American house and techno are in a remarkably good place right now. The underground is thriving, bolstered by a network of labels, club nights, warehouse parties, and off-the-beaten-path festivals, all with a staunchly independent spirit that’s a world away from the high-flying, big-ticket milieu of commercial dance music. It’s an especially welcome development given that house and techno’s well-defined parameters, combined with a retro-fetishizing reverence for the past, have sometimes left the music feeling cautious and conservative. But a new generation of artists is finding ways to tweak familiar templates, carving a zig-zag path between respect for their predecessors and a determination to do things their own way.
Within this cohort, Anthony Naples is becoming something like an elder statesman (in relative terms, anyway). The New York electronic musician broke through in 2012, at just 21 years old, on the strength of “Mad Disrespect,” his debut single—in fact, the very first production he ever completed. The resulting flurry of interest yielded a remix for Four Tet and EPs on European labels like The Trilogy Tapes and Rubadub before culminating in a debut LP, in 2015, for Four Tet’s Text imprint. Over the years, Naples has continued to build out his rough-around-the-edges approach, balancing unvarnished sonics with canny dancefloor instincts. Resident Advisor’s Jordan Rothlein called Naples’ debut “not revolutionary so much as perfectly suited for its context,” which could also describe his approach in general. He’s primarily a craftsman, rather than a shredder of rule books. And on his third album, both his instincts and his technique are in top form.
Naples’ albums have largely skirted club fare: Body Pill balanced its dancefloor cuts with slow-motion studies for scratchy samples and overdriven machines; last year’s Take Me With You, for the psychedelically inclined Good Morning Tapes label, was an expression of honeyed ambient bliss. But Fog FM is techno through and through. Contrary to the album’s name, virtually everything here, save for two beatless palette cleansers, is tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical. Burly sub-bass tugs at the lower limits of your perception; intricate drum patterns are carved out of compressed white noise. Naples layers competing rhythms in ways that create friction and throw off sparks; the atmosphere is frequently nervous, turbulent, suffused with clattering sounds that are all the more menacing for the fact that you can’t quite make out what they are or where they come from.
Fog FM goes plenty deep, too. That’s immediately apparent on songs like the title track and “Lucy’s,” which avail themselves of the resonant chords of dub techno, one of dance music’s most inviting forms. Intimations of depth also play out in less obvious ways; there is always more here than meets the ear. In “Unhygenix,” a highlight of the album’s back half, a skipping, hissing groove reminiscent of Thomas Melchior’s blissed-out minimal house bounces away against a shimmering backdrop. Even the heaviest tracks have an unusually enveloping quality. “Benefit” is caressed by dissonant squeals that twist like tendrils of guitar feedback, until, two-thirds of the way through its eight-minute run, a cooling synthesizer progression is applied like a balm, taking the edge off.
At more than an hour long, Fog FM is Naples’ most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin, but his insistence on wringing his grooves for all they’re worth keeps the album engaging as a front-to-back listen in a way that isn’t true of most techno long-players. In fact, the slipperiness of his arrangements plays out across the album itself: It’s the rare dance full-length that foregrounds its heaviest cuts and then gradually leans back and loosens up.
Buy: Rough Trade
