Fire-Toolz @fire-toolz - Tumblr Blog

fire-toolz - race for titles feat. lipsticism is out now on all streaming platforms. music video on youtube!

guitars, bass, drums, synths, background vocals, & production by angel marcloid/fire-toolz

vocals, lyrics, & compositional inspiration by alana schachtel/lipsticism

mixing & mastering by @angelhairaudio,

cover art by goo age

music video directed by til will & paz mawilla (pillmawilla.com)

I don’t use my Tumblr much anymore. Sign up for my mailing list on fire-toolz.com, or follow me on Twitter & Instagram @fire_toolz (that’s an underscore). <3

The image is art for my latest release, I will not use the body’s eyes today.

needlejuicerecords

This is an Angel Marcloid appreciation post!!

She masters virtually all of our releases, including the current versions of all Lemon Demon albums and the upcoming vinyl reissue of Good & Evil! She mixed the new version of the Scary Jokes' April Fools, and is currently mixing a new Trust Fund Ozu album along with producing a new Scary Jokes project!

Her Mindspring Memories album Om was the first vaporwave project we put out, and ever since we have been close collaborators! We've reissued her musique concrete tape Rectangular Prism of Shitty Eyes, her 3LP opus The Binary Ocean, her Nonlocal Forecast single "Conscious Agents" and even have a new Mindspring album on the way!

But of course, she is best known for her incredible work as Fire-Toolz! Go listen to her latest full-length, Eternal Home! It's incredible!

We love you Angel! Never stop being an audio sorceress!!

ETERNAL HOME PRESS:

"Even from the project’s earliest days, there has always been something of an ARG element to Fire-Toolz. On her 2017 breakthrough Drip Mental, Angel Marcloid gave every song an alternate “code name,” and its machine-gun volley of decontextualized samples seemed designed to explore the gap between reality and the media simulacra of the same; 2019’s brilliant Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) pushed the idea even further, exploring concepts like the Advaita Vedanta and the holographic principle of reality. So it was probably only a matter of time before Marcloid ended up in Heaven—the alternate reality that gives Eternal Home its title. Appropriately, the album feels like the fullest manifestation of everything Marcloid has been pushing toward for the last six years—a bracing, 80-minute masterpiece with songs so densely layered it takes six or seven close listens to spot even half the details. As always, Marcloid deftly volleys between bright, jittery songs and scalding blasts of industrial-black-metal, but the scope here is unmistakably wider: The cotton-soft ping-ponging pads that open “Umbilical Cord Blood” gradually give way to ominous washes of synth and a noir-y, corkscrewing sax line; “Shenpa Indicator Light!!!”—one of the most immediately beautiful songs Marcloid has ever written—surrounds a yearning, emo-esque vocal melody with expansive electronic textures and the hopeful “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window” (there’s that multiple-reality idea again) feels drenched in sunlight. The album’s core message could be summed up by saying, “Heaven is whenever you are living your truth.” On Eternal Home, Marcloid delivers heaven in track after track after track."

J. Edward Keyes/Bandcamp [link]

The word “dreamlike” often bears an association of hazy, fluid arrangements, but Angel Marcloid seizes on the chaotic and absurd whiplash of the subconscious in her work as Fire-Toolz. She burrows further into her all-encompassing explorations on her first double album Eternal Home. With the opening two-song set, “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈ / guardian angel bear,” Marcloid pulls from what seems like an unlimited expanse of textures, lending the impression of a supernatural architect. On “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈,” Marcloid’s harsh vocals scrape across an opening blast-beat chug, with an airy drift of saxophone and synths peeling away from a hard rhythmic stop. She sounds untethered from a body, charging through as a forceful and eerie presence. She clears out a quiet space as the song ends. Birdsong and electronic twitches flit around the light buzz of a cicada drone—until synths erupt again like an arcade cabinet thrown on in the middle of the woods, announcing the beginning of “guardian angel bear.” Amid her power-metal guitar riffs, wraith-like vocals, and neon arena-rock uplift, Marcloid dusts these songs with faint sparkles and other subtle surprises; an owl hoots between squalls. Marcloid keeps the paradoxes running until the final seconds of “guardian angel bear,” ending it with a thud and a twinkle: a quick twist of charm that underscores the buoyancy of her infinitely uncharted visions. -Allison Hussey/Pitchfork [link]

For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s The Castle is a book with multiple ways through, the meaning changing depending on which entrance the reader chooses. Fire-Toolz’s fourth album on Hausu Mountain, Eternal Home, is too doused in vibrant light to be Kafkaesque, yet this idea of multiplicities resonates. As though an existential crisis has been pulled out of the air and rendered to audio so the listener can make their own sense of it. Angel Marcloid’s music as Fire-Toolz is a riddle wrapped in an enigma exploded through a reality bending sonic onslaught. Surreal electronic vistas bleeding into blast beats, new age transcendence melting into gargantuan shred. Eternal Home stretches that world and its dualities even further. ‘Shenpa Indicator Light!!!’ goes from smooth keys and sax through arena-rock glitch before shedding the glitz in a blaze of screams and frantic drum overload, all of it ultimately melting together in fractured equilibrium. ‘Yearning = Alchemical Fire’ bends electronics reminiscent of R Plus Seven-era Oneohtrix Point Never into a radiant, light-bathed black metal gallop. This sense of rupture hits a peak on ‘I am a Cloud’, a doom muzak ballad which sees Marcloid swing between broken pastorals and the slippery nature of reality itself to find her own space in the confusion: “The days spent in my meadow, I profess, life is a film.” The tracks here are epically scaled in their diversity, but it feels necessary for encircling the overwhelming cosmic and mental weight which dominates them. An enormity which resists a single interpretation. It’s tempting to keep tracing the different sonics imprinted in Fire-Toolz’s music, a hint of jazz fusion, the surprisingly jangly guitar on ‘Where on Earth is My Sacchidānanda?’, or ‘[Maternal ♥ Havening]’s blast through drum and bass. It’s also tempting to dismiss everything as made from quarks and leptons, but doing so only tells you so much about what matters in the world. Latching onto the slithers of familiarity in Eternal Home distracts from the disarming bigger picture. Eternal Home is music forged in the maelstrom, but it’s firmly pointed towards whatever light you choose as your solace. That’s felt most poignantly on ‘Thickflowyglowysparklystingy_pain.mpeg’, the album’s triumphant highpoint which sees a mighty riff act as defibrillator to fire you back out of the void. This sprawling double LP’s sheer intensity doesn’t feel intended to alienate the listener, so much as accompany them in processing the mind frying enormity of everything.

