Ross From Friends goes big on intimacy at Village Underground

His brand of lo-fi house took the 2017 dance scene by storm - it was underground, insular, fuzzy, and deeply personal. But since signing to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label earlier this year, and releasing debut LP Family Portrait in July, RFF (AKA Felix Clary Weatherall) needed a bigger stage than Soundcloud drops and club nights.

How then, can a producer dealing primarily in cosy nostalgia for electro, breakbeat, 90s house, bedroom beats, and worn out cassette tapes make the pivot to headline tours and shows in venues like Village Underground? The answer again probably lies in the intimacy of it all.

His live show sees him in a compact line on stage with a guitarist, a keyboard/saxophonist, and a couple of laser beams. The backdrop to opener “Pale Blue Dot” is made up of vintage photos, courtesy of his parents. No disrespect to Weatherall, but the most interesting things about him are probably his Mum and Dad, who met while travelling Europe staging dance music parties in countries previously trapped under Soviet rule. Their passion for prolifically sharing music clearly rubbed off.

The scuzzy lo-fi textures still exist in the live set, but there’s also big, euphoric hooks, more expansive layered soundscapes, and lucid, liquid-like noise that drips out from the speakers overhead and down the cracks in Village Underground’s exposed brickwork.

RFF has certainly added the necessary strings to his bow to garner that mass appeal without losing the underground fans, and when he finishes with “Thank God I’m A Lizard” and an encore of older cut “Bootman”, he successfully fused his day-one fans with his new ones in one fell swoop.