Herminio Molero

Herminio Molero. La Muerte Sintética de Miss Europa [The Synthetic Death of Miss Europa], a 1974 audio work

Hermino Molero: I have known about Alea –well everything begins and you go back further and further and…I was born!
One day, Jesús Ordovás was talking to me about some young actor who was a little absentminded and he introduced me to Pedro Almodóvar. To be precise it was in the doorway of the Rex Cinema. About a year later, we did our first show, a review of a very short text by Beckett: Come and Go.

We were doing a lot of sound poetry and recording things. We divided the roles, apart from what we were doing on stage. To begin with, I was the director, though that changed later, like it always does with this type of group. I also handled the soundtrack and worked with what I later learned was called editing.

Then Ignacio Gómez de Liaño told me about a place that had tape recorders and that I could edit there. That was Alea, which also had synthesisers. At that time, Pink Floyd’s double album Ummagumma had just come out and the back cover showed the whole road crew posing with the truck with all their gear. I saw the stuff, and I knew that we had the same or better synthesisers in Madrid. And that led me down a lot of very interesting and stimulating paths.

For example, in one of the first shows, I did a sound trick at the end when everyone thought the show was over. I recorded one of the albums from the Isle of Wight or Woodstock festivals with a bunch of applause and I repeated it. The trick worked incredibly well. At the right moment, the applause sounded and the people started clapping, because they didn’t get that it wasn’t really applause. Audiences are a lot less naïve these days and you couldn’t do it again, but I played a lot and saw the power that manipulated sound can have when it is properly placed in a show, like an emotional connection with the audience.

At the same time, I started filtering. Before I made sounds with synthesisers, I was always interested in electronic music as a sound filter for real sounds or electronic sounds. I was interested in passing instruments and tapes through synthesisers.

This means passing one reality – or a reading of reality, since it’s a recording – through a synthesiser. I acted like a bridge, taking all my rock and roll friends from the neighbourhood to the Alea concerts, because I assured them there would be synthesisers and electronic instruments.

Everyone responded in their own way. Usually the pieces by Polonio and Vaggione were short and all my rock friends liked them. But when Luis de Pablo’s pieces hit an hour and twenty minutes, they started making noises.

Alea worked in two ways. There were semester courses where you could find what you were looking for. My first synthesisers took me two different places, the first one via John Cage and the Alea music. At the same time, groups like Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Incredible String Band and King Crimson were starting to use synthesisers. I always had one foot in one type of culture and one in another. Bringing the rock singers to Alea meant a lot to me. Pierre Boulez showed up there and someone told me that he was very important and I was interested. So we turned a little towards Artaud, the theatre of cruelty, and took it almost to the edge of pop culture.

The format of the work: an overture, a long ‘opera’, for example, and four epilogues. A total of 8 tracks.

That’s where the sound poetry came in. At some point, we started working with poetry that was recited more than written.

The first piece predates the others by a few years. The breathing. That’s a whole story in itself. I was thinking about it all, and a year after Miss Europa, I did the comic California Sweetheart. I was very interested in the question of sex changes, which seemed to be the greatest rebellion possible in this life: being able to change your sex. Psychologically and technically. I was really interested in the transvestite scene and especially transsexualism. It’s about being other than what life is supposed to have prepared you to be – the power to control your own history and biography.

This was going to be the background music for a performance that never took place. It was going to be done in Cádiz in 1974, working with the architects’ association. Everything had to be approved by the censor. We never really figured the performance out, and the background music took on a life of its own without it. I can’t remember the whole story anymore. Maybe we didn’t really figure anything out and the censorship, as so often happens, did me a favour. I didn’t have to put on a show that wasn’t ready at all.

This all goes together, but I separated it because it was really done like that. Five elements, three by three. One comes in, which is why the stereo is very important here. Another comes in from the different place and another halfway. As one goes up, the other comes down. There is a constant fade in and fade out. The mix is never the same even with the same elements, because it’s never all at the same level.

There’s one of my poems: “my life with women in the plastic palms…” Another is a cut-up à la Burroughs of a fashion magazine from the 1950s that I found in a flea market. The three acts are the biography of a character named Miss Europa, who has a sex change operation in the overture.
If we’re going to play with the character’s schizophrenia, California Sweetheart would be a lesbian – a lesbian transvestite or a lesbian transsexual. It’s a little complicated but that would be the twist.

California did this piece, because for a year and a half, I was California. I wore make-up and dressed like her all the time.
The reasons that California decided to compose this piece was to have ad hoc background music to drop acid to.