1. Murcof is the performing and recording name of Mexican electronic musician Fernando Corona.
20 Facts About Murcof
1. 2.
Murcof was for a time a member of the Tijuana-based Nortec Collective of electronic musicians under the Terrestre project name.
3.
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.
4.
Murcof was born as Fernando Corona in 1970 in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
5.
Murcof began to wonder how these sounds were made, becoming primarily interested in the sound design aspect of music.
6.
Murcof went to school and learned English across the US border, in San Diego.
7.
Murcof 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.
8.
Murcof's first professional keyboard was a synthesizer, the Kawai K1.
9.
Murcof continued in that style by forming the live act Vortex together with two of his friends.
10.
Murcof's uncle employed him as a warehouse manager around the mid 80s.
11.
Murcof began to digitally process samples of classical music and mix them up with doom metal, death metal, ambient and noise.
12.
Martes, the first Murcof album, came out in the year Corona became a father.
13.
Murcof then teamed up with artists and personal friends Ruben Tamayo and Eji Val from Nimboestatic to create the Electronic label Static Discos, which in 2002 released Martes as a CD in Mexico.
14.
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 Sonar.
15.
Murcof sees Utopia as an important transition from the Martes style into the style of his upcoming album Remembranza.
16.
The Murcof aesthetic moved a bit away from minimalism towards more complex and melancholic harmonic progressions, slightly reminiscent of his prog-rock past.
17.
Murcof was processing previously recorded acoustic material as usual, but this time the source material was very specific 17th century baroque and the experiments in the studio were already a part of the composing process.
18.
Murcof did realize though that he was going in the wrong musical direction.
19.
Murcof thought the big space demanded a different sound: more openness, more time for the sounds to develop and resonate.
20.
Murcof used feedback effects to manipulate the video and his visuals responded to the music.