Dance music loves a tempest in a teapot, and few have whistled louder over the last few years than the dust-up over lo-fi house. The term popped up around 2015 to describe a wave of producers like DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, and Ross From Friends, who lacquered moody vocal house in tape hiss and racked up millions of plays practically overnight. Their memetic nostalgia attracted the kind of extremely online fans who were probably commenting “a e s t h e t i c” on Chuck Person videos six months prior, and rankled the usual suspects, who picked up a whiff of ironic detachment.
A little fun never hurt anyone, but purists had a point when they argued that this scene seemed more like an exercise in re-branding familiar house tropes for Gen Z audiences than a truly fresh sound. In fact, lo-fi offered a fascinating case study of how songs that fuse several common genre elements—say, house beats and nostalgic R&B samples—receive an advantage from the machine learning algorithms that drive music discovery on streaming platforms. That’s why Ross from Friends’ “Talk To Me You’ll Understand” pops up so often in your recommended tab on YouTube.
Despite their initial struggle to be taken seriously, the lo-fi producers’ schtick masked real ambition. “I think my name is very far down on my list of ‘things that are important about my music,’” Ross wrote during one climactic battle (read: Twitter spat with a blogger) in the lo-fi wars. In fact, his real name is Felix Weatherall, and he’s from Colchester, UK, but he’s right that this is beside the point. Arguments about whether he and his peers “really mean it” have faded over the last 18 months, as they’ve released a stream of solid tracks on crucial labels and emerged as genuine stars on the club circuit. Weatherall, for his part, recently signed to Brainfeeder and played live at Berghain’s hallowed Panorama Bar.
He’s in the big leagues now, and the four-track Aphelion EP feels like an attempt to class up his goofy moniker with la-di-da cover art and a Greek non sequitur. (An aphelion is “the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is furthest from the sun,” FYI.) The effect is of a self-conscious bro trying on his dad’s itchy tweed blazer before an intimidating date. That’s fine—artists deserve the chance to reposition their brand upmarket, as long as they have the tunes to back it up.
Weatherall’s older material used sepia-toned tape hiss to gesture at nostalgia. Yet the simplistic compositions never seemed to pin down what exactly he was nostalgic for, beyond a blurry idea of “the ’90s, man.” On Aphelion, he wipes the fog off his lens and a widescreen vision blossoms into focus. Keys drip with detail. Synths shimmer. Kicks and snares land with a 4K thwack.
Lead single “John Cage” is a holdover from an old hip-hop project that Weatherall started with a friend named Guy. The song’s moving parts unfold with a patient logic. A sample from a daffy guided meditation exercise introduces billowing new age textures. Pitch-shifted vocals, via Guy, warble a jazzy lullaby. Seagulls squawk in the background. Synth streaks accent the mix with oversaturated hues familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a psychedelic afternoon at the beach, staring at the sky.
The most forgettable track is the one most indebted to lo-fi tropes. “There’s a Hole In My Heart” has a sweet, yearning vocal, but its 4/4 shuffle never really goes anywhere, and Weatherall falls back on drowsy chords you’ll recognize from a zillion Soundcloud mixes. I prefer the limpid electro bauble “March,” which is basically a DJ Stingray tune in relaxed-fit sweatpants. Some may be partial to electro with more gas in the tank, but in Weatherall’s hands a little syncopation goes a long way.
Best of all is “Don’t Wake Dad.” The beat flirts with R&B; in fact, it sounds like a friendly ghost that’s crawled into the warm hollow of a memory-foam mattress only recently vacated by N.E.R.D.’s 2010 masterpiece “Hypnotize U.” I couldn’t stop humming “touch it girl, touch it girl, touch it girl, ahhh” when the break comes in.
Then, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, Weatherall unleashes a blast of beatific sax. It’s schmaltzy and totally disarming, like something you’d hear at a rave thrown by the Life Is Good™ stick figures. Here we have the clearest picture yet of what a Ross From Friends track should sound like: hands in the air, tongue in cheek, heart pulsing on its sleeve.
