To be released on LP, CD, t-shirt, and digitally on 8/24/18. Artwork from Jeremy Coubrough and Fire-Toolz.
LP packaged with two-sided insert. Manufactured by Gotta Groove and mastered by Patrick Klem. CD packaged in a jewel-case with four-panel insert. We will also have the first ever Fire-Toolz t-shirts which come with a free download of the new album.
Fire-Toolz is one musical moniker used by a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. While her other projects focus on extended noise texture or experiments in sample manipulation, Fire-Toolz has come to host some of her most complex and expressive compositions to date, characterized by multi-aesthetic overload and labyrinthine progressive songwriting. Skinless X-1, her first LP, follows the omni-metallic squall of Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain, 2017) and the see-sawing atmospheric juxtapositions of INTERBEING (Bedlam Tapes, 2017) with a program of dense compositions that accelerate her ideas through ever more exquisitely detailed cycles of self-consumption and recombination.
Though her work fits under the wide umbrella of beat-focused electronic production, Fire-Toolz sculpts her tracks from warped signifiers of genres including jazz fusion, electro-industrial, new age, black metal, prog-rock, and noise improv. Far from a passing tourist cherry-picking the juiciest chunks of each of these traditions, Angel has worked through an improbably rigorous musical self-education that seems to compress several entire discrete lives into one: a teenage student of prog and metal, tracing the linear compositions of Rush and Dream Theater on drums, then guitar and bass, then keyboards; touring the country at the front of multiple emo bands before touring the country for years again under myriad monikers in the harsh noise circuit; falling headfirst into the internet abyss of mangled smooth jazz samples and ultra high-resolution sound design. Each of these skillsets and memories collide in the production of Skinless X-1, as sketches of knotty fusion complexity and ornate MIDI-sequenced arrangement untangle themselves before our ears, only to melt seconds later into hard-panning clouds of alien texture or pads of angelic synth. Fire-Toolz breaks straight through the ceiling of frantic stylistic combination only to realize that she has paradoxically achieved some twisted total unity in sound and form – a complete disjunction in which no single element has any other logical referents, so all fit together in their state of ecstatic variation.
Fire-Toolz’s lyrics from album to album chart a progression from a preoccupation with trauma, through considerations of personal spirituality and secular knowledge of consciousness, and out into prismatic memories of her childhood, her dreams, and her relationship with the natural world. The trajectory follows Angel’s own growth and focus on self-awareness and presence in the moment, informed by the likes of Thich Nhat Hanh, Alan Watts, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. As she burrows inward and unpacks her own character and history, her eyes also turn to the scope of the universe as a whole. By inhabiting these top-down and bottom-up perspectives all at once, Angel demonstrates that the cosmic and the hyper-specific are not as contradictory as they may appear, just like the seemingly opposing forces at play in her music: the chaos of ever more minuscule fragmentation as it crashes into the infinite abstract expanse.
