Fire-Toolz - Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

Bandcamp Daily

Angel Marcloid's melting pot of metal, experimental noise, pop, and vaporwave boils over into a satisfying transcendental froth.

Thu Sep 12 13:45:08 GMT 2019

The Quietus

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:spasm@swamp.god?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.

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Sun Sep 29 15:56:44 GMT 2019

Pitchfork 80

Balancing vaporwave’s glossy kitsch with throat-shredding metal vocals and labyrinthine sound collage, Angel Marcloid’s music is a perfect fusion of pop and pure abstraction.

Fri Aug 30 05:00:00 GMT 2019

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Fire-Toolz
Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

[Orange Milk; 2019]

Rating: 4/5

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.

Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) by Fire-Toolz

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.

Fri Sep 27 04:06:17 GMT 2019

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Fire-Toolz
Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

[Orange Milk; 2019]

Rating: 4/5

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.

Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) by Fire-Toolz

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.

Fri Sep 27 04:06:17 GMT 2019