Entry 401 - Murcof - Rememberanza

 

How did I miss this? How did I miss this artist for so many years? I only heard of Murcof this year... January to be exact. I have been missing out on listening to this music for nearly twenty years... I suppose its better late than never to have heard it at all... but damn this is way too good to ignore.

Murcof is a dark ambient project. It's rare that a genre so exactly describes the music that is contained within, but I feel like Rememberanza (even in the short amount of time I've been listening to it) is a genre defining album. It is exceedingly dark and ominous... brooding. It is also fully ambient, minimal, and expansive.

This album (and many of Murcof's other works) are special. They embrace what it means to be truly dark music and in doing so create some of the most moving and unsettling music I've heard... maybe in my life.

So how does he do it? How does Fernando Corona create this incredible sound? Well to be completely honest I'm not sure, I just know the end results that it has on me are monumental. The music embraces minimalism, silence, and many times any sense of musical direction.

The opener - Recuderdos - uses a piano, a minimalist percussion loop and silence to create its atmosphere. The second track - Razon - utilizes a much more fleshed out sound (while still remaining minimalist) to create its ominous soundscapes. The first track is far more structured, the second casts aside any sense of meter and focuses solely on atmosphere. Both tracks are phenomenal, both achieve a similar effect... but the way they go about doing it is almost the opposite of one another.

The rest of the album continues to experiment in various ways. Each and every one is excellent... there is not a single weak moment on this album. There are so many bands that try to be dark and ominous in their sounds and music. So few even get close to achieving true darkness... Murcof is the first in a long time that has achieved it to this degree.