Fire-Toolz - Eternal Home

A Closer Listen

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)

The Quietus

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. ‘Sherpa 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’m 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 ‘Thinkglowysparklystingypain’, 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.

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Resident Advisor

Sometimes you hear something that blows your mind. Fire-Toolz, the best-known project from Chicago artist Angel Marcloid, has been taking up space in my head si..

Pitchfork 76

Read Sam Goldner’s review of the album.