Born Adam DiAngelo, Fingernail is one of the many defiantly independent artists around the turn of the century taking full advantage of technological advances and a suitably less clannish underground music scene to make his own fine, hard to categorize efforts. Philadelphia-based, he steers his own particular way, working alone at home with additional instruments to flesh out his modern electronic compositions. In both sound and approach, he's won comparisons to many Warp Records stalwarts such as Autechre, but generally Fingernail's music is softer without losing any energy or capacity to thrill. Beats skitter and crunch through the gentle ambient side of his compositions, less interested in doing anything on the dancefloor as it is settling into a listener's head. So, Backwards, his strong debut album in 1998, brought his name and work to an appreciative audience, a number of whom returned the favor on the later Remixes collection. ~ Ned Raggett