CFCF - Soul Love

Hear the Canadian electronic experimentalist's take on a Bowie boogie-woogie classic.

To celebrate 40 years of David Bowie’s seminal 1972 album ‘Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars’, Paper Bag Records have released a cover version of the album for free. Mike Silver, AKA CFCF , who has put out music with Paper Bag in the past (as well as, you know, other places ), contributes a cover version of Soul Love featuring vocals from Austra . He describes his cover version as such:

‘My relationship with ‘Ziggy Stardust’ is not really that close — when it came time in my musical upbringing to get into Bowie, I kind of sampled everything and then naturally gravitated towards records like ‘Low’ and ‘Young Americans’, records where he was further experimenting with his identity and different genres. So actually when I was asked by the label to do Soul Love, I couldn’t really remember how it went! I listened to it a few times for the first time in probably 10 years, and tried to wrap my head around how I was going to handle this kind of boogie-woogie 70s glam track, which is completely outside of my usual pallet. So I tried to approach it from the point in Bowie’s career that I did relate to — ‘Low’ in particular — and use sounds that were kind of artificially heavenly.’

I do like Bowie’s Soul Love, but I also prefer his ‘Low’/‘Heroes’/‘Lodger’ period, so to hear CFCF’s sweeping take on the track is a joy, with Austra’s atmospheric vocals complimenting Silver’s broad soundstrokes perfectly. You can stream the song below, and download the rest of the compilation – featuring tracks by Born Ruffians, Young Galaxy and PS I Love You, amongst others – over on the Paper Bag website.