Murcof - The Invasion of Silence

Silence as sound. Or, if you prefer, sound that settles onto silence, not breaking it, but gently resting upon it. Probably the hardest thing to express in music, even more than feelings or social commitment, precisely because of that contradiction in terms involved in trying to use sounds to convey the absence of sound. Many have tried; the most famous remains, without doubt, John Cage with his "4'33"". But Cage was a courageous pioneer, and, like true pioneers, he perhaps couldn't fully express his genius because he lacked the right equipment. A stool next to a piano, and for the rest of the time not a fly stirred.

In the internet age, Cage's lesson found a disciple. The Mexican Fernando Corona uses silence as a fundamental part of his music, to create, stretch and compress the sonic flow of his tracks, shaping them like actual instruments. But there's much, much more to the Murcof project than that.

Born in Tijuana in 1970, the bearded Corona graduated in Systems Analysis and Programming, while at the same time developing a passion for the sonic possibilities opened up by the computer. He has a smattering of piano and cello, but his musical passions were already clear since adolescence: classical music (his father was a multi-instrumentalist) and electronic music, a horizon opened up for him by Jean-Michel Jarre's "Oxygen". And when, back in Tijuana, he decided to shut himself away in a recording studio, Fernando Corona fused these two passions into a spectacular concentrate, giving birth to Murcof. One of the most interesting and innovative musical projects of recent years, a point of dialogue between experimental electronics and fragments of classical and electroacoustic music.

In 2002 Murcof released his debut album, Martes. The work is a difficult one, but curiosity grew among insiders around this so mysterious project, the father of a fascinating record that is, at the same time, full of questions. What exactly is it that Murcof plays? Is it the anguished silence of a long suite like "Maiz"? Or a new kind of ambient electronics, condensed into singles like "Marmol"? Is the use of string, brass and piano samples just a quirk of this debut work, or is the Mexican composer trying to blaze a new trail?

Whatever the truth may be, Martes is the work that lights Corona's path toward contamination. It's above all the brilliant success of tracks like "Mapa" – a long dronic carpet pierced by a searing burst of violin – that excites Murcof himself and spurs him to keep going. Or the faint hint of tango in "Mir", or again a soprano loading "Muim" with pathos.

The musician's geographic origins play an important role: the Murcof project is certainly a product of the American electronic school, yet at the same time it's entirely detached from it, bolstered by Corona's self-taught approach to learning and by his hunger to seek out (and find) a sound all his own. Here every listener immerses themselves in whatever their mind wants to find, from Future Sound of London to Sergei Rachmaninoff, from Piazzolla's tango to Fennesz.

In 2003 Fernando Corona crossed the Atlantic and decided to settle in Barcelona. There he worked on and released around ten singles, which came out across various compilations and EPs before finally being gathered into an album, Utopia, a record we might call "maritime". After the red-planet atmospheres of his previous work, the Mexican composer's focus here outlines oceanic landscapes, where the journey takes shape in one of its most complete expressions: the epic voyage of Ulysses. It's the Homeric hero who traces the thread of an album where we also hear samples of waves and the sirens' song, but above all we can picture Ulysses' felucca cutting through the Mediterranean, pressing on swiftly through the depths.

On the title track (and in its remixes included on the album), the traveler par excellence accompanies Murcof into clubbing territory, however timidly. In the ten minutes of this deeply dark classical ride, the glitches and the kick drum only make their entrance after six minutes of introduction, of rowing out to sea. "Ulysses" is probably still, to this day, the track that best exemplifies Murcof's musical style, an essential starting point for anyone setting out to discover this artist.

The dreamlike closer "Ultimatum" revisits a 12" already released, while the new versions of "Maiz", "Mo" and "Muim" show real understanding of the spirit and sound of Murcof's conceptual music. If anything, the contributions of fellow artists Jan Jelinek, Aeroc, Collen and Fax lend legitimacy to Fernando Corona's project and elevate its standing, placing it alongside the sacred monsters of cultured electronic music.

But in Utopia we above all witness the Murcof project drawing closer to the dancefloor. In this sense, Seth Orvitz's remix of "Memoria" exemplifies an affinity with beat-driven territory that Murcof's music readily lends itself to.

The more dance-oriented compositional streak that emerges in certain moments of Utopia poses something of a dilemma for Corona. On one hand, distorting the nature of the Murcof project is to be avoided; on the other, that would mean reining in the more "restless" expressiveness that seems intent on taking over. Corona decides not to give up either path, and picks back up his parallel project Terrestre, which we'll discuss further on.

