Exercises is the fifth extended play in the discography of Canadian musician Michael Silver, known by his stage name as CFCF. The extended play was inspired by brutalist architecture and several synthesizer-heavy modern classical and piano-only works that Silver listened to during the fall and winter of 2010–11, which were the "soundtrack" to how he felt "kind of uncertain” in those seasons. Its cover art by Ken Schwarz, Josh Clancy, and Travis Stearns shows one of the buildings the extended play was inspired by.
Exercises was produced with very limited resources; the piano was not an actual live piano but rather a replication from a software instrument plug-in. Each cut on Exercises is a minimal track that involves a piano that slowly builds around other sounds like quiet drums and synthesizers. It follows a more classical and less dance music-based style with more "simple" compositions than his past releases. The EP features a "semi-cover" of "September," a track by English singer-songwriter David Sylvian.
Promoted with two pre-EP track releases and a music video, Exercises was in released in 2012 by the labels Paper Bag Records and Dummy Records. It garnered generally very favorable reviews upon its distribution, ranking number 14 on a list of the best dance and electronic releases of 2012 by Exclaim!. Some reviewers highlighted the expansion of Silver's musical scope with the EP, while critics with more mixed opinions on the record felt it sounded too nice and lacked in having surprising or exciting moments.
Inspiration
In the fall and winter of 2010 and 2011, Michael Silver listened to several synthesizer-heavy modern classical and piano-only works by composers such as Frédéric Chopin, Glenn Gould, Philip Glass, and David Borden. He described them as the "soundtrack" to how he felt "kind of uncertain” in that time period. Listening to these works influenced him to record a piano-and-vocal-only version of a track from his previous extended play The River (2010) titled "It Was Never Meant to Be This Way."
The piano version was included as one of four bonus tracks on digital download releases of The River and also received an official music video that paired the track with "icebox glamor" sequences from the David Cronenberg film Stereo (1969). Stereo was filmed in a brutalist building at the University of Toronto. This combination of the recording of a piano piece and visuals of brutalist architecture created the feeling of an "otherworldly and kind of sad" world that Silver wanted to explore. After creating around five piano-and-synthesizer pieces, Silver decided to produce and release a set of these types of tracks as a record. Architectural elements were noted in a review of the EP for SoundBlab by Daryl Worthington: "The first few tracks exhibit a distinctly urban feel, sounding like soundtracks to a film about architecture."
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s album Playing the Piano (2009) as well as improvisational recordings by composers such as Alva Noto and Fennesz were the most influential works for Silver creating Exercises. The EP also garnered influence from the soundtracks of the National Film Board of Canada and tonal elements from Canadian animator Norman McLaren's sound work.
Production and composition
Work on Exercises began in December 2010, when Michael Silver was packing up to move to Paris. For the EP, he went for a more "structured," classical, and less dance music-based approach with more "simple" compositional structures than his past releases. Exercises was categorized by reviewer Puja Patel as a "dreamy indie flick scored by fuzzy synths and gorgeous piano recitals," while Worthington labeled it as a "pop perspective" of the synthesizer works of Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds. Elements of kosmische are also present on the EP.
In producing Exercises, Silver tried to represent warm feel of a concert hall with the limited tools he had to work with. Given that most of the equipment he usually used was packaged in Montreal and he was mostly in a Paris apartment while making the EP, Silver was left with only a laptop. Despite being an instrumental piano EP, Exercises was not recorded on an actual acoustic piano, but rather a software instrument plug-in replicating a piano. While Silver spent hours on a piano experimenting to find which melodies would work for each track, he didn't want them to sound too perfect. An example would be when he was making "Exercise #4 (Spirit)," an improvisational track where he played on a "synth bed" not thinking about the melodies he was coming up with.