Daryl Worthington/The Quietus [link]

Angel Marcloid’s seventh album as Fire-Toolz is a 78-minute double LP, making it the project’s most ambitious release so far, which is saying a lot, considering how vast her sonic palette has always been, and how she’s explored such heavy concepts with her work. She explains the album’s title by stating that Heaven is our Eternal Home, but that “the conscious experience of it is a state of mind” and “it has nothing to do with the afterlife or religious theology.” Her music’s constant juxtaposition of extremities signifies that despite all the conflict and traumatic experiences in her life, she is always safe at home. By this point, Marcloid’s fusion of progressive metal arrangements, black metal howling, and vaporwave textures (including smooth jazz sax soloing) is second nature for her, and she executes every time change, cathartic scream, and sparkling synth tone with finesse and passion. Yet she continues to surprise even longtime listeners with unexpected shifts and additions, while potentially drawing in new fans with her most accessible songwriting to date. Apart from a few longer suites, most of the songs are fairly brief, yet packed with ideas. “Yearning = Alchemical Fire” is a catchy industrial synth pop number with perky synth melodies, and “Shenpa Indicator Light!!!” progresses from clean vocals, stuttering beats, and aired-out saxophone to an easy listening drill'n'bass nightmare in two-and-a-half minutes. A brilliant stretch of songs during the album’s midsection lean closer into alternative rock influences than Marcloid’s previous work, with “Thick_flowy_glowy_sparkly_stingy_pain.mpeg” having a dramatic mall-goth sway, and “Where On EARTH Is My Sacchidānanda?” somehow managing to blend screamo, shoegaze, and billowing ambient loops without sounding confusing. “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window” is an especially frenetic collision of electro-industrial, glitchy noise, and hyperpop, while others like “This Particular Universe Is Friendly ;)” insert panic-stricken post-hardcore breakdowns into cuddly new age. Chaotic yet tightly controlled, Eternal Home is boundlessly creative, and up there with Skinless X-1 as Marcloid’s best work.

Paul Simpson/Allmusic [link]

What initially drew me to Fire-Toolz were the songs that sounded like death metal broadcast from a Windows 95 screensaver, but Angel Marcloid's experimental alias runs much deeper than that. If that description piqued your interest, her new three-disc album is a great opportunity to explore her world.

-Jordan Darville/The Fader [link]

While listening to Fire-Toolz, it is very often – almost every few seconds, in fact – that I find myself asking: how’d she manage to do it? How is it that these 56k modem-like noises fit perfectly with a Chrono Trigger-adjacent melody and a black metal growl? As with Rainbow Bridge (2020), here’s music that truly feels new, whose potential resides in the wonder of seeing jewelled treasures where most see something so banal it is unworthy of attention. It is both infinite and total, a mystical perspective that in the small and insignificant finds the divine, flourishing with the glistening traces of the everyday as it ponders the colorful voids that connect our lives with what lies beyond them. Eternal Home’s collage aptly opens us up to the fact that sometimes that connection happens to sound like the heartfelt core of a Deftones song; sometimes it flows from a soft jazz fusion riff; sometimes it is the particular beeps of 16-bit videogame electronics; sometimes it is the grinding pitch of a screamo vocal. Yet that is only one side of what makes Eternal Home such a moving listen: a mystic, after all, is also someone who reflects the divine in virtuous acts of worldly transformation. Angel Marcloid’s sheer technical prowess is tied to an adventurous talent that constantly pushes the significance of all types of musical elements beyond its limits, to a point, precisely, where entirely dissimilar styles and sounds converge. It is not that a new meaning is given, or at least not exactly, but that all possible meanings clash, stand side by side, coincide to form an endless, multitudinous fountain of meaningful becoming. At 80 minutes long, it feels like a foray into a sublime wilderness where feelings are thoughts unleashed, like a dreamscape of early 2000s aesthetic references, themselves channelled through their own early 90s elements. It is memory as kaleidoscopic mass, an undifferentiated wave that first causes paralysis – it is all too much – but then, once the bounds of reason become undone, it opens the way for intensity, for a kind of rhythmical clarity that intuitively reconstructs those aesthetics as an aesthetic of belonging. All the fragments and their infinities are, under the mystic’s experience, an expression of the essential continuities within them, and the capacity for us to share in that divine link. Just like the 2000s belong to the 90s and the 2020s belong to the 2010s and the 2000s, so do we belong in this unpredictable dream-state of flux, this Eternal Home where everything is simultaneously significant and insignificant. “Our Eternal Home is Heaven. Heaven is the ultimate reality of our shared Being, but the conscious experience of it is a state of mind (a dimension we are meant for)”, states Marcloid in the liner notes, explaining that “it has nothing to do with the afterlife or religious theology.” Listening to Eternal Home, I thought about the ages-old idea about the un-representability of the divine, and how this music captures that abstraction only to make an experimental attempt not to represent but to express that otherworldly quality. Its abstraction is the cutting up of various musical realities, a collage that should not sound this good by virtue of the considerable differences between its elements, and yet melts into something that appears to have definite form but truly doesn’t. The seams are there for all to listen to, the dissonances allowed to bloom into beautiful noise explosions, the harmonies spreading afterwards like nuclear fallout. The density of Fire-Toolz’ work, in other words, is transparent, but its transparency is, simply put, also mystifying. The excessive, stimulant overload of this music leads not to a world beyond our own but straight into its bowels, made of the same substance as everything we deem commonplace, perhaps even unsuitable for close consideration, from nu-metal to new age to soft music to emo to cat videos to computer file names to videogame console startup jingles, and so on and so forth towards infinity. There’s something worth repeating about this music that is extremely rare and should not be taken lightly: it does sound new. Not in the avant-garde way that means it sounds completely alien, but that it retains something purely inexplicable at its core. There might be words to describe it, and surely better writers than myself will find them, but I firmly believe that they do not belong to the realm of music writing, but to the realm of words people use to talk to their loved ones and animal companions, or to the playfulness of inside jokes and meanings known only to a few close relationships – the realm of words that tie each of our infinities together, not as one, but as a formless, chaotic multitude. Eternal Home sounds like an everyday ritual, with all its joys, griefs, and contentments, a jewel that is also just a rock, precious solely because it’s there, and nothing more.

David Murrieta Flores/A Closer Listen [link]

The musical world Angel Marcloid assembles as Fire-Toolz is maximal and restless, flashing restlessly through genres and ideas - from new age ambientalism to fusion jazz, prog metal, IDM, chiptune, death core and more testing the extremes of intensity and technical execution. A barrage of violent and tender moments framed by blast beats and virtuosic guitar, crystallised in neon synths and screams, whimsical sound design and Fourth World atmospherics. On Eternal Home, Marcloid has mastered her language of hyper-omnivorous everythingness, creating a temporal musical expression that reflects the complexities and constant becomings of life. The effect is bewildering and invigorating. The double LP is divided into four themed album sides, each exploring different spiritual energies and existential themes. Marcloid’s voice is processed with formant effects to sound genderless, more than human and legion, her screams at times recalling Claudio Sanchez of Coheed And Cambria. Proggy chops are abundant on tracks like “Odd Cat Sanctuary” and ”OFF 2 Lost Vagus.” Calmer instrumental pieces like ”(e)y(e)s w/o a %brain%“ and the latter parts of “This Particular Universe Is Friendly ;)” punctuate the chaos, creating space to breathe and drawing attention to Marcloid’s deft sound design. The production is meticulously detailed with late 1990s and turn of the millennium aesthetics rendered so convincingly you could be forgiven for thinking it was a sample based bricolage. TherE are a few glimpses of her process, like the Logic Pro click that closes out “Rubber Band Wrist” which feels akin to noticing a dangling thread exposing the seam of a fantastical garment. The artful and confident mangling of the familiar and the unexpected creates a sense of alien newness; a labyrinthine postmodern, post-digital core of world creating potential that Marcloid demonstrates across Eternal Home’s 25 tracks. There’s a lot to wrap your ears and brain around, and it can make a strange load of sense if you allow yourself to be carried away by its relentless stream. Leah Kardos/The Wire [no link…transcribed from physical copy]

