Fire-Toolz - I am upset because I see something that is not there.

A Closer Listen

“We’ve lost nothing”, a floating text states within a simulated, 2000s-game-graphics brick building whose modernist layout spells Bauhaus 19th century industrial warehouse. In the video for “It Is Happening Again / Mantra-ing & Golgotha: Double-Bind (Prequel)” our camera-eye transitions seamlessly between inside and outside, reaching one of those old-school US suburb mailboxes we’ve all seen in cartoons, penetrating into its depths and awakening a psychedelic orb (the eye we’ve been, all this time) that irradiates rainbow colors. Old email clients like Eudora used the imagery of written letters and postal workers to convey not only its function, but the experience of byte-fast communication, turning them both into some sort of smooth late 90s futurist motifs that irradiate movement. Neither the fluid building nor the mailbox represent something that exists in the world – they perform it, just like email performs the already-present instant communication that is mail (before there was nothing, now there is something), because time, historical distance, is like an illusion that inscribes separations where perhaps there are none. When Fire-Toolz screams “we’ve lost nothing”, I believe this is what she means: let that perception, which tells you these things are far away from each other, whether in time, in experience, or through judgement, corrode absolutely. When it does, you will see, you will hear the full radiance of the rainbow.

So what’s this got to do with music? Everything! Fire-Toolz’ work has generated no small amount of interest and genuine puzzlement when it comes to her holistic approach to genres and styles. The usual confusion regarding her music’s relationship to vaporwave, for example, reflects that worldly necessity for listeners to be able to connect through separation. What is indeed shared between the two, beyond the occasional electronic arrangement, is that they both do away with distance; sounds that we believe are not us, because they should be confined to the dustbin of history, awaken all sorts of haphazard processes of memory, identity, and belonging. By canceling that separation something weird seems to emerge, not that all those sounds and our experiences of them are all ultimately the same, but that in belonging to the same chipset they are different, differentiated through connection. The technical mastery with which Fire-Toolz unites dozens of genres and styles should not be understated, but it is supported by a conceptualization similar to what the Eudora images used to tell us about email: nothing has been lost. The fact that regular mail is still a thing is a relatively minor aspect of it – the important part is that the image of an old mailbox, a dynamized virtual postperson, email clients, the actual postperson, the mail system, clacking away on your keyboard and writing by hand, are all participants in the same fabric of communicative electronics. In their performance of each other, the distance fades away.

This means that the sheer vibrancy of a musical world in which everything remains, in which a myriad genres become distinct by flowing into each other, is still the core of Fire-Toolz’ work. However, if Eternal Home was an explosive device of holistic mysticism, I am upset because I see something that is not there. is more like the record of the aftermath, the first “text” through which to make sense of that great opening. After such a detonation of novelty, what is to be done? To think through it, to give it shape, to integrate it, to map it, to give it a contour. I am upset… is a clearer album, slower paced, perhaps even more disciplined when it comes to the structures unfolding before us, like working our way through a relatively familiar system of referents that nonetheless contains all sorts of surprising patterns. The use of stadium-rock guitar solos, as well as clear singing, underscores that newly interpretive approach, reconstituting the fabric of musical continuities much more accessibly than in past albums. Make no mistake, there are still drone-screamo-synth sections that will pierce your ears, but their disruptive impact is contextualized by connecting much more immediately to, for instance, smooth jazz elements that will enable you to follow the music more easily than before. In other words, the contrasts in I am upset… are technically even more radical than in Eternal Home, but that is precisely why, under Fire-Toolz’ able hands and methods, they work even better. Because the wider the apparent distance, the wider the true connection is: the harsh sections perform the soft sections perform the intense sections perform the contemplative ones, and the other way around, forever. You are not listening to rock, or to drone, or jazz or prog, you are listening to music itself, precisely because we’ve lost nothing. (David Murrieta Flores)