MURCOF - Remembranza

The title of this third album by Mexican artist Murcof (aka Fernando Corona) is highly indicative of the feelings his music conveys, as well as of the elements it's built from and how they're used. It arrives after a long gestation, following a debut that made waves, "Martes" from 2003 (again for the excellent Leaf), and an album of previously unreleased tracks and prestigious remixes, "Utopia", from last year.

Murcof is a solitary artist, and even though his music has travelled the world and lends itself to comparisons with flashier, more talked-about peers, his work is the product of a self-taught process, and, by virtue of that, is even more meticulous and precise than average. If in the past his output has been described as "the perfect meeting point between minimal techno and classical music", on this latest effort Murcof is after a sound that doesn't settle for playing between thesis and antithesis, but strives, not without effort, for synthesis.

The result is a work whose strengths lie in its production, its attention to detail and its balance between parts: everything reveals the care of a true scribe of modern music, a trait more common to an actual classical composer than to a "mere" minimalist musician.

Murcof proves to be completely unbound from genre, even from the overbearing genre of electronica.

Even though the record is made up of samples of various kinds, which he builds and assembles in complete solitude, at times the digital element seems to disappear entirely ("Resignacion"), while elsewhere it remains the unmoved mover of the composition ("Rios").

On "Rostro", Murcof works with pauses, but throughout the record the pause, the silence, is a living part of the composition itself, as it is for Canavarro and for the great masters of electronic music.

"Reflejo" is a harmonization of digital rustlings, with sequences of strings and piano poised in balances that are partly dreamlike and evanescent, partly dense like the echo of dripping water.

It's striking how a string sample manages to create an intersection of planes with Escher-like precision, provoking an almost heart-wrenching emotional tension.

But returning to the theme suggested by the title, the music on "Remembranza" lends itself beautifully to being music of memory; like memories themselves, it is indeed rich in familiar, easily recognizable elements, but these emerge in a disjointed, sudden way, at times echoing one another, though ultimately coherent and meaningful.

Murcof likes to silently link his albums through the semantic thread of the initial letter, with the exception of the final track: on "Martes" it was "M", on "Utopia" it was "U", and this year, of course, "R".

The record indeed closes with the outlier "Camino", which picks up and sums up the hypnotic voices of the strings, stirring in the listener a metaphysical unease worthy of "music for films".

It's no coincidence that at times this record edges toward a dark-toned ambient ("Recuerdos", "Ruido"), but for places that belong more to the mind than to the world around us: and the places of the mind, as we know, make sense even when they contain disparate episodes within themselves.

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30/04/2026