RIYL Atari Teenage Riot, Machine Girl, Genghis Tron WHY YOU SHOULD CARE Under the name Fire-Toolz, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid moves tornado-like across a vast sonic terrain, gobbling up pieces of black metal, cybergrind, new age, vaporwave, jazz, breakcore and more, creating a hulking whirlwind of sounds that crash and congeal at a dizzying pace. Witchy shrieks fling above placid puddles of ambience; speckles of synth stardust glimmer in the darkness of industrial cosmos; proggy guitar solos stretch out of oceanic washes of noise, dive back underwater and emerge as giddy drum-breaks flanked with black-metal howls. Strap in. QUOTE “I feel like this is a spiritual happening. I feel like I’m just a vessel for it,” Marcloid says of their creative process. “My mission statement to myself is to not block that flow for any reason … rarely throw anything out.” In many ways, the project seems like a reaction to old bands of theirs that had stricter rules. “When I played in metal or emo bands as a younger person, I’d always want to bring in lots of weird guitar effects, keyboards, drum machines, but no one else really felt like that made any sense.” In Fire-Toolz, anything goes. “It’s like commissioning an architect and saying, ‘Can you build me a very stable and strong version of my ridiculously stupid idea?’ And both the client and the architect are me.” -Eli Enis/Revolver [link]

Last year Fire-Toolz‘ Angel Marcloid melted our faces with Rainbow Bridge, an encompassing blitz of genre and suspense that ranked among the best of our Top 50 albums for 2020. Today, Fire-Toolz returns with “Shenpa Indicator Light!!!” – a frenzied offering complete with new age gloss, a propelling sax solo that serves as the song’s North Star, and a colorfully clever video by Faye Fadem that harkens back to Crazy Frog animation as much as it does to the feeling of waking up from an uncanny dream and trying to map the plot. This single is the first piece from Fire-Toolz’ next project, a double LP called Eternal Home, due out on Oct. 15 through Chicago’s Hausu Mountain label. As an artist and producer, Marcloid plays with genre like the best musicians master an instrument. Never a visitor in these areas though, Marcloid melts sound and sonics down to liquid and freezes them in new shapes and forms. You can trace inspiration throughout her work, but the way she shreds these connections and builds them into new spheres is truly the most marveling aspect of her work. The video’s main character seems to be journeying through a dream – or is it? Gazing into the trash, the purple protagonist is presented with a sax by Marcloid, and conquers the cityscape until forces of doubt, pain, and diversion rain from above. Fadem’s video presents a number of easter eggs and quick stills that deserve repeated watches, screenshots, and additional analysis. The song and video scans as a riddle, and presents plenty of clues for where Marcloid is heading on Eternal Home.

-Chris Cubbison/Impose Mag [link]

I'm just going to come right out and say this: Rainbow Bridge is up and away my favorite Fire-Toolz album yet, bar none. Angel Marcloid has been drawing an intricate web over the years, with dozens of monikers and projects, various experiments in genre, and a growing mythology of symbols mapping out her spiritual online vision. But with Rainbow Bridge, she's finally tied all the threads together. Revolving around the passing of her beloved cat Breakfast, Rainbow Bridge is a heartbroken, questioning work, confronting the existential search for peace that's always been the heart of Fire-Toolz's music, all while offering some her most twisting, emotional songs yet. Immediately, the album kicks off with a dose of pure blastbeat hell, the purest metalcore Marcloid has ever pulled off, before suddenly leveling up into an epic Rush-style prog overture. From there, Rainbow Bridge just keeps winding down hallways; "It's Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer" never seems to settle on one key, bouncing along on shimmering adult-contemporary synths before diving into an extended passage of glitch as hellish as it is blissed out. Marcloid's voice is constantly being transformed: On "⌈Mego⌉ ≜ Maitrī," it sounds like it's being ground up into a sticky paste while synthetic choral pads hover above. The magic of Marcloid's music is how she contrasts the ugly with the heavenly, creating an equal plane where her frenzied tastes can live together in harmony. This may not be the first time Marcloid has blended soft jazz, harsh noise, vaporwave, and nü-prog into a strange smoothie of styles, but the songs here stand as some of her most melodic, outwardly beautiful creations to date. I've probably listened to "(((Ever-Widening Rings)))" more than any other song this year; Marcloid's shrieked vocals shouldn't make sense on a slow-riding '80s smooth jam like this, and yet it feels like gliding through the clouds with a demonic guardian by your side. It's disorienting, yes, but in Marcloid's hands it simply couldn't sound any other way. I'd say that this is Marcloid's masterpiece, but so far she's managed to just keep on topping herself. Who knows how high she can go.

https://mailchi.mp/03c80948555e/episode-4-jolly-rancher-beach

Infinity and “I”: An interview with Fire-Toolz

Sometimes you encounter music that opens your ears to new possibilities in such a way that your subconscious burns the moment of impact into your memory. For me, the most potent of these include an early adolescent exposure to the cyclic, minimalist bliss of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way as in-between-set music at a neighborhood basement show, doubling over laughing with my sister on our drive to school at the vocal-sourced percussion of Björk’s “Where is the Line?”, and having my 19-year-old shit permanently rocked amid my (still) daily breakfast of eggs and oatmeal by the opening few tracks of Fire-Toolz’ Drip Mental.

At least to my ears at that time, the breakneck transitions between Mego-style avant-pop glitches, digitized metal skree, snapshots of vapor memories and scream-led dance pop offered up a vision of shape-shifting music that felt wholly new, almost sacred in its profane blend of styles and sound. “To me, that constantly shifting atmosphere and mood is the ebb and flow you perceive,” says Angel Marcloid, the face behind the Fire-Toolz moniker. “Lots of waves and conditions to pass through, but they all make sense to me … Ideas flow out of me with absolutely no effort made, my body records as many of them as it can and the song gets built in little bits at a time.” The idea of musical “sense” might seem at-odds with the free-wheeling, genre-agnostic sounds of a Fire-Toolz album, but sustained exposure breeds familiarity: By the time I rolled around to my third or fourth listen through Drip Mental, the chaos began to cohere into a logical world of its own.

If my ears grown more accustomed to the utter uniqueness of Marcloid’s art, so too does it seem that “Fire-Toolz” is becoming a musical language of its own. Every new release brings the euphoria of Marcloid’s music toward higher and more mind-bending plans, and nowhere is this more true than on Rainbow Bridge, Marcloid’s new album for Hausu Mountain. The music is distinctly Marcloid, taking the same hallmarks I found on Drip Mental and refining them into sharp gems. A monophonic hymn drives “⌈Mego⌉ ≜ Maitrī,” making for one of the most patient and profound Fire-Toolz composition to date. At the other end, “Rainbow ∞ Bridge” hurls in with synthesized black metal fervor before it combusts into a grooving, tuneful section of electronics. A soaring electronic guitar solo dominates the middle third, and the track eventually loops around on itself into the ear-splitting pulses and crashes of the opening. “It’s less stitching sounds together, and more like inventing gigantic puzzles made of both large and tiny pieces dancing around and overlapping each other, interacting with each other,” Marcloid says of this segmented composition process.

