Murcof
Murcof is the performing and recording name of Mexican electronic musician Fernando Corona.
Corona was born in 1970 in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in Ensenada. He was for a time a member of the Tijuana-based Nortec Collective of electronic musicians under the Terrestre project name. In 2000, he returned to Tijuana. Since 2006, Corona has been living in Barcelona, Spain.
Music
Murcof's music is sparse, minimalist electronic music. Many of his compositions are founded on abstract, glitchy, sometimes complex electronic percussion. Harmonic and melodic influences come from classical music, ambient music, drone music, berlin school synthesizer music, ethnic music and free improvisation. Rhythms are derived from minimal techno, dub, glitch, industrial music and IDM, and are often aligned around a 4/4 beat. The more recent works in the Murcof catalogue no longer include electronic beats.His earlier works, like the 2001 EP Monotonu, feature orchestral instruments sampled from recordings of works by modern composers such as Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman. Some of his later works, like the 2005 album Remembranza, incorporate samples of Corona and his friends playing classical instruments. Besides his personally initiated albums, Corona worked as Murcof on the 2008 commission project The Versailles Sessions, in which he reinterpreted recordings of a baroque ensemble. Live shows of Murcof featured guest musicians from varied musical backgrounds, like jazz trumpet player Erik Truffaz, tabla player Talvin Singh, crossover electronica-classical pianist Francesco Tristano and contemporary composer Philippe Petit.
Biography and influences
Early youth (1970)
Murcof was born as Fernando Corona in 1970 in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. His earliest contact with music came from his home, where his father sang, played bass and accordion. Corona tried some of these instruments as his father bought a very cheap organ for him and his sister. He began to wonder how these sounds were made, becoming primarily interested in the sound design aspect of music. His father's record collection included Bach, The Beatles and The Carpenters. His mother listened more to traditional Mexican music. Corona was taught by his father to pay attention to the compositions and arrangements of both classical and pop music, which helped him to better understand what elements in music he liked or not.On his eight-year he moved to Chula Vista, close to the United States border. He went to school and learned English across the U.S. border, in San Diego. A few years later he moved 100 miles south, to a small port called Ensenada.
At the age of eleven Corona was introduced to electronic music by a friend of his father's who gave him a tape of Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygène. Soon afterwards he got fascinated by electronic‐classical crossover through a present from his father, an album on which Jon Santos plays Bach on a classic Moog synthesizer. This resulted in him purchasing other electronic music from artist such as the Berlin School synthesizer gurus Tangerine Dream, Japanese electronica composer Isao Tomita and Mexican ethnic crossover composers Jorge Reyes and Antonio Zepada. The US was Corona's "window to the world", as he had to cross the US border to obtain records and magazines.
First electronic instruments (1985)
Around his fifteenth Corona started to play music, taking piano and music theory lessons from 1985 to 1989. He bought his first keyboard in 1985, one out of the Casio Sample Keyboard series, which made him excited as he could use it to record and transform snippets of everyday sounds.For a while Corona enjoyed an alternative club in Tijuana, called Iguanas. There he developed a taste for mid 80s industrial and synthpop and Black Celebration ).
Around 1988 Corona acquired some more sophisticated equipment. His first professional keyboard was a synthesizer, the Kawai K1. Corona was "blown away" by the concept of designing his own sounds with oscillators and waveforms. He also began to program sounds on the Commodore 64. He started to write his own compositions influenced by techno pop, acid house and industrial. He continued in that style by forming the live act Vortex together with two of his friends. The group was active from 1988 to 1991.
Besides electronic music Corona was also listening pre‐1900 classical music during his whole teens. His uncle employed him as a warehouse manager around the mid 80s. In 1988 he started his study to become a computer programmer, but dropped out in 1990. By then he was focusing on DJing with his mobile DJ system and later as a resident DJ in a club in Ensenada. From 1992 to 2000 he worked in a nursing agency that dealt primarily with the elderly and terminally ill in San Diego.
