Ross From Friends, the artist otherwise known as Felix Clary Weatherall, has returned to Brainfeeder under his new Bubble Love alias.

On Love Divide / The Knife (Bubble Love Remixes), Weatherall breathes fresh life into two Ross From Friends tracks: “Love Divide,” from 2021’s Tread album; and “The Knife” from his 2017 debut, Family Portrait.

We’re told that Weatherall “retains all of the emotional heft of the original whilst ramping up the four-to-the-floor elements to deliver a peak-time remix.”

Bubble Love was conceived as a way of bridging the gap between the energy of the Ross From Friends live shows and the late-night club DJ sets Weatherall was enjoying playing. Much of the initial music that would eventually become Bubble Love was written spontaneously and fast, which is in stark contrast to the meticulous production that goes into the mainline Ross From Friends output.

At the same time though, he found himself struggling with what he felt was the “hollow” nature of making music this way.

“Quite a massive part of me eventually found making things disposable like that really meaningless,” he says. “I felt like I was abandoning a side of me that loved spending time working on details, and loved to try and think really hard about certain parts of tunes.”

Fortunately, he found a way to reconcile these conflicting feelings whilst whiling away some of the hours on a long train journey.

“I came up with an experiment,” Weatherall explains. “I told myself, ‘let me try making a tune as if there was a digital character instructed to carry out the very first idea that came into my head.’ For example, if I had the idea that I wanted a horn section, seeing as that was the very first idea that came to my head, as per the rule, I had to carry it out without any judgment. It might sound far-fetched, but I love coming up with these kinds of games when I’m in a bit of a creative rut, and eventually I found myself just absolutely firing away making tunes like this. It was almost like a total epiphany—I realised I could bypass any self-doubt and confused voices and replace them with this character who was just mindlessly carrying out all of these tasks for me. Like I could just set up this algorithm and let it run.”

As Weatherall started making more and more stuff like this, that digital character started to become clearer and clearer. It started gaining actual characteristics, a voice, a personality. Whenever Weatherall would make a creative decision he’d quite literally imagine this little character carrying out these tasks for him, and it just became more and more vivid.

“As the character kept growing, that hollowness associated with making music in this disposable way started to lift, and it actually started to gain all this meaning,” Weatherall says. “It’s like I could now allow myself to enjoy making music in this way if I imagined it wasn’t me doing it. It’s easier to picture this digital geezer just pressing all the buttons instead.”

That digital geezer is Bubble Love. “He’s extracted all of that drunk, decisive, hedonistic energy I’ve got somewhere in me and spat it into my music,” Weatherall adds.

Tracklisting

01. Love Divide (Bubble Love Remix)
02. The Knife (Bubble Love Remix)

Love Divide / The Knife (Bubble Love Remixes) is available now on Brainfeeder. You can stream it in full below and order it here.

Photo: Dylan Khoo