Interview | Anthony Naples

The genre-hopping US producer tells Matt Mullen how he created his escapist and emotive new album, orbs

© Jenny Slattery

Anthony Naples broke through in 2012 with Mad Disrespect, a 12” release made up of three loose and leftfield house jams that inaugurated the buzzy NYC label Mister Saturday Night. In the decade that followed, Naples has continued to refine his charmingly scuzzy, refreshingly individual take on house and techno while treating periodical longform releases as a place of respite: an opportunity to explore slower tempos and a shifting palette of obscure moods and hazy textures. orbs, Naples’ fifth full-length project, is a masterwork of musical escapism. “The best records take you to another place,” he tells us. “I want my music to sound otherworldly: outside of the realm of possibility.”

Written in Naples’ home studio, the music became a means of transcending his surroundings to reach a celestial plane. Across ten dreamlike tracks, synths twinkle, reverb shimmers and woozy melodies eddy and whirl across the stereo field, floating past like an untethered astronaut. Placid, downtempo grooves provide an anchor in the ambience, and there are distant echoes of shoegaze, chillout and dub’s dilatory thump amid the swirls of cosmic dust.

“IF I’M GETTING DEEP INTO FINDING NEW PLUGINS, OR THIS WHOLE OUTBOARD THING I’VE GOT INTO -IT’S ALL JUST A WAY FOR ME TO RESIST MAKING MUSIC”

Naples spoke to Future Music from his home in New York, giving us a captivating insight into his creative process and talking us through the gear, software and studio techniques behind orbs’ interplanetary drift.

What did your studio setup look like for this record?

“It’s a home studio. I’m not a bedroom producer: everything is in another room next to the bedroom. I don’t have a ton of stuff, but for the most recent record, I got into analogue summing, which I think is a bit of a wormhole. I got the Neve Orbit, which is their new summing box. But then of course to use that, if you don’t have enough outputs, you have to get a whole other box of AD/DA conversion. So I got that, and I was stemming everything out of that into the Neve and then into the SSL Fusion.