CFCF / Jean-Michel Blais - Cascades

Pitchfork 73

Montreal’s Michael Silver maintains an exhausting workload as CFCF. In 2015 alone, he dropped two albums, a Blowing Up the Workshop mix of original material, and an EP. Equally impressive is how Silver strikes—and maintains—a careful balance between charming electronic music and sounds we otherwise look down on: lite-jazz, adult contemporary, Windham Hill-esque new age. In an appreciation of CFCF last year, the New York Times sussed Silver’s aesthetic as where “uncool become[s] cool” and “defiantly corny.”

That balancing act continues into the present with Cascades, Silver’s collaboration with newcomer and fellow Canadian, pianist Jean-Michel Blais. Together, they move into some new genre terrain to mixed results. Blais only just released his debut album last year, but he's been making minimalist piano music on his own for two decades while teaching music by day. An album featuring piano and electronics is generally an austere exercise, as the resonance between piano keys provides the space in which best to insert electronic washes—see Fennesz and Sakamoto or, more recently, Bing & Ruth. This five-track EP finds Silver and Blais warily feeling one another other out and then synchronizing to exalted effect by the record's end.

They open with “Hasselblad 1,” a restrained piece that showcases Blais’ ability to expand the melodic lines with eloquence, leaving just a few patches of space for Silver to dab in with additional color. It’s lovely, but it feels like they're establishing their respective spaces rather than moving as a single unit. On “Two Mirrors,” Blais hammers a repetitive piano line redolent of Philip Glass, finding new accents and rhythms in it, steadily adding to the theme in the upper and lower registers. Outside of some atmospheric moments, you'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint which sounds belong to Silver, as he allows Blais and his piano to dominate. Silver’s synths swell and find more space on the gentle “Spirit.” At times it’s reminiscent of Boards of Canada, but Blais deftly nudges the piece away from such a tangible aesthetic.

By this point, they're clicking, and the record has successfully outlined its parameters. But the delicate mix of sounds is derailed by “Hypocrite,” wherein the duo edge into questionable territory. A rolling melody from Blais provides the drama for the piece. But when Silver enters, it’s with his synths set to “EDM.” In this setting, the drama of Blais’ piano pushes the track to the brink of being “big tent,” as if the Piano Guys got a makeover by OWSLA.

They remedy the situation with Cascades’s longest piece, a stunning rendition of John Cage’s 1948 piece, “In a Landscape.” For those more familiar with Cage’s later work, which embraces silence, dissonance, and chance operations, “Landscape” is a melodic composition clearly indebted to ambient godfather Erik Satie. On this version, Blais’ piano moves at a stately pace as Silver adds flickering electronics and a bit of radio chatter in the background (perhaps a sly nod to Cage’s shortwave radio piece, “Imaginary Landscape”?). Four minutes in, marimba and chimes ripple and synthesized strings quiver to life and it evokes a rolling pastoral scene the moment the sunlight lands upon it just so, so that every tree and hill on the horizon seems to glow golden. For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable.