Radiance and Submission, the newest record by Montreal's CFCF, is a loving transmission from the in-between, a soundtrack of non-time, non-being, non-death. Featuring art by MATSUDA MATSUO, it's eight songs share a stunning ethereality; they quiver and glow like sunlight beaming through closed eyelids. Adding acoustic guitar to his trademark warm synths and masterful electronic production, CFCF's MICHAEL SILVER has made an album that plays like a dreamtime paean to ECM and Windham Hill's catalogs of meditative folk explorations. Silver's guitar arpeggiates sublimely throughout the record, at times sounding like a choir of otherworldly hammered dulcimers. Fragments of voices, chattering percussion, nature recordings, film samples, and Silver's sparse vocals arise and disappear, calling from somewhere just outside the boundaries of the waking world. Radiance and Submission is a record that celebrates the ephemeral. It is the sound of eternal flux, the joyous crash from life to death and back again, endlessly returning.
