Originally written for Clash in November 2021. Read the original article here.

When Clash last heard from Felix Clary Weatherall AKA Ross From Friends in 2018, exciting things were very much afoot. Following his signing to Brainfeeder, his long-awaited debut album ‘Family Portrait’ was about to drop and its subsequent tour was set to deliver great things.

Fast-forward to 2021 and things have continued to shift gears for the electronic producer. Ross From Friends’ second album, ‘Tread’, produced and compiled entirely during lockdown, marks a subtle shift in Clary Weatherall’s unique production style, buoyed by the development of a bespoke piece of software called Thresho, which he created especially for the record.

Increasingly frustrated by the stop-start nature of producing, Clary Weatherall conceived Thresho as a means of capturing an entire recording session using a user-defined threshold. The output was a series of clips and timestamps that effectively enabled Clary Weatherall to create his own bespoke sample library, which he would cut together.

The end result feels defiantly on-brand, whilst representing some of Clary Weatherall’s most melodic and mature work to date. Nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek, yet eminently danceable, it delivers everything we’ve come to expect from Ross From Friends, whilst continuing to subvert expectations. Paul Weedon caught up with him in the weeks following the album’s launch to reflect on the process.

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Is it fair to say that ‘Tread’ is a much more introspective record for you?

Yeah, I think so, man. Especially down to the process where it was just totally solitary. I was really particular about so much of it as well. I think previously, I’ve always been like, ‘Oh, fuck it, that’ll do’ with certain things, but with this one I was like, actually I want every second to be really carefully thought about and considered. So yeah, it was a real introspective thing.

How does it feel to be releasing the record now?

It’s really good. It was so scary, just because I know the songs so well from listening to them for hours and hours and hours, obviously. You wonder whether they’re actually good, or you just think they’re good, because you’ve got some Stockholm Syndrome with them or something like that. But now it’s out and I’ve had that time to sort of reflect on it, it’s always really nice to sort of listen through the whole thing on Spotify, or whatever, and think actually, yeah, this does feel like a complete album. I never have that full realisation until it’s fully out and I can see how it would be consumed.

When we last spoke, we discussed the self-referential aspect of your lo-fi work. Does that playful spirit still underpin your process?

Yeah, definitely. I think there’s something tongue in cheek to it that I really like. I suppose at this point it’s less of like, ‘Oh yeah, fuck it, that’ll do’. It’s more like knowing how I am now and how I’m really particular about stuff, whether I can challenge myself to put out something that is kind of daft, or something that is unconventional or that I find funny. After a while, I’ve listened to something over and over again, I’m like, ‘Is this going to start making me cringe? Is this something that’s gonna make me feel really stupid in a little while’s time?’ But then it’s also nice to have that challenge: Come on, you’ve got the confidence to be able to just go, ‘Yeah, this is really dumb and it that’s fine.’ But I guess there’s more of a considered dumbness to it.

I still think the sample at the start of John Cage is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

[Laughs] I feel like that track is like the absolute pinnacle of how I do dumb shit in records. It’s got all of this stupid stuff, but that intro, I just set it up where I just had two channels: one of me playing these keys that you can hear in the background and one of them with my friend. We were just really high and he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna pretend to do a relaxation tape – record this.’ And I was playing that and he was just freestyling this relaxation tape. And then I was like, ‘Yeah, fuck it. That goes in.’

I understand lockdown had a huge impact on the record in terms of where you were and how that fed into your process.

For that lockdown period, it was just me sitting holed up in the studio making music and doing anything else to keep my mind occupied. It was just such a stark contrast from finishing the Family Portrait tour throughout 2019 and then 2020 where everything completely stopped. I just had so much pent up energy and just writing an album didn’t feel like enough to keep my brain moving. I was just like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna write some software for this thing that I’ve been thinking about for ages.’

So was Thresho something you felt you needed to create before you could make a start on the new record?

I was really struggling to write anything. After Family Portrait, I was just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’… I could write loads of drums and love them, but I could never sort of get past that and think, ‘What am I as a producer? What am I trying to achieve here? What melodic parts can go into a track just to elevate it and how the hell is that all gonna fit together?’… I was trying to move away from sampling all the time, but that was a really easy process for me. I remember having a conversation with one of my band members and I was like, ‘I feel like if there was a sample of some chords that I played months ago, if I could drag them on to some drums or something like that, I reckon I’d really like it.’ Playing them physically for those drums, I would cringe myself out and think these are too cheesy or they’re too complex or something like that. I just had this quite mad mental battle.

What shifted that for you?

I just had the thought that it’d be great if there was a plugin that always recorded everything that I was doing, just so I could always have this bank of stuff and I could go back and revisit it and drag it into a track and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it – just like sampling. And I couldn’t find anything – nothing that would tick the box entirely. So I was like, well, I’ve got an infinite amount of time to do anything. I just decided to create it myself to solve this creative problem.

So the idea is that you’re less in your head when you’re just trying stuff out, right?

