The ordinary world made radiant

My review of CFCF's Music for Objects ran yesterday at Blurt. There's still a Popmatters interview coming at some point, but for now...


Music For Objects
CFCF
Paper Bag

By JENNIFER KELLY

Working in intricate, pointillist textures primarily piano and electronics, CFCF’s Michael Silver finds emotional resonance in small, contained, repeated patterns. His Music for Objects turns from the large scale landscapes of earlier EPs (The River and, most recently, Exercises) to focus on the quotidian. Inspired by a Wim Wenders documentary on the fashion designer Yoji Yamamoto, Silver looks for the ineffable in the objects that surround us, things we can hold in our hands like keys, bowls and glasses.

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Running with Safety Scissors

Hard to imagine you could hurt yourself falling on this...it's chilled and liquid and translucent, with wavery washes of synthetic tone and slumping, slouching mechanical beats. The album is called In a Manner of Sleeping, and it's the latest from SF (originally MN) electronic artist Safety Scissors aka Matthew Curry. It's been out since mid-June on Bpitch Control (isn't that Ellen Alien's label?).

Anyway, the track they're pushing has vocals, so just because of that, it is relatively warm and accessible as these things go...but more than that I like how the beat shambles and percolates in a kind of living, organic way..."it's the journey, you will enjoy, when it's over, you'll begin."



So I interviewed Michael Silver from CFCF yesterday and I'll be writing a feature pretty soon for PopMatters, but just to hold you, a) this guy has no formal training in playing, composing, music theory, etc., it's all self-taught (and what he's taught himself is towards the esoteric end: stuff like Philip Glass and Stephen Reich) and b) he is really interested in what he called "derelict technology" that is, sound making techniques that were hyper-modern at one time but now resonate with a very specific, very limited period (like the synths on Peter Gabriel's So). Anyway, interesting stuff, lots to do to get it into feature format.

We're going to see Roger Miller's pre-Burma outfit Sproton Layer tonight at the Flywheel, but I don't think I'm writing about it, at least not anywhere but here.

Liking CFCF, not crazy about Oneohtrix Point Never

I've got a couple of electronic records in the listening pile this week, which is always an opportunity to sound like an idiot, but I'm really, really enjoying CFCF's Music For Objects and somewhat less enamored of Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven. So, with the caveat that I do not really have any expertise in this area, I thought I'd think a little about why.

First the CFCF, which is a wonderfully restless, pointillistic montage of piano and percussive sounds. All the tracks are inspired by inanimate objects (hence the title), so that "Glass" has a lovely, crystalline clarity, while "Bowl" is somehow denser, earthier and, not sure how to say this, but a rounded-ness. all the tracks are made (by CFCF's composer/producer Michael Silver) out of the same basic elements, computer sounds, piano and something that sounds like malleted percussion, like a marimba or such (though the sounds might be synthesized, no idea about that). So there's an overall texture, but also a lot of variation in the individual pieces, a sense of personality almost. I really like it a lot.


Here's "Camera," which is built, more or less, on a not-quite-real-life sax-like sound suggests. I'm not sure what it has to do with a camera, but it's got quite a nice sense of slink and syncopation to it.


Oneohtrix Point Never's R Plus Seven is supposedly not intended as songs, but rather sonic material for an upcoming album. Which is maybe the problem. It's not that the individual sounds aren't intriguing, there's just no impetus to move from one to another. I think that Daniel Lopatin should have kept this private, maybe, and shared the finished material with us later.

What do you think?