A standout sonic quality of Fire-Toolz’ music—on Rainbow Bridge and all its older siblings—is its embrace of the sounds, chord structures of new age, jazz fusion, prog and a host of other styles based around extreme musicianship, and exacting production. Born in 1984, Marcloid finds that many of these sounds are inseparable from the nostalgia of her childhood. “I wasn’t raised on jazz or electro-pop or adult contemporary or electronic music, but in the distance, there it all was—in waiting rooms, in the background of movies, at the mall, in TV shows, in educational films, in video games, in my friends’ parents’ vans,” she says. These musical encounters all share a sense of accidents. From muzak to soundtracks to chance encounters, Marcloid never supposed to take this stuff in.

 Though that’s precisely the path she took, and Fire-Toolz takes a magnifying glass to these background sounds and exposes their inherent beauty and strangeness. “Because of the internet, and having the privilege of being able to access those sounds and use them creatively, I am living out my second childhood in a heartfelt, authentic way,” she says. This “second childhood” is an apt analogy for the giddiness that Fire-Toolz music exudes. These sounds and harmonies are familiar—some would argue overused and tired—but Marcloid approaches them with a renewed sense of optimism. At their core, these styles hunt for religious ecstasy and otherworldly piece, cosmic qualities that Marcloid’s art exudes with boundless glee.

These ideals of grandiosity that run rampant through Marcloid’s music also appear in the conceptual and philisophical framework surrounding the Fire-Toolz project. The track titles alone convey this sense of out-of-body msyticism. Through a combination of between cheeky, internet-based puns, dense transcendental philosophy and creative linguistic construction through the use of atypical spellings, punctuation and word structuring, Marcloid constructs a verbal world inside which her singular music lives. “Infinity and wholeness is a constant theme, but it is by default. It is a framework from which I operate,” she says. “I’m on a journey; steadily growing every day, until my body no longer works. I’m not even saying I’m getting better and better, but I’m always changing. I’m constantly falling, and there is no ground.”

Stand out examples of these constructions from the past include the warm, nostalgic hum of Skinless X-1‘s “In The Computer Room @ Dusk ☕” or the scattered sonic metamorphosis of “Fluids Come Together & The ‘I Am’ Appears.” On Rainbow Bridge, one of the most stunning realizations comes on “dEcRePiT φ PhOeNiX,” a track which Marcloid says “is a direct reference to myself and evolution. A decrepit phoenix is kind of how I see my body-mind and personality. Always escaping from the ashes, sore and tired … But, a phoenix nonetheless.” With its wobbling chromatic synthesizer melodies and arena-ready drum slaps, the music presents a colorful foundation atop which Marcloid’s screamed vocals delve head first into this beautiful crisis of change: “Melted and melded and molding crashes / Illusion of self reduced to ashes,” she sings, highlighting the twin agents of destruction and rebirth that accompany any process of change.

While these ideas might traverse the breadth of Fire-Toolz’ discography, the new album places the themes in a more specific context. “For Rainbow Bridge, I felt like I had an enormous amount I needed to say and express; so many questions to ask, and expressions of energy I needed to release. I just make music with that in mind,” says Marcloid. Specifically, “the title references the pathway that our pets take when they leave us. My cat Breakfast, who passed away in December of 2018, is the talking point of the album. A lot of it is about her, or speaking to her.” Breakfast also appears on the album (as she has on a number of previous Fire-Toolz releases), creating a sort of living/lasting artistic tribute to the lost friend. In this light, the epic constructions feel even more special, as if the explosions of colorful sounds on Rainbow Bridge are paeans to Breakfast. The songs build towers that stretch toward the bridge in search of communication.

 “Fire-Toolz has always been sincere,” Marcloid says. “Melodramatically sincere.” It’s this sincerity that’s kept me coming back time and time again after that fateful February morning encounter. Especially at its most bombastic and indulgent (see: the sing-along chorus of Rainbow Bridge‘s “It’s Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer,” the neon, fusion-drenched guitar outro “Clear Light” off 2019’s Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)), Marcloid’s music teethes with a sense of purpose and meaning. What might illicit chuckles of disbelief upon first encounter transforms into a beautiful sonic odyssey that offers more intruige and magic over time.

Like each and every Fire-Toolz album, Rainbow Bridge is a mind-bending excursion that blows up music into a cosmic, surreal land, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg: In the last year or so alone, Marcloid has put out equally incredible music through her Mindspring Memories, Angelwings Marmalade, Nonlocal Forecast and Path to Lobster Believers projects, as well as a number of mastering jobs (some personal favorites include The Car? and w i n t e r q u i l t 愛が止ま). A number of these projects (including Fire-Toolz) have future releases already in progress, and there’s a high chance I’ve even left of a name or two in this list. If this seems like this stretches the limits of what one entity can perform and produce, Marcloid suggests that there’s other energy at play: “Something tells me it’s not me doing it. ‘Me’ in the individuated sense,” she says. “It feels more like something I am a part of is doing it through me.” What form this ancillary force might take is unbeknownst to anyone save Marcloid, but let’s hope their fruitful collaborations continue for years into the future. We’ll always need more rapturous shock; we’ll always need more Fire-Toolz, ad infinitum.

-Audrey Lockie/Slug Mag

https://www.slugmag.com/music/interviews/music-interviews/infinity-and-i-an-interview-with-fire-toolz/

My family's beloved 16-year-old Siamese cat, Webley, died in my arms last year. He'd been a sleek fat kitty before he got ill, but he'd lost weight and lost weight till he was little more than a bedraggled shadow. At the end he could barely lift his head, and then the vet gave him the shot and he couldn't lift his head at all. I was scratching his ears as I'd so often done before, and suddenly they dropped, and whatever I was petting wasn't Webley anymore. It's one of the worst memories of my life.

I've been thinking about Webley a lot while listening to the new Fire-Toolz album, Rainbow Bridge, which comes out May 8 on local label Hausu Mountain. Angel Marcloid, a Chicago musician who records as Fire-Toolz (as well as under several other names), made Rainbow Bridge about her 16-year-old cat, Breakfast, also a Siamese, who died in December 2018. The album is an idiosyncratic collage of guttural death-metal roars, electronic bleeps, and vaporwave ambience. Bleak, sweet, and quietly unflinching, it slides back and forth between two emotional poles: one boils with rage and grief, while the other is steeped in a comforting lyricism as gentle as a cat rubbing its chin against your hand. "It's been a while, but I think about her every day," Marcloid says. "I still have moments where I feel her close and I just cry a whole bunch. I've got her ashes two feet from me right now. I have a tattoo of her on my chest. So yeah, I'm happy to honor her in my music."

From as early as she can remember, Marcloid says, music made her feel things "that are just so abstract and visceral and hard to put your finger on." She was born near Annapolis in 1984 to a music-loving family; her parents constantly played CDs of hair metal, the Beatles, and her all-time favorite band, Rush. Marcloid started making little drum sets out of pots and pans almost as soon as she could walk.