Yeah, exactly. At points I wouldn’t be playing something for a track, you know? I would always do that as part of my process. I’d pause the track that I was working on and be like, ‘Let’s just try some things out’. Then I’d find myself just sitting at a keyboard for like, fucking eight hours or something, trying to figure something out and just having a mental battle the entire time. And then I’d come back to the project and either I couldn’t remember what I’d played that was really good, or I didn’t know if I even liked it. I feel like I liked it, but do I really want to commit to putting it on the track? Using Thresho, which just recorded everything that I do while I’m having that mental battle, I could just get some space away from it after a while. When I’d revisit it, I’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, this sample was good’. It allowed me to just sort of compartmentalise the time that I spent experimenting and this time that I spent structuring and actually songwriting.

Is it quite intimidating looking at a bank of recordings from a session and going, ‘How do I process that?’

Yeah, definitely it is. Especially as the album goes on because it just gets bigger. It’s pretty daunting, but it’s quite nice. Because this list is so long, there’s thousands of these recordings, it is quite nice to just scroll down and press something at random, and be like, ‘Oh, right. Okay, yeah, maybe that will do’. Just drag that in and then scroll down to something else. That’s how a lot of tracks would end up starting once I was really going with writing it. I’d end up just scrolling, load a bunch in that sound pretty cool and then just see if I can weave some sort of way between them. It’s changed my process so much, and it just made me feel like I knew what I was doing again.

How did you catalogue everything? Would you be doing a percussion session and label it in a sort of granular fashion?

No, not even. Sometimes if I felt like it was a really good session, I would specifically take that recording and put it into a different folder, but a lot of the time I just left it completely open. Even if I was like, this track needs some chords, for example, and I’d scroll down looking for some chords, sometimes I’d just stumbled upon something else – a little glitchy noise or like a lead or anything – and I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck me. That’s actually cool.’ And you’d discover something that you weren’t looking for.

And you’re planning to share those recordings to see what people can do with them, right?

Yeah, exactly. Just as a resource to sort of be an extension of the album and to give people a better understanding of what my approach was. On reflection, I’ve realised that it is this sort of journal of everything that I’ve done over the space of a year or so, which I thought was a really interesting resource… But also for people to come in and just sort of use it in some kind of way, you know? Whatever that might be. I’m not mad about it being a remix competition or something like that, but if people want to remix it, that’s great. I just want people to use it in some kind of creative way.

Has the nature of the way that ‘Tread’ was created presented challenges in terms of how you guys reinterpret it in a live setting?

Yeah, it definitely has. But you know, what? Having played a few shows, it is easier to play than a lot of stuff from Family Portrait and I think I sort of had that in mind somewhat when I was writing it. Although it does have twists and turns and odd structural ideas throughout, I think there is scope to have it in quite a conventional sort of loopy way… The drums and stuff are going in the background and I’m just trying to effect them a little bit, but there’s a lot of reliance on everything else that is on top. We have the saxophonist, Jon [Dunk], who also plays keys and he has a synth, which has MIDI sent to it. And there’s a drum machine running – the guitarist [Jed Hampson] controls that and he’s obviously playing guitar as well. We’re trying to make sure that they are absolutely instrumental in the entire thing in the way that it moves. It’s like a completely collaborative sort of process while we’re up on stage.

And whenever the saxophone comes out, people still lose their minds.

Yeah, definitely. It goes off every single time the saxophone comes in. And for the guitar in Talk To Me, You’ll Understand. People go fucking wild for that.

I asked about the origin of the name last time, so I won’t ask again, but do you still enjoy giving different answers every time you’re asked a question about the origin of ‘Ross From Friends’?

I dunno. Maybe? [Laughs]

You did a Reddit AMA the other day and I saw someone asking about it. Does anyone know the definitive answer?

I don’t know. Is there one?

Do you even need one at this point?

Who knows? I don’t think I even know anymore, to be honest. On that Reddit AMA, I was like, ‘I hope a lot of people ask me where the name comes from so I can give many different answers’. But only one person asked me.

What’s the story behind Tread’s artwork?

The guy who discovered it said it was from an old newspaper clipping of something, but he doesn’t have the newspaper anymore. We spent fucking ages trying to find out what it actually is, but eventually were just like if we can’t find it, then who knows? It was originally black and white and we had it colorized so it was green and had that pale sort of shoe as well. He just pulled together so many different images and did this huge presentation of fucking hundreds of images and that one popped up in black and white. Then he colorized it and I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s definitely the one.’

Was there a kind of brief when you were looking for imagery?

I wanted something that was like a photograph. I wanted something that was like still life. I basically just didn’t want something that was graphics-led. I wanted something that felt real, just because I felt like I’ve previously done something that was graphics-led and I wanted this to feel like a high def version of stuff that I’ve done before. To have a photograph that was just like, plain and pure. It felt like it made sense. And then obviously, Tread was the name of the album already. He came up with this image, and I was like, ‘Wow. This really works.’