In 2021, the Montreal-born, Los Angeles-based Mike Silver, often recording under his CFCF moniker, released a wildly unexpected album titled Memoryland. Having spent years working in the ambient/instrumental space, Memoryland was a leap into a new realm and an attempt to capture a new audience, where he swapped his tenderly rendered calm soundscapes for alt-dance vibes, spoken word interludes, and a sense of fun that was derived from Big Beat and rave scenes of the late 1990s, aurally referencing Paul Oakenfold one minute and Daft Punk the next. It’s a stunning, overstuffed work—a love letter to a pivotal scene in electronic music—that holds up five years later.
Yet when Pitchfork ran a review of the album, their score was a safe-but-positive 7.0. Silver responded online, saying that he found the review fair and that “honestly, this album was conceived as a ‘7’ — I wanted it to be kind of bloated, overreaching, and not without its weaknesses.”
That comment always stuck with me because, in my review, the loving reference points to a hyperspecific digital era, and the careful craft in the details elevated every aspect. Personally, I was vindicated when the Uproxx end-of-year Critics Poll came out and Memoryland placed within the Top 50, proving others were just as affected by it as I was.
L.U.V., Silver’s latest full-length under CFCF, stands for Life in Ultra-Violet, and it moves from the DJ-centric mixes into full-bore 2000s dance pop. It’s a record brimming with color, featuring guest appearances, and rich in detail. It shows that Silver can hop genres and master whichever one he chooses, largely out of his unadulterated love of music. As he gets older, his songs get more compact, kinetic, risky, and daring. In short, L.U.V. is an absolute trip.
Yet first things first: did he really think Memoryland was designed to be a “7”-kind-of album?
“Well,” Silver chuckles, “it’s possible I was coping with the relatively mild reception. Obviously, I wouldn’t have balked at an 8 or a 9, but such is life. Conceptually, I do think what I said sort of holds up, in the sense that I was really working from things like UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, or even like Outkast‘s Speakerboxxx/Love Below. Just these CD-era bloated records overstuffed with ideas. I always wanted Memoryland to feel like it was overflowing with ideas, textures, and genres, and inevitably that means some ideas will take a back seat to others; ‘filler tracks’ have a distinct purpose in that sense. They’re there to add color and detail and broaden the scope of the world the record is trying to build and have the listener inhabit.”
Color and detail are very much a defining aspect of Silver’s latter-day pop work, as L.U.V. opens with the dance-rock banger “Kiss Me” (featuring nuum and Seren Forever) and closes with a vibey-er “Eurovision” closing iteration of the same track, much as how major label CDs from the early 2000s would often end with a bonus remix of the lead single. Elsewhere, he works with a variety of on-the-rise voices in the electro and hyperpop spaces, from soloists like Cecile Believe to acts like TECHG1RLS and Touching Ice. It provides a cavalcade of new perspectives on the record, giving it a buoyant, party-ready vibe.
“It was definitely a conscious choice to open up this album to collaboration, especially because it just made so much sense with the sonic world I was trying to explore,” notes Silver. “The records I was sorta mimicking—like, for example, this record by Richard X Presents His X-Factor, or Les Rhythmes Digitales’ Darkdancer, and [Basement] Jaxx albums—were these parades of guest stars, but ultimately it comes down to what the song itself demands. I play around on the computer, and eventually the song starts to present itself, and in some cases it wants a particular sort of female lead vocal, or a guy chatting in French, or sometimes it just needs me.
“So I start setting about to find the right voice. In some cases it comes together effortlessly and organically, like in the case of Cecile Believe, EQ, etc. Other times, it’s a challenge to lock someone down because everyone is so busy, has their own priorities, and you’re trying to stay true to the vision while also being realistic. A few tracks on here took a long time to find someone. I’m very happy with how it all turned out, but I don’t know that I’ll do another record with so many features unless it comes together as a truly natural part of the creation process.”
Yet with tracks like “Ultra-obscene!” angling for sexy club vibes and the deep irony-dripping indie-sleaze of “Let’s Kill Ourselves” feeling like it’d have a home on the Jawbreaker Original Motion Soundtrack, it’s clear that Silver didn’t just expand upon the lessons he learned from the creation of Memoryland, but blew up his entire sense of scale and showmanship.
“Memoryland and this record both presented pretty different challenges,” notes CFCF when asked about the difference between working on pop songs and ambient records. “L.U.V.‘s challenges came from the amount of attention to detail both in the writing and the mixing, the sort of internal logic and math of pop songwriting structure, while also trying to do something unique, or at least ‘personal’ in the sense of wanting to present the vision of pop music that is an accumulation of my personal listening lifetime and not just playing to contemporary expectations. Then all the external factors of working with collaborators, scheduling, finishing this record were the most up-to-the-last-minute I’ve ever done.
