Having listened to some EP and their first and acclaimed album Family Portrait (2018), this writer went to the fabulous Paraiso Festival in 2019 (which, we hope, will rise from its post-Covid ashes and bring us a third edition) eager to see what Ross From Friends would offer live.

And it was one of the most pleasant surprises of the festival, because, as usual with everything Felix Clary Weatherall (the name on his passport) does, it was something different, fresh and tremendously fun. Accompanying himself with Jed Hampson and John Dunk, Felix puts together a trio for live performances that includes guitar, saxophone and keyboards + Ableton Live. Tremendous.

If before that I had already been following his adventures with interest, since that Friday night I try not to miss anything he does, because it’s always interesting.

A few biographical details for those who don’t know this brilliant British producer. He was born in June 1993 in the coastal town of Brightlingsea, near Colchester, in the county of Essex, into a very musical family, as his father, Jamie Clary, was a live sound engineer. In the video clip for Pale Blue Dot, a track from his first album, you can see footage taken by their mother, Jo Weatherall, on a bus tour around Europe, raving wherever they could.

With that family background, it is not surprising that the young Felix decided to dedicate himself to music and in 2012 Ross From Friends was born (the anecdote of the name is curious: in the studio where he recorded some tracks, there was a television with an integrated DVD in which a copy of the American comedy was stuck and it was the only thing that could be seen every time it was plugged in).

Let’s fast forward to the year 2021, when in January Felix releases his new record label (Scarlet Tiger) with the track Burner, breaking a recording silence caused by the pandemic. But the Ross From Friends machinery was still running quietly but intensely, even if no record releases came out during that period.

During this time, his life was spent mainly between his studio and his home, located not far from each other, with Old Kent Road in South London as the hub of these journeys. A neighbourhood that has familiar roots for Felix, as his grandmother worked there and his father was at several squats and a few parties, which served as inspiration for the creative process of Treads, the new Ross From Friends album.

 

 

That’s as far as inspiration goes, because on a technical level, Treads also brings with it a process of research on Felix’s part. Frustrated by some of the creative process involved in recording hardware and instruments through a computer – the constant need to start and stop recording, saving and cataloging everything as he went along – Felix decided to write and build his own software. The resulting plugin, called Thresho, is available through Ableton’s Max For Live platform. Its operation is logical and simple, the plugin starts recording when the audio reaches a user-defined threshold and stops when it drops below that threshold, automatically saving and indexing the resulting clips along with timestamps.

With Thresho running in the background, Felix discovered the possibility of being able to remain fully in the moment as he improvised on his instruments, free to follow ideas as they arose, safe in the knowledge that nothing would be lost, or need to be replayed or re-captured. In this way, he spent the first six months experimenting with his hardware, not committing to any music, but letting Thresh record in the background whatever he was doing, with each session leaving his recording in an archive that grew by the day. When it came time to produce the album, he was able to draw on specific moments, either by remembering the exact date or time he had made a recording, or by simply browsing the now vast audio library of his own creation.  As Felix himself recounts, “Sometimes a whole melody would emerge from an idea within a recording, or sometimes I would just dump a random recording into an existing project and see what happened”.

Thus, Treads was born. From the inspiration of a neighbourhood with familiar aromas, research into how to improve the recording process and the time without the possibility of doing much else that Covid has left us as a legacy to humanity.

 

 

All in all, Ross From Friends’ second album is one of those great little timeline events in the history of electronic music. It opens with the truncated rhythms of The Daisy, followed by the soaring melody of Love Divide and the danceable melancholy of Revellers. A Brand New Start is almost an interlude, which gives way to XXX Olympiad, with rhythmic aromas of the early days of Aphex Twin and warm melodic patterns, to reach Grub, where the rhythmic base reaches other latitudes. Spatter/Splatter, Morning Sun On A Dusty Room and Run are the most experimental tracks on the album, which give way to Life In A Mind, which leaves no doubt as to its objective, which is none other than dancefloors.

To close the album, we have a well-deserved tribute to one of the main culprits of the creation of Treads. Tresho 1.0 reflects to perfection what has been explained previously with respect to that plugin, and Tresho 1.1 is a short closing track of barely half a minute.

An album to listen to and enjoy in depth, another excellent exercise by this British producer who always leaves his personal stamp on every sonic artefact that comes out of his hands. He rejects the Lo Fi label with good reason, because his music transcends that label and almost any other.

The album has been released thru Brainfeeder Records, and it´s available here

 

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