of the stunts you two pull; first the San Francisco American Music Hall performance and then getting on stage at the Warhol event in Los Angeles without being invited.
MM: Yes, the American Music Hall was the birth of Los Super Elegantes! We love being spontaneous.
CS: Now are you [and LSE’s other half Martiniano Lopez-Crozet] a couple? I never have read anything about that.
MM: No, no, no, just friends. We have been working together for 12 years. We started by doing little shows by ourselves at parties. We would pretend to get into a fight and then burst into song–that kind of thing. We have always had this natural and positive way of creating tension between us and the audience and creating a moment. We liked this idea and went with it.
CS: Did you begin LSE as a project for art school or just for fun?
MM: It was just for fun, very natural. It started in a nude drawing class. We were bored to tears so we started asking if we could play music; so we had this relationship of changing spaces, and we got the students to focus on us more than the model.
CS: Poor model! Stark naked and ignored.
MM: Oh, he was fine, trust me. Later we approached the San Francisco American Music Hall and we told the manager that we would open a night there. We convinced him that we were an established band and that he just had not heard of us. So he signed us up and we got all these cooks from a local restaurant that were musicians, punk rock ones, and created this weird band. It actually sounded really great so we started performing more. We would create these narratives in clubs that people really enjoyed, and, voila, here we are 12 years later.
CS: You are doing something right! With all of this notoriety since the beginning, its funny that you were signed by two record companies and then got bumped from both because your music changed so much from when they initially heard you to when you sent them the finished product. After all of that, do you think another record company is going to want to sign you?
MM: Well, here is what happened: we are trying to write performances that could work in a mainstream way and be pop music and enhance [our] image; that is a project in itself. The problem is that we work in a conceptual way, but when we started recording we got really interested in narratives and musicals, so our first album was a long soundtrack that was supposed to be a BMG Latin America mainstream record. We loved what we did and thought it was perfect.
CS: BMG didn’t feel the same?
MM: No, not at all. They wanted to cut the narrative and wanted us to just do a single. And neither of us would budge and it just didn’t work out. We also worked on a soap opera to coincide with the record to be played on Mexican television when the album came out, but the entire thing got way too complicated.
CS: What has LSE been working on recently?
MM: We have really been traveling a lot and transformed Dan Hug’s entire gallery in Los Angles into a theatre set based on an interior designer’s [work with] her client; and, last month in London at Blow de la Barra Gallery, we had a series of stage sets where little vignettes took place. Both have had a great response.
CS: As for your record, I noticed the Whitney produced it. Do they have a music label I wasn’t aware of?
MM: Oh, no. We wrote the musical for the Whitney Biennial two years ago. That was our fourth one and the Interior Decorator was the fifth one. So, whoever produces each musical we ask to produce a formal documentation of it so we can have a collection in the end.
CS: Smart. So what’s up next?
MM: Marti and I are trying to finish the next album called Nothing Really Matters. We are trying to find someone to produce it now. We want to do it in Mexico City; and then we have also been writing our autobiographies, about his life in Argentina, mine in Mexico, and then meeting in art school in San Francisco and the failures, tragedies and extreme highs we have experienced. We also want to write about having a passion for a craft that you don’t know. Like us, we have no idea how to write music, but we love doing it. Our keyboards are labeled with colors so that we know the pink ones work together and the blue ones work together.
It works in a way that doesn’t work. It is complicated for mainstream music companies to comprehend, and, for galleries, it is complicated because there is no fine art background.
CS: It seems like you have conquered the art and music worlds, and I think with The Leaves of St. Pierre you could really conquer the fashion world. Since it is a spoof on Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion flock would eat that up. Stage it for Fashion Week!
It would be perfect to stage it here at the decadent National Arts Club.
MM: Lets look into that please. It was fun when we staged it at Javier Peres’ Peres Project because we cast two relatively famous Hollywood actors in it, so they were either making us look like professional actors or we were making them look like amateur actors.
CS: I love the story behind Tunga’s House Bar too.
MM: Yes, we wanted to write about the guruism in California, kind of like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face when Audrey Hepburn becomes so avant-garde once she meets the guru in Paris. We always travel to write, and this time we went to Brazil. Nothing was coming to us and one night we walked into a party and everyone was off their minds listening to this crazy man. We both took notes and that was the base of our project. Thanks Brazil!
CS: Where does this record sell?
MM: It will be sold at the Whitney and other museums as well as small record shops like Amoeba. Kids may not get it, but they will have to just get into it.
CS: I’m sure, in time, the kids will grasp it, the dilettantes anyways. Good luck on the autobiography and new performance Nothing Really Matters.
MM: Thanks! Hope you can understand your recording with all these birds flipping out. Hmmm, maybe we should record something in here.
