The quick
are the dead

Remixer and techno producer CFCF bides his
time, dodging hype and overstatement

NO WORRIES: CFCF

by JACK OATMON

Sharply dressed impresario at Green Room on Saturday nights and bedroom producer recently released on Paper Bag Digital, Mile-End’s Mike Silver is known to the Internets as CFCF. Aside from concocting chilled-out remixes for Crystal Castles, Sally Shapiro, the Presets, Health and other such names, Silver composes his own moody, ethereal laptop techno. He says 2009 will be a year of consolidation.

“What I’d really like to be doing is making my own music and not having to worry about it,” explains Silver during our chat at Club Social on St-Viateur. “I just really want to have the time to work on it and make it better. I wouldn’t say that I want to build it up in terms of hype or anything like that. I’d just like the resources to further the sound. That’s mainly what I’d like 2009 to be—an accruing of resources and time.”

In terms of external predictions for the upcoming year, Silver doesn’t go out on any thin limbs. “I’d say that some blockbuster movies are going to be released in the summer. Some people are going to die. Ha ha! In terms of music, I don’t know where 2009 is going to be headed. What I like to hear is stuff that’s just purely good music and not built up by any hype. So when I see bands become popular through press and stuff, it becomes a pattern. There are the bands of the year and then they get shifted aside and two years later you’re like ‘what the hell was that band?’”

A self-professed lover of pop music, however, Silver listens for durable sounds and shuns the ephemeral and ill-conceived products of pop cultural hyperbole. “The way bands get marketed, it’s so built on hype that they start to get marketed towards the hype. They blow their load too early. Bands that are around right now like the Cool Kids, it’s just build-up, constant build-up, and by the time they release their album and they’re approaching that big hurdle, they miss the hurdle.”

On the production side, Silver is all software, something that allows him full control over his sound. “Occasionally I record my vocals or something like that, but it’s all computer with one MIDI controller that I sparsely use. So it’s a lot of laying things out and composing, not so much improvisation.”