Twin Color is the last album of Girona based producer and composer Fernando Corona aka Murcof. It is out via InFinè – offering a futurist nostalgia voiced in part by his daughter Alina, recorded in the early pandemic. We’ve interviewed Fernando a few days ago, talking about the last album, the new projects and the upcoming concerts, as the one on Thursay at Sonica Festival in Slovenia.
Hello Fernando, and thank for your time. As we are following your music production since many years, we are eager to know more on your approach since the first steps of your career. Can you tell us more about it?
I became interested in music in the mid-1980s. My first experience was with a Commodore 64, then I bought a small Casio sampler – the very famous SK 1. My father was a professional musician and a multi-instrumentalist, so at some point I had a basic sequencer in my hands, plus I was practicing at home playing the piano trying to play simple classical pieces; eventually my first experience was with a band, where I played for 3 years, fascinated by the productions of Sundays, Smiths and other related bands.
Since your first full-length album, Martes – the technology available to a musician has changed drastically. In what spirit did you carry out your sound research?
From my first ambient project in the mid 80’s, then with the collective Nortek – impressed by the work of Kraftwerk and the industrial scene. I was interested in knowing how to make beautiful sounds, stimulated by the records that my father owned, and how to combine electronic music with other genres like rock and ambient. The computer has become so strong for designing sound in a natural way, I spent hours and hours of sound processing to see what oddities could come out of my studio experiments.
As you have spent part of your life in Tijuana, Mexico, do you think there is any particular influence on your career and why you decided to move to Catalonia?
It’s hard to imagine how the local Mexican scene has influenced my music. Tijuana is separated from the rest of Mexico, the food is so different and so is the media we consumed as children: dozens of American television channels, huge radio networks. We bought several musical instruments and a lot of studio equipment from the USA. When my daughter was born in 2002, I thought about leaving Tijuana, maybe to Los Angeles where I have some friends and relatives. That year I also released my first album, I was traveling more often in Europe. Spain was the area closest to the tour’s activities, and it was quite natural to move first to Barcelona and then to a small village in Catalonia.
For a producer and sound designer, would you detail a main thread of your process?
From my point of view, for 99.99% it is a fragmented process. Even when I’m working on different productions, I always jump between tracks just to give some space, to come back and listen critically. When I have to perform live, like the project with Vanessa Wagner, the program is already there we have to translate it live; this means a lot of technical work on my part, until we get to rehearsals one day before the show. For Statea we had some preparation sessions for the show, with a lot of work for me, incorporating live electro show an instrument as complex as piano album.
Twin Colour once again confirmed all the passion and mastery you are able to achieve when together gathering so many influences. How was the feeling during the recording?
It all started in 2020, when a lot of things happened and I turned 50, thinking a lot and being very nostalgic. During that time, I listened to a lot of synth pop productions and my daughter spent a lot of time in the studio, so I started recording here and there and rehearsing vocal samples on the album. I already have ideas on the next volumes, which will be inspired and based on synthesis: volume 2 or 3 will be on FM synthesis and the focus could also go on the classical synthesizer, with a more classic approach.
How is the story on the creation of Etna Sessions?
The Etna Sessions will be performed entirely, for the three concerts scheduled in Budapest, Novi Sad and Ljubljana. The story of its creation is linked to Sicilia and the Zoo crew, who invited me and a friend from Tarragona (visual artist Manu Ros) for this Portrait. The preview was performed in 2015 in Sicily with other shows in Italy, before everything was archived. I always had this project in mind, at one point I decided to make the material more ready for an album that we then released just a few months before Twin Colour, for a pleasant coincidence.
