Friday, July 15, 2005
Murcof
Atmospheric, dark, moody - sound too interesting for minimal 4/4 beat music? Murcof aka Fernando Corona, manages to pull it off, combining minimal, echoey clicks beeps and glitches with snippets of orchestral music and operatic vocals. What makes it stand out from the rest is the variation in each track. All to often micro-house tracks just plod along without changing much or at all, but Murcof keeps changing bits, making it unpredictable and ultimately more interesting
He's worked with Bostich and the rest of the crew in the Nortec Collective, a description of which I've nicked from The Milk Factory's interview with Fernando, available here
Nortec stands for Norteño-Techno, which is an aesthetic concept invented here in Tijuana by us, a group of musicians and graphic artists, where the main ingredients are northern Mexican popular and border culture (also called cultura norteña) and technology, in our case as musicians we take elements from norteña and tambora bands. We record loops and samples from real bands that play these types of music in seafood restaurants, bars, streets and even studios were they record their demos, once we have these recording we go home to our computers and mess around with the samples, crating new compositions based on these loops
The Tijuana/US border has been the focus of a fair amount of attention recently as it's rightly seen as a hotbed of culture - not suprising really given the social and economic circumstances. Charles LaBelle's article on Tijuana as a hybrid is available here, and makes for an interesting read
Mir and Memoria are taken from 2002 album Martes and Una is taken from 2004's Utopia. I posted the first two a while ago, but as I've re-written the post and the last links were broken, I thought I'd include them again
Murcof - Mir.mp3
Murcof - Memoria.mp3
Murcof - Una.mp3
