Montreal based electronic musician Michael Silver aka CFCF has released the follow-up to his acclaimed EP Exercises. Entitled Music for Objects, it contains 8 tracks ranging from modern classical to house and from minimal electronica to ambient music. You’ll quickly realize that – as the previous record – it is highly influenced by legendary Japanese musician and member of the pioneering electronic music group YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, as well as avant-garde minimal composers, especially PHILIP GLASS and STEVE REICH. That may be the first reason why CFCF sees both records acting as companion pieces.
The second one deduces from CFCF‘s conceptual approach and his extra-musical source of inspiration. While Exercises was inspired by the monstrous buildings of the so-called brutalist architecture that still permeates the Montreal landscape, Music for Objects has its starting point in the concealed aura of everyday objects: Watching Wim Wenders’ film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a documentary about the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, a composition by the film’s composer, Laurent Petitgand, provoked Silver “to look at the everyday objects on my desk and all about my apartment and outside on the street and see that there was something kind of inexpressible about them that I wanted to convey through music.”
Starting with the pure minimalism of Glass, its gradually shifting rhythmic and glitzy electronic sounds, over the housy, saxophone driven Keys up to the shimmering, fragile beauty of Ring, it’s not always easy to imagine or even to sense musically the objects the track’s titles refer to. But even though it sometimes succeeds, for example with the exotic piano piece Perfume or the levitating, kind of translucent Lamp, it shouldn’t be the primary demand or benchmark. It seems to be more important to get oneself into the openness of the tracks and to breathe their lightness and facility. And where this can be put into effect also the surrounding things may be perceived less on the basis of their shape, function or material than through their radiance and auratic presence.
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