CFCF Brings Disco Beat Back on 'Continent'

If you're a Montrealer, the name CFCF probably conjures up images of a local television station that has since been swallowed up by the CTV Globemedia conglomerate. But for electronic music fans, the TV call sign is better known as the moniker of Montreal synth-disco revisionist Michael Silver, whose debut album, 'Continent,' was recently digitally released by Paper Bag Records (CD and vinyl versions arrive next month).

For the past couple years, the new CFCF has appeared as the tagline for a series of soft-spoken remixes for acts like Sally Shapiro, Justice and Health. With Silver, the disco shuffle is the key attraction, Silver's work is a resurgence of the vibrant disco scene that took over nightclubs in the late-'70s and early-'80s.

Re-imagining that era of music has become the cornerstone of Silver's work, with strains of early electro-pop mixing in with synths galore to form a dreamy, Balearic dance music that mixes in everything from Fleetwood Mac to Alan Parsons.

"I think a lot of people get hung up on trying to bring something to the table that hasn't been done yet," Silver says. "But really I just think that if it does something to you, makes you feel something, evokes some feeling or image to you, it's successful. So I felt free to pilfer from different influences in the collective consciousness, whether real or only half-remembered, to arrive at something that would affect the listener."

The results are as hypnotic as they are hazy. Over the course of the album's 65 minutes, Silver treats listeners to that half-remembered vision of a decade by blending in and out of recognizable cues with his own special touches. As Silver puts it, CFCF is all about "compiling influences and ideas into music that is often rhythmic and atmospheric."

Reworkings of Fleetwood Mac's 'Big Love' and the Alan Parsons Project-referencing 'Invitation to Love' sound closer to dancefloor updates of the originals, while other album highlights like 'You Hear Colours' and 'Monolith' bury their cues a bit deeper so as to let Silver's arrangements take the lead, all without letting go of that sense of familiarity.

Any way you look at it, the songs on 'Continent' add up to a cohesive, inviting artist that will appeal to old fans of his remix work while appealing to a truckload of new folks looking for a little more dreamy disco in their lives.