Her first public performance was when she was seven. Her parents knew a local bar band, and she sat in with them to play drums on a cover of the Black Crowes' "Hard to Handle."

"This is a smoky bar, women showing their boobs and stuff—it was not an environment for kids!" Marcloid says. "But I sat down with the drum kit and we played the songs, and they were just amazed. They were looking back at me while we were playing, like, 'Holy shit! This kid's actually keeping time!' I'll never forget walking off that stage, and all these drunk, smelly adults cheering me on, and a couple of people just gave me money. 'You're awesome, kid! Here's 20 dollars!'"

Marcloid soon taught herself to play guitar and bass too, and her musical interests expanded. As a child she had a formative late-night exposure to Morbid Angel's 1993 video for "Rapture" via MTV's Headbangers Ball, and soon she was also listening to jazz and electronica. She performed in several short-lived bands, and in the late 2000s she launched her own label, also called Rainbow Bridge. Through it Marcloid released cassettes and CDs by other musicians, as well as a blizzard of her own music under various names—including ambient acoustic music as the Human Excuse, punky dream pop with the trio Shadow Government, and electroacoustic noise as Water Bullet.

Marcloid came to Chicago in 2012 to move in with a girlfriend, who owned several cats and had just adopted Breakfast. Like most Siamese, Marcloid says, Breakfast "has always been a little strange." She was neurotic and disliked the other cats, and she never really warmed up to Marcloid's partner. In fact she only had one clear favorite. "She took to me immediately," Marcloid says, "and always wanted to be on me and just wanted to spend all her time with me." When Marcloid and her partner split up, there was no question who Breakfast would go with. The kitty ended up spending most of her life in Marcloid's bedroom to avoid other cats. "The rest of the house was just scary for her. There were too many other cat smells," Marcloid says.

"On the one hand, it may seem weird or maybe even borderline cruel to keep a cat in a single bedroom for their entire lives. But that's what she wanted; she was happy."

Marcloid has featured Breakfast in tracks throughout her oeuvre. "Spirit Spit" from the 2017 album Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain), for example, is a short wordless suite in which Marcloid imagines the usually shy Breakfast grown adventurous enough to go exploring in the house during a storm. The track opens with Breakfast engaging in some Siamese vocalizing and squawking, with thunder in the background. The rest of the narrative unfolds through auditory cues. "She comes down to the basement and turns on her ancient computer, which dials in to AOL," Marcloid explains. "Then she puts on a Telepath CD, which is a vaporwave artist that I absolutely love. You can hear the CD drive opening, you can hear the Telepath song start. And then she types some stuff and is meowing. And then she turns off the computer and goes back upstairs."

In 2018 Breakfast began to go into kidney failure. She was constantly peeing in Marcloid's room, and she wasn't eating. Eventually she was so uncomfortable and miserable Marcloid had to euthanize her. "And that was just so fucking traumatic for me, and so emotional," Marcloid says. "It really energized the search for truth and meaning that I had already begun years ago."

Marcloid began making Rainbow Bridge during Breakfast's illness. The title isn't just a callback to her record label (which she folded around five years ago) but also a reference to contemporary folk mythology about a rainbow bridge that, in Marcloid's words, "our pets either cross when they die to go to the other side, or they go there and they wait for us." The cover art, by Marcloid and Jeremy Coubrough, shows a Siamese cat sitting in a green field with her back to the viewer, looking at the prismatic steps of a bridge that leads upward into a kind of bloated growth of exploding colors.

The chaos of different hues fits the Fire-Toolz aesthetic. As Hausu Mountain cofounder Doug Kaplan puts it, "There's just nobody else that sounds like this, and there will never be another. Each track goes a billion different places but has a strong sense of oneness." Marcloid's other projects often follow particular rules or fit into particular genres; Mindspring Memories, for example, is mostly slowed-down and otherwise manipulated smooth-jazz samples. A recent album under the name Path to Lobster Believers is tape-collage improvisation. But with Fire-Toolz, Marcloid says, "Anything goes. It's a no-rules catchall; everything reports to it. It's the top of the pyramid."

The violent shifts in tone and genre on a Fire-Toolz track often feel exuberant and playful. On Rainbow Bridge, though, they create splatters of emotion: nostalgia, confusion, loss, hope. The opening track, "Gnosis .•o°Ozing," starts out as ranting death metal, with Marcloid screaming distorted, virtually indecipherable lyrics: "Arms wrapped in neon like a warning / A rainbow bridge unfurling / And now I lay listening to nothing / I feel my organs locking up."

By the second verse, she's superimposed smooth-jazz keyboard flourishes atop the noise, so that it sounds like the metal is battling easy listening, anger struggling with happier memories. "Layers in grief not unlike stages of passing / There are many / Not too many / Not so much."

The video for the song "Rainbow ∞ Bridge," created by Marcloid with Armpitrubber (aka Christine Janokowicz), provides an intense visual analogue for the music's smeared palette. This song too starts with a death-metal feel, pairing double kick drum with Marcloid's throat-tearing vocals. "Please don't be mad that I cut your cord / Fear lodged in my gums / Pressing into my face with fingerlike force / Breakfast!" she yells, as images of the kitty strobe and dissolve into colors, lights, emojis, a door opening, SpongeBob screaming. Tinkly new-age keyboard ambience plays over purple clouds and the on-screen words "Heaven! They say I can sit and soak you up." A guitar solo fit for a classic-rock ballad cuts through the shifting landscape, and then the song briefly fades into ambience as Breakfast romps across the screen and dissolves. It's a vision of a loved one disintegrating, perhaps into nothing, perhaps into memory or heaven, while pain and happiness alternate in spasms of glitches.

"Heaven has no location," Marcloid howls near the end of the track. That's a statement of spiritual hope; heaven is everywhere, Marcloid believes. "It's not any particular place. It's something that is all-encompassing," she says. "I think that it's everywhere and everything. It's the flow of life." You can hear that hope on tracks such as "⌈Mego⌉ ≜ Maitrī," which is all gentle surging keyboards and pattering electronica, encouraging you to gently drift into an ether of soft fur and purring.

A heaven without location can also simply be a heaven that doesn't exist, though, and that fear and doubt is also part of Rainbow Bridge. On the jittery "Microtubules," a throbbing beat loops around and around as Marcloid asks, "Were you afraid of crossing?" It's an unsettling question: of course she'd worry about a cat who never wanted to leave the bedroom going off on a long journey alone.

"When Breakfast was sick, anxiety was a huge, huge part of it," Marcloid says. "And even after she passed, and I knew that there was nothing to be done, there was still so much anxiety. I became frustrated because I wanted to know where she was, if she was anywhere. I just want the truth. I don't even care what it is, even if the truth is we're all just dead, and that when my body stops working, it's completely over."

Marcloid finished Rainbow Bridge months ago, and of course she didn't know it would be released at a time when anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and isolation would be so pervasive. In the context of a pandemic, the album seems even more relevant, not just because of its grief but also because of its prescient reminder of the importance of pets: during the stay-at-home order, animal adoptions have broken records as humans turn to cats and dogs to keep them company, and keep them sane, in isolation.