If Martes and Utopia turned the spotlight on the classical/electronic contamination Corona was producing, it's certainly with Remembranza, from 2005, that the Murcof project reaches its artistic peak. The Mexican artist firmly establishes himself as a composer, polishing away one of the few but understandable flaws of his earlier work: the length of the tracks. Never, as in "Recuerdos" or "Reflejo", had Murcof's music reached such a high level of synthesis; never, as on this album, did such attention to sonic detail pervade the musical spectrum, giving room to a series of phenomenal tracks that assert themselves with delicacy and austerity. Clean sounds, glitches deployed with precision, and unsettling fragments of strings are the strong suit of Remembranza, along with its astonishing continuity between tracks. A single, long journey between the melancholy of Chopin and the hysterics of Venetian Snares, but above all the trademark, that inimitable style of timeless music. What once might have been called "the mature album" is, in this case, the definitive consecration of a clearly defined sonic path, one that began far away and arrived at peaks of sonic poetry, like the suite "Razón (En tres partes)".

This writer likes to place each Murcof album within a precise setting, inspired and sealed by the music, by the thoughts and images its notes conjure once your eyes close with the record on the stereo. And it almost feels as if these settings are projected onto a shared screen, as if we could see exactly what Murcof wants us to feel. I picture wandering asteroids while listening to "Martes"; I seem to see Ulysses' slender boat cutting through the waves of the nighttime Mediterranean; or an elderly man playing a disused piano in a run-down gymnasium at the edge of the Nevada desert, the very one glimpsed on the cover of Remembranza.

This audio-visual synthesis, this constant stimulus toward thought and mental travel, reaches its perfection on the phantom record Cosmos. Corona has been playing it systematically in his sets since October 2006, it's widely circulated online, its release has been announced for a while now, but Leaf still hasn't put it into print, due to legal complications (it should nonetheless be released next summer).

Cosmos manages to reflect a powerfully evocative quality, where simply closing your eyes and listening to the record ideally carries you into the depths, floating among the stars. It's a genuine, perfect soundtrack to infinite space, amid galaxies and asteroids, in that non-place wrapped in tomb-like silence and devoid of atmosphere. Instead, Cosmos translates into musical language – albeit a dronic one, steeped in silences and apocalyptic glitches – the boundless idea every human being holds of the mysterious cosmos, with its planets, stars, meteorites. The void.

The four tracks on this 12" (just 20 minutes of music) almost seem like the expression of a theory Fernando Corona wants to prove: that even silence, in its most complete form, can be filled. A kind of insistence, at all costs, on music, on the extreme pleasure of art over the emptiness of silence. Only this can explain the rapturous climax of "Cuerpo Celeste", or the deeply somber solemnity of the title track.

"Cielo" deserves a discussion of its own, a long electronic ride where you can almost hear the call of the atmosphere, polluted and overrun by mankind's filth. A shuttle on the launch pad, clouds coiling in on themselves, the chaotic frenzy of the sky above us rebelling in all its drama.

After Cosmos, Murcof pauses the evolution of his artistic moniker with a work that's decidedly eccentric compared to his usual path, not only in terms of musical content but also in terms of how off-the-cuff the project it was created for turned out to be.

The Versailles Sessions stands as the record of a singular musical experience: in the summer of 2007 he was tasked with creating a sonic accompaniment for "Le Grandes Eaux Nocturnes", a festival of lights, water and sound held every year at Versailles.

The project's further distinctive feature – and thus of the results contained in these sessions – lies in its unprecedented mode of realization: Corona had to push electronics into the background in order to work instead with a sonic framework derived from recordings of an ensemble of musicians specializing in baroque music, playing seventeenth-century instruments including flute, violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord.

The traditional character of the performances and the need to adapt the sounds to the venues and the water-and-light shows they were meant to accompany did not, however, stop Murcof from thoroughly reworking the recorded material, which differed from what he usually uses but was subjected to the same process of filtering and assembly.

Thanks to a remarkable evolution and openness in his techniques for shaping sound and timbre, Murcof has kept the baroque specificity of the base compositions intact, pouring it into six long and complex tracks in which he gives shape to a kind of spectral soundtrack, ceaselessly furrowed by noise, distortion and small detonations that move in a centrifugal motion over a fragmented, predominantly dissonant dark-ambient backdrop.

Although there's no shortage of more harmonic passages, and modern sound manipulation resurfaces in the two closing compositions, the work ends up losing part of the fleeting magic it may have given off when paired with the lights and images for which it was conceived; the sound results of that unique experience alone, rather than an organic work, end up resembling more of a stylistic exercise, one in which Corona has nonetheless further applied and refined his compositional precision.

Murcof is beyond. Simply beyond any limit of categorization, because images and silences are an integral part of his work. We're not talking about musical genres, but about activities outside the fateful seven notes, emotional states that elude the self-appointed experts of music magazines, who are excluded from any say in the matter. Murcof's music is personal, taking shape in the imagination of anyone who stops to listen to it, closing their eyes, dreaming. A soundtrack for the oneiric. And these are Murcof's own words: "Images can help just as they can also achieve the opposite effect. Among the audience there are people who don't need any image at all, who simply love to close their eyes and create their own visualization of the music. At the same time, others need to receive a more complete concept from the artist, both in the music and in the video: so that the images can complete the music in order to capture the whole idea that inspired the artist."*

As mentioned earlier, Fernando Corona also runs another musical project, called Terrestre, in which he gives free rein to livelier sounds closer to dance music, yet always manages to stay close to cultured electronica.

