Friday, March 9, 2012

EXERCISE YOUR MIND


CFCF is the stage name of Canadian electronic musician Michael Silver. Based in Montreal, Silver took the name CFCF from the call sign of the city’s CFCF-TV.
His debut LP, ‘Continent’, was an impressive collage of vintage electronic textures evoking grandiose landscapes worthy of a Michael Mann film. ‘The River’, an EP based partly on Werner Herzog’s classic film Fitzcarraldo, deepened a growing obsession with conjuring far-away landscapes and voyages through a style which is at times melancholy, propulsive and ecstatic. Working in genres ranging from house and disco to ambient and new age to rap and R&B, and pulling influences from Peter Gabriel and Popol Vuh to Mr. Fingers and DJ Screw, CFCF’s music is at once versatile and far-reaching yet eminently listenable and recognizably pop, and always vivid.
Since these two releases Silver has stayed busy with a series of evolving mixtapes. ‘Do U Like Nightbus?’ explores the titular “genre” through his remixes of Aaliyah, Ciara and ‘Twin Peaks’, while ‘Reincarnation’ presents a dark mindmeld of exotic chants, pounding drums, R&B crooners and menacing dancefloors. As with his own music, you get the feeling you are embarking on a fantastic journey to an unknown destination.

For his new EP ‘Exercises’, out April 24th on Paper Bag Records, CFCF shows a different side of his palette with a series of subdued piano and synth based pieces. Pulling from influences like Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Borden, among others, and using institutional architecture and 70s Canadiana as a framework, the EP has a distinctly 20th century feel.

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