Marcloid adopted another cat herself after Breakfast died, and she now has three. "It's incredibly comforting to have them during a time like this," she says. "They're a solid rock for me to lean on. Especially lately, because they just don't fight with themselves. They're just such simpler creatures, and they're so much more connected to reality than any human could possibly be because of how complex our lives are. When they're in pain, they'll react—they won't like it, but they don't conceptualize and theorize about it. They don't get into this existential dread. They're just in pain, and they just want the pain to go away. That's all it is. It's that simple. We are just hopeless cases in comparison."

Marcloid's music, for all its genre shifts and chaotic oddness, can also reach for that kind of simplicity of thought and emotion. The six-minute instrumental "Angel (of Deth)" is elegiac, oceanic Muzak—a soundtrack to play while the waves roll in, or while watching a kitty sleep. At its conclusion the track breaks up into electronic blips and warbles, as though the world were coming apart and something else were wavering into existence behind the static.

"It's a mystery because we don't know," Marcloid says. "So I have to love and honor that mystery. I don't even know what God is, or if God exists, but whatever it is, that's what I love." Marcloid's tribute suggests that cats may know more about love than we do. They trust you even at the end, to help them die. Rainbow Bridge is not just a eulogy but an expression of hope that they'll lend you a paw in turn when your time comes. It's a comfort to think that when you start up those stairs, there will be a small someone to show you the way.

When someone talks about "shapeless" music, they're usually referring to the ambient or noise genres. But on Rainbow Bridge, the fifth LP in four years from Angel Marcloid (a.k.a. Fire-Toolz), shapeless simply means the act of smashing together disparate musical modes until it loses all structure and meaning. Over 12 tracks and 46 minutes, Marcloid crafts vapourwaves of MIDI-assisted muzak underneath black metal-urged screeches and IDM polybeats. But tracks like the anthemic/synthetic guitar heroics of "(((Ever-Widening Rings)))" and the surprisingly funky, noisy "ER = EPR ~ EoE (EP ∆ P = ER)" reveal to be more than just the sum of their parts, as the Chicago musician drags the listener through labyrinths of sound, mood and time, assuring her tracks are as adventurous as they are novel. Although Fire-Toolz uses only a few musical modes throughout the LP, there's not a moment on Rainbow Bridge that's predictable or forced, leaving the listener with an album so amorphous but with such ingenuity. (Hausu Mountain)

http://houdinimansions.com/magnetic-mystery-hour/2020/5/3/magnetic-mystery-hour-episode-16-angel-marcloid-talks-with-us-about-rainbow-bridge

On this episode of the show multi-talented musician and producer Anger Marcloid is here to talk about the new Fire-Toolz album “Rainbow Bridge”

We’re also going to premiere two tracks from the album: “(((Ever-Widening Rings)))” and “Dreamy #ex Code”

Visit https://fire-toolz.bandcamp.com/album/rainbow-bridge to hear/purchase the new album, also visit https://www.angelmarcloidav.com/ for all things Angel.

ⓢⓔⓣ ⓐ ⓡⓔⓜⓘⓝⓓⓔⓡ >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REEx1Qv_c5g

Chicago avant-vaporwave artist shares another taste of upcoming LP for Hausu Mountain Fire-Toolz has been one of the most exciting names in experimental electronic music over the last few years. Armed with dreamy vaporwave atmospherics, pummeling rapid-fire beats and shrieking vocal dissonance, the Chicago-based artist has impressed on a variety of albums, including last year’s lush and expansive Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace). Today she shares a galvanizing video for brand new song “Rainbow Bridge,” the title track off her forthcoming LP which arrives on May 8 via Hausu Mountain. Right out of the gate, machine gun-like digital percussion and blood-curdling screams swirl frantically before the track enters a peaceful lull, underscoring bending, twinkling synths and staticky swells of background static. Soon, a cavalcade of noodling guitars bleeds through the mix, giving the track its wondrous, shimmering kick. The song then powers down for a moment – a tranquil calm before the storm, in which a final last-gasp stratospheric noise crescendo brings everything to its explosive, cathartic conclusion. The video clip, meanwhile, is crafted with deft visual aplomb; a flurry of eye-popping colors and graphic visual overlays conjure a kaleidoscopic, acid-washed visual tapestry. You can watch that video below, and pre-order Rainbow Bridge HERE.

-Jeff Cubbison/Impose [link]

[Translated from Japanese by Maxwell Allison]

Chicago producer Angel Marcloid’s Fire-Toolz project releases a new album Rainbow Bridge on Hausu Mountain on May 7. Today we premiere the music video of the album’s title track. The album follows Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) on Orange Milk and returns Fire-Toolz to Hausu Mountain. Toiret Status, Koeosaeme, CVN, woopheadclrms, Machine Girl, and EQUIP participated in a Fire-Toolz remix album Triangular Reformat. Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) was a groundbreaking program of electronic fantasy that was painstakingly realized with a delicate, complex, and three-dimensional vision. A consummate collage of MIDI composition, Fire-Toolz music changes and recombines constantly within each track, producing a magnificent baroque spread filled with beauty and chaos. Passing through the consciousness of sorrow and sadness, screams turn into love.

-Avyss Magazine [link]

#electro-industrial #new age music #jazz fusion #experimental music #electronic music #chicago #hausu mountain #angel marcloid #fire-toolz #firetoolz #fire tools #grindcore #black metal #cyberpunk #noise #noise music #synthesizer

🅡🅐🅘🅝🅑🅞🅦 🅑🅡🅘🅓🅖🅔

ⓅⓇⒺ-ⓄⓇⒹⒺⓇ ⓃⓄⓌ from HAUSU MOUNTAIN

ØɄ₮ Ø₦ 5/8/20 Ø₦ Ⱡ₱, ₵Đ, ₵₴

ѕнιятѕ αναιℓαвℓє σи вℓυє & вℓα¢к

https://fire-toolz.bandcamp.com/album/rainbow-bridge

Record reviewers shoring up that all-important, ill-earned authority for themselves is a time-honoured practice made considerably easier in the streaming era. Who’s to know you weren’t down from day one, and in fact Spotify-binged on their back catalogue just before blurting out your blurb? Well, here’s the thing with Angel Marcloid, a plunderous and maximalist Chicago musician trading here as Fire-Toolz: this is her fifth album proper under that name, ergo manageable enough, but Discogs reveals a virtual canyon full of tape- or netlabel offerings and offcuts, which would take weeks of dedicated listening to conquer. So be it: Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) is my introduction to this project, and I’m very glad about that.

It’s hard to name any composers – at any level of the industry – who are more ‘more is more’ than Marcloid. The stems for these eleven tracks must be more like redwood trunks, so layered, complex and multidirectional are the resulting arrangements. It’s electronic at root, and subject to heavy digital processing of course, but with live guitar and bass – fretless, for that extra injection of jazz fusion – chopped up, post-FlyLo or perhaps post-post-Squarepusher style. Marcloid’s loose links to the nebulous vaporwave scene repeatedly manifests, too, cuts like ‘April Snowstorm (Idyllic Mnemonic)’ touting MIDI-melancholy keyboard melodies and smarmily ersatz woodwind.