“Whereas Memoryland, I worked sort of silently, alone in the background, concocting, perfecting, conceptualizing, overthinking,” he continues. “It was a more introverted experience, and I took my time with it, sculpting it to where I felt it was the closest I could get to what was in my head. With L.U.V. I let myself be loose, less conceptual, more fun for the sake of it. Other records, like [2019’s drum-and-bass instrumental detour] Liquid Colours, are a blast to make; those records are like pure, unadulterated fun creation, no external pressure whatsoever, I just go into flow state while I’m making them. Memoryland & L.U.V., despite their differences, were both more laborious.”
Yet as CFCF branches into more overt, accessible, and even commercial territory, a new element is increasingly coming into play: lyrics. Silver has had lyrics on even his earliest vibe-y albums, but pop witticisms are a different beast altogether, and L.U.V. strikes its pose with ease. “Ultra-obscene” makes explicit come-ons, while “Kiss Me” is coyly self-explanatory. The delightful digital pop-funk of “Cosmo” oscillates between coitus at the Dunkin’ Donuts one moment to observations on capitalism dolled up as compliments the next (“You are a born star / Recession in your country / But you’re never ever lonely,” Silver sings).
“I don’t know if there was a fear, but I can’t put a finger on why I felt more free to be a little naughty on the record,” Silver notes about L.U.V.‘s overall horny vibes. “I think because on so many of my records I’ve done, I’m donning a mask, playing a role, even when it’s just instrumental, there is a sense of conceptual remove, but more than that, it grew out of the music I was listening to and enjoying the performative, goofy elements a bit more.
“‘Cosmo’ is the best example, because that’s me actually singing and pretending to be this sort of sleazeball lothario, somewhere between Bryan Ferry, Mick Jagger, Tiga, Midnite Vultures-era Beck, or like, Har Mar Superstar and Kennedy. [laughs] It’s just funny to slip into that persona, but also affords me the opportunity to write in ways I haven’t before and play with different cliches. I just wanted to try breaking out of this head-down, serious-electronic-producer thing. There’s a big world out there, lots of suits to try on.”
While the abrasive “My Friend Fox” drips with Hollywood sleaze (a direct homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Fox & His Friends, Silver admits), official album closer “Love Hotel” sprawls itself out and luxuriates over rubber synth tones over the course of ten decadent minutes. In Silver’s mind, the references are obvious.
“Well, sound-wise, I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets by admitting that one is very Kraftwerk, particularly owing a debt to ‘Computer Love’, which is one of the most beautiful songs ever made,” Silver notes. “That song is its own entire world, but I’ve always been trying to track down more songs written in that tone, and there just aren’t enough of these really lovely, subdued, melancholy sort of electro tunes. So I set out to make my own. Some other influences crept in, like AFX and DMX Krew, and there’s even a bit of Autechre in there, and also things like Erlend Øye, Schneider TM, Figurine, these sort of gentle IDM-electro boys. Lyrically, I just wanted to evoke a loneliness; I’ve never been to a love hotel myself, but the mere words alone evoke a whole emotional and sensual world. It’s business, it’s pleasure, it’s loneliness, and desire. Shit, I should have put that in the song!”
After touring Memoryland as a one-person show, the thought of turning the pop exuberance of L.U.V. into a stage spectacle has absolutely crossed his mind.
“I think there will be some touring, though I’m still figuring out what that live show looks like,” he admits. “The more collaborators on a record, the harder it is to strictly replicate live. Anyway, the nature of live performance and audience expectation is constantly shifting. A live performance can look a lot more like a DJ set these days, or vice versa.”
Yet even seeing his visage under the flecked lighting of a discoball, Silver now seems more determined than ever to follow his muse to whatever ends it takes him. While he does tease, much like with Memorlyand, that there may be a deluxe edition or re-release of sorts down the line, there are still many things he wishes to accomplish as an artist. When asked what kind of artist CFCF is right now, he jokes that he’s “unseriously sophisticated”, but that’s just the jumping-off point for him now.
“There are definitely still things I want to do in the more ambient/subdued/experimental world,” he notes. “When I started L.U.V., I put aside a record I’d started in 2021 that plays in a more indie, post-rock, chillout mode: a bit of Air, a bit of Cornelius, some Tortoise, the Sea & Cake, O’Rourke-era Sonic Youth, To Rococo Rot, stuff like that. I’d like to jump back into that at some point and refine it, maybe make it more of an open, collaborative, experimental sound with a live band, and see where I can go from there. As I get older, I feel like I want to branch into weirder places and sort of hone not just my musicianship but also just my general artistic approach, conceptual approach, experimental approach, get a bit more rigorous with it.
“The challenge is trying to craft a narrative from one record to the next when I want to do all these things. I want there to be some continuity amid the fluidity. Memoryland set me up well to explore many different pockets of the music I love.
“I go down rabbit holes, and I get ideas about how music ought to be and what I generally like, and I make records of it to get it out of my system. In this case, I wasn’t seeing enough music that felt sort of sexy and glam, sort of stupid, and sort of sophisticated all at once.”