Prog-rock (1991)
In this period of time Corona played keys in the rock band Sonios, which was first influenced by British pop music like The Smiths, but later went into the direction of prog rock, jazz fusion, ambient and post rock. Corona states that this was a learning school for him about the various elements of music. He took influences from the local rock scene. The 1998 Sonios album ‘200 Fonios’ was released on Tijuana indie label Nimboestatic, won various prizes from cultural institutions in the Baja California region, was rated one of the best rock albums of 1998 by the Mexican press and reached a cult status in many places of Mexico and Latin America.Electro-acoustic projects (1994)
Whilst in Sonios, Corona also engaged in other musical co‐operations like Elohim, an experimental multimedia group, and Arvoles, an acoustic‐ambient crossover project including a female vocalist. Then Corona got to compose for modern dance ensembles in Ensenada, an experience that led him to develop a taste for modern academic music, from the dodecaphonism and minimalism of the early 20th century to the experimentalists and serialists of the mid-1900s. Also, he grew tired of pre‐1900 classical music having listened to it for all his teens and adolescence. Upon hearing Xenakis’ Oresteia, plus later Pleiades and Metastasis, as well as Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna his perception of music altered immediately and drastically.Some of the other composers he became interested in where Igor Stravinsky, Wolfgang Rihm, Giya Kancheli, Arnold Schoenberg, Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Stefano Scodanibbio.
Corona took his electronic experiments in a more extreme direction, playing with feedback effects to create walls of noise. He began to digitally process samples of classical music and mix them up with doom metal, death metal, ambient and noise.
Non‐classical music he listened in that time were for example Steve Roach’s dark ambient record The Magnificent Void. As well as Squarepusher’s mix of jazz, D&B and acid on Hard Normal Daddy. And the at that time freshly emerging glitch genre initiated by the Raster-Noton label. Also capturing Corona's attention were the ambient noise of Deathprod. And the Icelandic post‐rock band Sigur Rós.
Corona studied cello at the Centro de Estudios Musicales in Ensenada in the years 1993 and 1994. In 1995 and 1996 Corona had private lessons in audio engineering in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. In 1998 and 1998 he studied audio engineering and music arrangement at Harper's Music, Chula Vista, California, US.
Terrestre and Nortec (1999)
Early 1999 Corona leaves Sonios to fully focus on his solo electronic project Terrestre, for which his goal was to bring together the worlds of ambient electronica, pre‐Hispanic music and other ethnic sounds. For this project Corona sampled from vinyl records in the styles of tambora, danzón and salsa.In a later period of 1999 he gets an e‐mail from three Tijuana based electronic musicians inviting electronic musicians to work with some norteña and tambora tracks downloaded from a studio in Tijuana. This way he became a part of the team of electronic musicians, DJs and graphic artists who would soon develop the Nortec Collective. Nortec's objective is to blend traditional Mexican norteño‐tex‐mex border culture with electronic dance music and visual projections. It grew from being a local phenomenon to getting some worldwide recognition.
Murcof - "MF Relay" / ''Martes'' / Monotonu (2001)
In 2001, during his Terrestre activities, Corona's Murcof project comes alive out of the need to explore modern classical territories, like the holy minimalism of Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt and the post‐modern atmosphere of Valentyn Sylvestrov. In 2002, whilst experimenting with digital effects on samples of Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman he creates his first Murcof track: "MF Relay", a track with glitchy minimal techno percussion, a synth drone and "sliced and diced" samples from orchestral percussion, choir, piano, strings and woodwinds.Somewhere around here Corona started to listen to Deathprod’s electro‐acoustic free improv band Supersilent, particularly their releases 4 and in later times 6 and 7. He also took influences from Oren Ambarchi and ambient/dub/electronica producer Biosphere.
Martes, the first Murcof album, came out in the year Corona became a father. With this album Corona continued to work in the MF Relay style of minimal dance rhythms interwoven with samples from holy minimalism and other modern classical sources. Corona later stated that the composing wasn’t a hard job for him: "It almost composed itself".
Corona left Nortec in 2002. He then teamed up with artists and personal friends Rubén Tamayo and Eji Val from Nimboestatic to create the Electronic label Static Discos, which in 2002 released Martes as a CD in Mexico.
Corona was at Barcelona's Sónar Festival in 2001 to perform with the Nortec Collective when a friend of his insisted he would give his Murcof demo CD to Tony Marley of UK based independent record label The Leaf Label. So he went to meet Tony in a club and gave him the demo. This led to the worldwide vinyl and CD release of Martes, three months after its Mexican CD debut with Static Discos. The pioneering "MF Relay" track did not become a part of Martes, but was published, also in 2002, by Context Free Media on the Monotónu 12”. Martes received an almost instant universal praise from well-known magazines like The Wire UK and consecutively Murcof got to play at festivals like Montreal's Mutek and the next edition of Sónar.
Martes was reissued by The Leaf Label in 2015 as part of the label's 20th anniversary celebrations. This was a special triple LP release combining the original album with unreleased tracks and the 2004 album Utopia.