The metal influence that peppered previous Fire-Toolz albums Skinless X-1 and Drip Mental (see, I did listen to them at least) remains strong on Field Whispers. Its opening number, ‘mailto:[email protected]?subject=Mind-Body Parallels’, in addition to having a title that could be the work of an extremely sassy early-2000s mathcore band, stitches blackened eldritch vocals into a quilt of IDM beats and loungey soundbed keyboards. ‘✓ BEiNG’ is even more paradoxical, smuggling the gutturality inside a maelstrom of crashing syndrums and mulleted guitar solos. If you like The Body’s No One Deserves Happiness, or certain recent Grimes efforts, you might get a kick out of ‘✓ BEiNG’, which is a statement distinct from ‘it sounds like them’.

Indeed, Field Whispers’ crowning achievement is perhaps making the listener think of so much other music in its forty-four minutes, it ultimately resembles none of it. Things are done at the intersection of noise and breakbeats that point to the queered hyperkineticism of Arca or Yves Tumor, even tipping into footwork patterns as artists on Orange Milk (who’ve released this album) sometimes do. ‘Clear Light’, the longest and most mutable composition here, pits just that against buff-sheen cocktail jazz. Autechrean acres of patches and plugins and other things I make no pretence of understanding seem to fuel more abstract, time-stretchy moments like ‘The Warm-Body (A Blessing & Removal)’ (Marcloid likes her parentheses). Vulgar excess carried out with consummate elegance, and something else to add to the list of 2019 electronic albums which manage to be throbbingly intelligent, scarily complex and relentlessly fun.

It was proven, it remains proven, that we are all electric narratives covered in varieties of skin, and that perfect sound can forever connect us to the infinite possibilities of being. We’ve lived these lives before, we’ve decayed through half-lives till chemicals and organics ceased to be different, merging instead at a subatomic level where electrons act as millions of tuning forks that have been perfecting themselves over millennia to form melody. They’re still evolving, obviously, awesomely: there’s no need for the utter endpoint of absolute perfection. We love our anomalies because those are what make everything interesting; they’re what spice up whatever we’ve got going for us at any given moment.

It was tracks in the snow that set it off, put me on a path of rigorous biological self-scrutiny, as words formed beneath revival tents of sound and blended into the sky while I contemplated the mystery of footsteps. These can’t all have been made by the same thing, the same being — there’s too much variation, too much separation of species to accurately convey a fitting reality. Yet I knew every single marking was mine, and the enigma deepened the more I thought about it. There was me as I expected me to be, human, “normal,” but there was also me in various other forms: bear, puma, peacock.As the sun shone, the snow melted, and every single footprint that was created by me-not-me lost focus and reduced its solid impression into a uniform flowing liquid, reducing clues to memories of hope and lost opportunities. But the air still holds its chill, and breath sharpens lungs to distinct points of reference in the midst of the clouding reality, a focus distinctly pinpointed, a beacon continuously glimpsed through the swirl of perceptual confusion.

Those points of reference are part of the body/part of the experience, a line increasingly blurred as external and internal commingle, digitized and encoded by Angel Marcloid into triggers of reaction. As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid has mastered the visceral and the aesthetic, allowing each to coexist in the confines of single time-demarcated sound fragments organized into the conceptual frameworks that we baffled and bewildered money-wielding apes refer to as “albums.” But with Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace), Marcloid has perhaps come as close as ever to offering a collection aligned so fully to the points of view of so many. In thrall, I move my shaking paw containing crumpled currency ever-so-dutifully closer to the human being behind the cash register.

But as fantasy and reality and other reality and maybe even further reality cease to achieve separation from the others, all possibilities enter the conscious mind at a cosmic rush and reduce the ideas of “corporeal” and “electric” and “soul” and “data” to meaningless fragments of the ever-widening Experience. As Marcloid steers us like a sheepdog toward the corral of the infinite center — in this case the “Crystal Palace,” a physical concept we can grasp while we are hurtling toward it — we are enlightened by Field Whispers until we plunge past the boundary of physicality where the snowmelt assumes the mantle of true metaphor and we/I manifest as All-Is-Me. Skin shed, we/I fully equal electric narrative, pass through a patch cord, and are/am saved to a server housing the Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) masters, forever becoming synapses in its programming.

-Ryan Masteller/Tiny Mix Tapes [link]

Fire-Toolz = ’80s Pat Metheny + Crying + Rustie

Angel Marcloid’s work as Fire-Toolz is among rare, completely unforgettable music. Whether or not it suits your taste, there’s no unhearing Marcloid’s frenetic pastiche of high jazz fusion, screamo, post-kitsch electronica and—really—anything else she desires. The unironic way that she presents this absurd music can be disarming at first encounter, but prolonged exposure to a Fire-Toolz album reveals a greater complexity to what can initially seem like shock value. On her previous albums for Hausu Mountain, Drip Mental and Skinless X-1, Marcloid showcased a strong understanding of both the technical and philosophical elements of her various musical influences, and even greater was her careful approach to the general idea of fusing disparate subjects. On her latest and first for Orange Milk, Fields Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace), Marcloid molds her style and compositions into an impossibly tight album, all while expanding the musical scope and ethos of Fire-Toolz into more profound areas. Her work is still far left-field, but the willfully clunky aesthetics of her previous records have given way to a stoic, comfortable approach to this highly individual sound. Marcloid explores the breadth of this style in the first two tracks. “Mailto…” is a blistering, scream-filled burner, quickly followed by the suite of hyper-digital collages, ambience, arena synths and slick jazz fusion on “Clear Light.” Marcloid plays games with the listener’s adrenaline levels and sense of coherence, such as with the way “Clear Light” flirts with eerie, unstable drones before exploding into a neon burst of romance and passion in its second half.

The following track, “She Was Me, My Name Was Surrounded,” is a relatively straight-ahead composition, highlighting heart-wrenching melodies and a glistening array of synthesizers. Even without the maniacal chaos, it feels distinctly Fire-Toolz with its chugging guitar riffs and its bleeding grandiosity. Not only does this balladic track serve as a foil the succeeding blips and clicks on “The Warm-Body (A Blessing and Removal),” but it also helps make sense of the general Fire-Toolz confusion. The melodic map provided by “She Was Me…,” as well as the synth counterpoint on “April Snowstorm (Idyllic Mnemonic),” guide the listener through the murkier surrounding territory. While there’s overall more focus on chordal synthesizer and guitar music, the knottier moments on Field Whispers are equally successful. “Fluids Come Together & the ‘I Am’ Appears” balances shots of saxophone with lulling, glitching bass and pure noise, slowly interspersing moments of sweetness before the at-once contrasting elements cohere into one grand chorus. “Smiling at Sunbears Grooming in Sunbeams” is the perfect conclusion to Field Whispers’ colorful, epic assemblage, sending the album off in a fiery blaze. The melody soars across Marcloid’s electric guitar, her screams are brittle and central in the mix, and the track undergoes a series of tempo pickups akin to Beyoncé’s famous “Love on Top” key changes: Just when you think she can’t possibly do it again, she takes it two levels past where you would’ve even expected. The whole thing eventually unravels into a final minute of droning semi-calm.

