Prior to the release of his second full-length, U.K. producer
Ross from Friends wrote a unique piece of software for Ableton's Max for Live platform called Thresho that records, saves, and catalogs audio as it's being generated, beginning once the audio reaches a user-defined threshold and ending as soon as it goes below the threshold. This made it easy for the artist to improvise for hours and not worry if he got everything on tape or not. He ended up with a massive archive of samples and ideas just from experimenting for several months on end, and he was easily able to compose an album out of it. Written during pandemic lockdown, the record is a set of reflections about the producer's family and memories of the neighborhoods he grew up in, parties he'd attended, and music he'd listened to. Much like his first album,
Tread has a constant sensation of thoughts flickering through one's head. Nothing feels totally linear, and sounds are constantly interrupted, short-circuiting, or otherwise fragmented. Certain sounds are in higher definition than others, but this is beyond lo-fi house, the micro-genre
Ross was initially associated with during the mid-2010s. The album starts out with some of its most distinctive melodies and hooks, with opener "The Daisy" setting cuddly synths and passioned cries of "I want an ordinary love" to skittering, tumbling breaks. "Love Divide" has a bouncy Ibiza trance melody matched with haunting vocal coos that occasionally form phrases such as "somebody new." "A Brand New Start" is an unexpected shift into moody downtempo soul, with grainy vocals and slow beats bouncing off the walls in a bare room yet coming back heavier and misshapen. "Spatter/Splatter" is even more of a left-field turn, emerging from a collage of incidental street noises, crawling drums, and mangled children's voices, eventually landing at an unexpected patch of scrambled, drill'n'bass-style breakbeats. The final two tracks are named after the Thresho plug-in, with "Thresho 1.0" being a wistful IDM piece that gets blown out with distortion by the end, and "1.1" being an isolated music box rendition of the song's melody.
Tread is the riskiest and most exploratory
Ross from Friends release to date -- the producer seems more willing to explore buried memories and come up with stranger sounds, stretching his sound out to something less categorizable or comfortable than before. ~ Paul Simpson