Born in Linares, in the Andalusian province of Jean in 1951, Francisco Guerrero Marín began studying music with his father at the age of six. He continued his studies in Palma, Majorca, in Madrid, and in Granada, with Juan Alfonso Garcia, focusing on organ and composition. In 1969, he founded an electronic music laboratory at Radio Granada. Starting in 1973, he was a program planner for Spanish national radio. He began teaching music in 1981, and in 1985 founded the department of electronic music of the Polytechnic University of Las Palmas. Soon after, he founded a working group with members from a wide variety of professions - engineers, physicists, architects, and computer scientists. In 1988, he met Luigi Nono, with whom he formed a strong friendship.

Guerrero Marín was fascinated by electroacoustic music very early on: Jondo (1974), with electronics, won the Gaudeamus Prize. In 1975, he founded the musical group Glosa. In 1976, his Actus won the C.E.C.A. competition, and a recording of this piece won a best album prize for 1978. In 1979, he received a composition prize from the city of Granada, and the Academia de Bellas Artes de Granada appointed him Academico corrispondiente (“academic correspondent”). In 1985, he was appointed as a member of the Granada Festival Foundation. In 1993, he was awarded the Andalucía de la Musica Prize for his entire catalogue of work.

Guerrero Marín’s compositions are concise, but extremely difficult to play, due to their rhythmic complexity and to the composer’s taste for extremely complex polyphonies - they bear witness to his uncompromising approach to music. He has at times been described as the “Spanish Xenakis,” but his work also shows the influence of composers such as Varèse. He is the first composer to have used fractal theory in his composition, beginning with his major choral work Nur (1990).

In addition to orchestral composing, Guerrero Marín wrote vocal works such as Anemos B (1978), Erótica (1978-1981), Nur (1990), and pieces for soloists such as Op. 1 Manual for piano (1976-1981) and Pâni for harpsichord (1981-1982). He also wrote a great deal of chamber pieces, notably the Zayin cycle for trio, string quartet, and solo violin (for one of the cycle’s pieces), which took him fourteen years to complete, from 1983 to 1997. At the time of his sudden death in October 1997, he was at work on an opera based on the legend of Pope Joan, which he left unfinished - the only genre missing from an extensive catalogue.