Locomotive disco

CFCF’s Continent straddles
the astral and the earthy

RIGHT-ON TRACKS: CFCF

by JACK OATMON

It took local producer Mike Silver, aka CFCF, somewhere in the ballpark of a year and a half to cobble together his first LP, Continent, out this week on Paper Bag Records. He did nearly all of the production on one laptop, with a few added guitar riffs he recorded. These two points seem to perfectly encapsulate the gradual, measured, mobile vibe which comes out over the course of the dozen diverse electronic gems on Continent. The sound is unabashed, funky, sexy, cinematic and silly all at once, while retaining something of a thoughtful, atmospheric edge.

Mike Silver: A few of the songs were even fleshed out largely on trains, while I was travelling. Whenever I’ve had to travel, I like working on the train. Especially when travelling to Toronto, which I’ve done quite often. If you do it during the day, you pass by Lake Ontario for, like, 15 minutes.

Mirror: You’re on this train, on your way to this other city, you’re working on your little laptop, and you’re making this atmospheric music. I think that’s what grabbed me about it. You’re coming from somewhere different.

MS: Well, when it comes down to making a song, I don’t want to get into genre practice. I don’t want to be that guy who’s like, I’ve got a laptop, I’m going to make dubstep, and I’m going to make it sound like dubstep.

M: It’s its own thing.

MS: Even down to the album cover. A lot of dance records, you look at the artwork and there’s a disco ball.

M: Laser beams.

MS: Yeah, laser beams, or something evocative of a nightclub. And that’s really the opposite of what I was trying to get across.

M: Where did the name and the whole aesthetic come from?

MS: I was trying to boil down, once I put it together, what it made me think of. I like the name. A lot of people will call it like cosmic disco or something like that. It’s halfway between being pastoral and earthy, and also being cosmic. It’s a continent. It’s not a field. It’s huge. Enormous. It’s the beginning of the Earth. It’s something so gigantic that people don’t often even think about the concept.

M: I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but how seriously do you take the sound? Some of it is quite campy and silly.

MS: I think it’s just that I don’t shy away from that kind of thing. I can understand why someone might pull back from doing that because they recognize that it’s going to be seen as overly corny. It’s either that I don’t hold back or I don’t even notice. Over the past five years, I’ve absorbed a lot of really corny, earnest, overt pop music. I’ve listened to so much of it, I have a hard time recognizing it.

DJ SET WITH MARK SLUTSKY AT CASA DEL
POPOLO ON SATURDAY, OCT. 31, 10 P.M., FREE