Murcof

Murcof is the performing and recording name of Mexican electronic musician Fernando Corona.

Besides electronic music Corona was also listening pre‐1900 classical music during his whole teens.

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.

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 (1978) 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 (around 1980) he moved 100 miles south, to a small port called Ensenada.

At the age of eleven (1981) 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 (new age) composers Jorge Reyes and Antonio Zepada (link in Spanish).

The US was Corona's "window to the world", as he had to cross the US border to obtain records and magazines.

There he developed a taste for mid 80s industrial (Play It Again Sam, Wax Trax! Records and Nettwerk labels, Skinny Puppy, Front 242, Front Line Assembly, KMFDM, and In The Nursery) and synthpop (e.g. Depeche Mode’s A Broken Frame (1982) and Black Celebration (1986)).

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.

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 (e.g. Kraftwerk), 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.

In 2000, he returned to Tijuana.

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.

Since 2006, Corona has been living in Barcelona, Spain.

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 (modern classical music, musique concrète, holy minimalism, micropolyphony, baroque music, etc.), 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.

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.