As has always been the case with Marcloid’s music—under any of her monikers—there’s a desire to loop right back around to the beginning as soon as the album closes: The emotional highs are addictive, the compositional puzzles are unsolvable in the best way possible, and the emotions reassuring and empowering. Marcloid unearths even greater depth in her music on Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace), stitching together the Fire-Toolz patchwork into an irreproducible, unfathomably beautiful quilt.

–Connor Lockie

https://www.slugmag.com/national-music-reviews/fire-toolz-field-whispers-into-the-crystal-palace/

ín thís thrєαd í wíll díscuss trαck-вч-trαck α líttlє αвσut mч nєw αlвum Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace)

https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/field-whispers-into-the-crystal-palace

mч αlвum títlєs αrє usuαllч mєltєd tσgєthєr rєfєrєncєs tσ vαríσus thíngs. ín thís cαsє wє hαvє unífíєd fíєld thєσrч, mσrphíc rєsσnαncє, thє hσlσgrαphíc príncíplє, cєrєвrσspínαl fluíd, mícrσtuвulєs, kundαlíní, cσnscíσusnєss αs fundαmєntαl, & srí nísαrgαdαttα mαhαrαj

mailto:[email protected]?subject=Mind-Body Parallels - thє вσdч-mínd ís α unífíєd unít. í lσvє wαlkíng ín nαturє. вєíng wíth αnímαls. вєíng whєrє í αm. wαkíng up σut σf sσmє вullshít. í tríєd tσ nσd tσ mч fαv nσ-trєвlє σctαvє chσrd smσσth jαzz guítαrísts. ímσ thє вєαt & вαss slαms.

Clear Light - wαdíng ín єntrσpíc mud σf thσught & єgσ. α slσw & stєαdч вírthíng & dчíng prσcєss. thєn sσmє rєsultíng вíts & вínαríєs σf gnσsís єхprєssєd αs α sєrєnαdє. nσt thє clєαrєst clєαr líght, вut clєαr nσnєthєlєss. єlusívє & nσt sσ clєαr tσ mє, вut clєαr ín ítsєlf.

trαck 4 ís α cσntínuαtíσn σf α pσst-trαumαtíc sєcrєt sαgα. 1. WORM-BODY / 2. ? [CODENAME_AUTO-BRIGHTNESS] / 3. Dreamt Hex Code / 4. The Warm-Body (A Blessing & Removal) / & σn thє nєхt αlвum, thєrє wíll вє 5. Dreamy #ex Code. (í hσpє wє mєєt αgαín sσmє dαч ín σur nєw skíns)

April Snowstorm (Idyllic Mnemonic) - í just lσvє thє snσw. í lσvє вєíng surprísєd вч ít. ít cσuld snσw αnч tímє σf чєαr & í'd вє thríllєd. í lσvє wαtchíng ít fαll. í rєmєmвєr wαtchíng ít thєsє pαst 2 αpríls, ín α вuввlє σf jσчσus nσthíng, σnlч tσ вє вurst sσσn єnσugh вч thσught.

Hologram Of A Composite (World Of Objects) - σur duαlístíc єхístєncє mαч вє вσrn σf α 3d prσjєctíσn frσm α 2d plαnє σf cσdє...α vírtuαl rєαlítч, íf чσu wíll. αn єαrlч míх σf thís sσng wαs thє dígítαl вσnus trαck tσ mч lαst αlвum, Skinless X-1, & thє σldєst cσmpσsítíσn σn FW(ITCP)

✓ BEiNG - íntuítíσn ís α sєntíєnt whíspєr σf ínfσ frσm thє fíєld íntσ thє crчstαl pαlαcє, αn єlєmєnt σf thє вσdч-mínd. mєdítαtíσn/prαчєr/sílєncє cαn clєαr thє tαвlє fσr thís mєαl tσ вє sєrvєd. thє 'í αm' ís thє sєnsє σf вєíng/gσd/nσw/lσvє/prímσrdíαl rσσtєd ín thє αвsσlutє.

Fluids Come Together & The 'I Am' Appears - 1st 1/2=αn σut-tαkє frσm Skinless X-1. 2nd 1/2=sчphσnєd frσm αnσthєr sσng σn fw(ítcp). guítαr wαs rєc'd ín вíts, rєαrrαngєd & cσllαgєd tσ sσund líkє lєgít tαkєs & cσhєsívє prσgrєssíσns. cєrєвrαl spínαl fluíd ís α vєhíclє σf líght. í αm!

The Pain-Body (Wild Energy Spheres) - nσt-sσ-mínímαl mínímαl / nσt-sσ-lσfí lσfí. dєєp, hσusєч. stríppєd dσwn wíth rσσm fσr plαч. nσtícíng. títlє rєfєrs tσ єckhαrt tσllє's "phílσsσphч" σn thє pαín-вσdч. thє trαck fєαturєs mutαtєd clíps σf hím spєαkíng. cєrєвrαl & fαíntlч glσwíng.

Eyewitness Meadow Flyover - α sínglє pєrfєct sphєrє 🔴 hσvєríng, flчíng σvєr gσrgєσus mєαdσws fít w/ 🦋🦌🦜🕷️🌾🍄🌼 єtc. вut thru suвjєctívє lєns. nσ thєσríєs/ cσncєpts. вєíng αs cσnscíσusnєss + wítnєssíng thє mσdulαtíσns σf cσnscíσusnєss σn thє scrєєn σf єхístєncє. αtσms víвrαtíng

Smiling At Sunbears Grooming In Sunbeams - fusíσn-trαncє αвσut mч cαts. thє híghlíghtєd cαt, вrєαkfαst, pαssєd 12/2018. hєr єssєncє, líkє mínє, trαnscєnds ímpєrmαnєncє. thís ís lαst вrєαkfαst-rєlαtєd sσng í wrσtє вєfσrє shє pαssєd. í'vє síncє wríttєn 5 1/2. stαч tunєd fσr mσrє.

In the current extreme music landscape there is an expectation from adventurous musicians and composers to cross over genres and blur the boundaries between diverse sounds and musical practices. In that manner areas of extreme metal have collapsed within the noise trajectory, or have built further fortifications through industrial machinations. But, when it feels like everything has been tried out, there are these creative forces that still push further and create an even more bizarre sonic amalgamation. Fire-Toolz mastermind Angel Marcloid is such a force, moving seamlessly between edges as remote as black metal and vaporwave.

Fire-Toolz boast a rich discography containing numerous full-length records, but in the project’s debut album for transcendental record label Orange Milk they perform a return to form with a dizzying sonic venture through ever changing sonic trajectories. Everything begins with a laid-back synthwave-y quality, peacefully setting in only for the processed black metal shrieks of Marcloid and the exploding blast beats to ruin this moment of pure serenity. From that point on there is an endless rotation of every influence imaginable. Hints of progressive rock become prominent through the marvelous guitar parts of “BEING,” while at the same time the subtle cheesiness of the 1980s synth pop creeps in with “April Snowstorm” and “Smiling at Sunbears Grooming in Sunbeams.”

Certain turns for a darker sound balance this sweeter quality, with the musique concrete informed “The Warm Body” stealing the show and the surreal “Fluids Come Together & The ‘I Am’ Appears” introducing a minimalistic touch. All while a jazz essence of improvisational galore and soothing essence is just a step away.

-Spyros Stasis/Invisible Oranges [link]

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