The Terrestre project is part of a broader collective of artists from Tijuana called NorTec (Norteño Techno), where a new generation of musicians, designers, image specialists and audio/video technicians come together to find an ideal "fusion" of their various artistic fields. A distinctive feature of both the Nortec and Terrestre projects is their strong identification with Fernando Corona's homeland, northern Mexico (hence the acronym "norteño techno"), both ideologically and concretely; indeed, Terrestre's music frequently features samples of musical instruments typical of that region. The definition of Terrestre's music is given by the bearded musician himself: Proyecto solista en estilo NorTec o Norteño Techno, música electrónica hecha a base de sonidos de música norteña, de banda sinaloense y tambora. Like Terrestre, Fernando Corona has been active since 1998, well before the birth of his most important project, Murcof, launched in 2001. This also explains the affection Corona shows for this side project of his.

Terrestre's music is light years away from Murcof's, but the substantial difference isn't so much a musical one (which, incidentally, remains considerable) as it is one of mood. The albums released as Terrestre are sunny, cheerful, rhythmic and full of percussion, guitars, and Latin American instruments. The extremely dark and icy atmospheres of the Murcof records are simply unimaginable here, and the sheer gap between the two sides of the same artist is striking.

On the first two albums, Plankton Man Vs Terrestre and vice versa, the collaboration with Ignacio Chàvez (Plankton Man) produces a flow of chill-out soundscapes, decidedly rhythmic but without a kick drum up front. In other words, plenty of room is given to various electronic solutions, without turning the result into a dancefloor racket. It's more a matter of experimentation, close to certain musical territory explored by Basement Jaxx, but, as already mentioned, much more relaxed and less forceful.

After curating the soundtrack for Nicotina, La vida sin filtro, a surreal thriller-comedy by Spanish director Hugo Rodriguez, Fernando Corona turned his attention to developing his best-known creation, Murcof. The last album released as Terrestre dates back to 2004, and despite a cover of dubious taste featuring the bearded musician's bust dressed up as Speedy Gonzalez against a purple background, Secondary Inspection turns out to be a fine record. The album's title refers to the two levels of inspection that anyone wanting to enter the US from Mexico must go through. And indeed, the secondary inspection is the more thorough one. Likewise, Fernando Corona's work here is carefully crafted sonically, poised between an afternoon at the Café del Mar in Ibiza ("Botas De Oro") and the world's busiest border crossing ("Ejido Del Terror"). An evocative album loaded with electronic beats, it's the record to pick if you want an idea of Murcof's other face, the one a famous band once called "the dark side of the moon." But what if it's actually what surrounds the moon that deserves our attention? Murcof doesn't tell us anything. It's up to the listener to close their eyes and see where his music leads, whatever name it goes by.

After thirteen years of collaborations (Philippe Petit and Erik Truffaz) and a few one-off projects for other labels (the two soundtracks La sangre iluminada and Lost in Time), the Mexican artist returns to the Leaf label with a monumental work (three vinyl records or two CDs). The Alias Sessions (2021) was born from a collaboration with the dance company Alias, led by Swiss-Brazilian choreographer Guilherme Botelho, hence the more intangible nature of the compositions. Violas, pianos, flutes, violins and harpsichords give way to drones, synths and electronic percussion.

The nearly ninety minutes of The Alias Session cannot be subjected to a fragmentary or episodic analysis. The rarefactions, the shifts in tonal colour, the variations between shadow and darkness form a single magma of leaden sounds and murky phonetic imagery that create a modern, spectral symphony. This makes it easier to catch those signals of divergence that slightly tear at the monolithic structure of the sixteen compositions, such as the roar of the electronic incipits that intrude on the tremulous, minimalist piano of "Dandelion Heart," or the techno and glitch unease of the mighty march into the unknown that is "Unboxing Utopia." The rich wealth of detail can only be absorbed through repeated listening: Murcof creates imaginary sonic spaces in which to channel anxieties ("Dividing Space") and seemingly more conventional dynamics ("Systemic Amnesia"), while also leaving room for ethereal digressions ("Void Glance") and unexpected bursts of lyricism ("Fire Thief").

Murcof approaches the sensory and extrasensory world with the same decisive clarity, unconcerned with the anxieties and fears they conceal, and when the rhythm starts pulsing again in "Ideology Storm," the Mexican musician eases the tension until everything comes to rest in the ecstatic embrace of the two closing tracks, "Unread Letter" and "Void Glance."

After spending the last twelve years in service to other people's images and visions, Murcof has picked up the thread left off after the release of the excellent Cosmos: the music itself becomes a source of suggestions and images, a project that further broadens the creative horizon of one of the most lucid composers of our time.

* Murcof's statement is taken from Marco Mancuso's interview published on the site Digicult.

Contributions from Raffaello Russo (“The Versailles Sessions”) and Gianfranco Marmoro (“The Alias Sessions”)

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