Life in Ultra Violet: CFCF on L.U.V., Deconstructing Nostalgia, and Knowing When a Track Is Done
Few producers navigate the shifting landscape of electronic music with the curiosity and sharp conceptual edge of Mike Silver, known to discerning listeners as CFCF. Over the past decade and a half, the Montreal-born, Los Angeles-based artist has resisted any singular lane, swerving effortlessly from pristine ambient works and neo-classical collaborations to lush Balearic textures and the chaotic Y2K-club archaeology of 2021’s memoryland. With his latest full-length, L.U.V. (Life In Ultra Violet), Silver delivers an organic successor that graduates from the early-adolescent nostalgia of his previous record into a sleek, adult sophistication. Channeling a Eurodance palette guided by touchpoints like Stuart Price, Giorgio Moroder, and Felix da Housecat, L.U.V. sidesteps facile “indie sleaze” tropes in favor of the nuanced, genre-defying production that has always kept Silver an outlier. Following his set at Just Like Heaven, we caught up with Silver to dig into his early sample-hunting roots, the shifting economics of remix work, and how he decides a track has finally run its course.
ListenSD: I read that you count DJ Shadow and Peter Gabriel as foundational sources of your inspiration. With DJ Shadow on the road celebrating the 30th anniversary of Endtroducing….. and you being in your late 30s, how did you first encounter his work? Same for Peter Gabriel—as a massive fan of both, I’d love to know what initially drew you in and what you found so inspiring about their catalogs.
CFCF: I think those are in my Wikipedia, right?
LSD: (Laughter) Hahah, completely caught! But truly, seeing those two names was the very first thing that caught my eye, and as a fellow fan, I just couldn’t resist asking.
CFCF: I heard Endtroducing….. when I was like 11 or 12 because my brother had a copy, and I pretty quickly became obsessed with his music, tracking down a lot of his older singles and B-sides and also the original sample sources. That opened up my musical world pretty quickly at a very young age; I was on Napster downloading rare Dutch prog and stuff. That has been a lasting and life-changing influence both in terms of Shadow’s own work and the way he structures his songs, to the broader world of music that his music acts as a window upon.
Peter Gabriel, that’s 100% my mom. She was always blasting Secret World Live around the house. When I got older, I started to revisit his music and dig deeper to hear things she wasn’t playing around the house—the weirder art-rock stuff on Peter Gabriel 3 and 4.
LSD: I figured as much! So much of what I listen to also comes directly from what I grew up with—hence my completely unhinged love for Rod Stewart, Deep Purple, and of course, Peter Gabriel. Families have a funny way of soundtracking our tastes forever.
LSD: You’ve turned in standout remixes for an eclectic range of artists, from The Presets to HEALTH and The Hellp. How do you select which projects to take on, and what draws you to such radically different corners of electronic music?
CFCF: I field offers for remixes basically—if people reach out to ask for a remix and I have the time and they have a little bit of money, I’ll do it. Or try my best; in some cases the remixes are rejected, or I don’t have enough time to actually get around to it. It’s getting more difficult these days. Remixes used to be my bread and butter, but they’re not as huge a part of the landscape anymore. I enjoy doing them when it works out because it gives me a chance to play around in a setting with sorta lower stakes and try some ideas out before applying them to my own work.
LSD: You’ve talked about an affinity for music that summons deep emotional resonance, but when you’re building a track from scratch, what headspace are you actually operating in? How do you know when a piece is truly finished and ready to go out into the world?
CFCF: I don’t really go for nostalgia in and of itself in my music. I think the music would be much more wistful if that were the case. Usually I’m trying to interrogate cultural nostalgia, false memory, constructed pasts—doing this by working with genre conventions, in some cases subverting them but in many cases upholding them and sort of piling extra signifiers onto them to hopefully draw out some last strains of emotion or realness. I’ll know if a song is done if I listen to it 100 times and I can’t think of anything else to add or change or fix on it, and I still like it. It’s ready to release when the artwork is finished.
LSD: Electronic music has felt vibrant across the festival circuit this season. Which up-and-coming artists are on your radar that you’d love to collaborate with down the line?
CFCF: Ms*Gloom, 1LDK, Cannelle, Helen Sun.
LSD: What’s in heavy rotation on your headphones right now? And any plans to bring a live or DJ set down to San Diego soon?
CFCF: Richard Hell, Robots in Disguise, Japan + Mick Karn, JC Chasez, The Cramps, Junior Boys.
I hope to come to San Diego soon! I’m sure something’s in the works…
LSD: We’ll be keeping an eye out for that San Diego date—thank you for taking the time to chop it up with us, Mike!