To be released on cassette and digitally on 3/1/19. C40 – white tape with black imprints. Pro-dubbed at NAC. 2-sided 3-panel J-Card with artwork from HausMo Max.

The music that Chicago-based producer/composer Angel Marcloid makes under the new moniker Nonlocal Forecast distills her experimentation in the prog, jazz fusion, and new age disciplines into pristine instrumental compositions teeming with intricate harmonic structures and complex webs of programmed percussion. Orbiting as another satellite around her genre-obliterating flagship projects like Fire-Toolz and MindSpring Memories, Nonlocal Forecast centers Marcloid’s practice on a palette of technical leads and atmospheric MIDI synth arrangements. For the project’s debut album Bubble Universe!, Marcloid drew inspiration from her personal studies in quantum physics/mechanics and non-dual spirituality. These frameworks steer her toward a strain of micro/macrocosmic composition in which the granular unfurling of rhythms and melodic elements evoke the movement of celestial bodies as much as subatomic particles on the smallest scale.

Bubble Universe! finds Marcloid emulating the format of a live ensemble, painstakingly programming each instrument in DAW software without the use of samples. Marcloid’s tiered systems of digital synth patches, modeled exclusively after the Korg M1 and the Korg Wavestation, interact in waves of steadily chiming pulses and chordal washes before streaking off into climaxes of melodic hands-on-keyboard input. Her meticulously programmed percussion tracks attest to her experience drumming in prog rock bands as they flow through interlaced time signatures, syncopated hard grooves, and rapid-fire tom fills. In contrast to her network of synthetic voices, Marcloid’s moments of guitar pyrotechnics burst out of the mix with fluid lead picking and searing distortion. With this composite of digital and analog instruments, Nonlocal Forecast sketches out a style of progressive composition that runs adjacent to the work of Allan Holdsworth and Casiopea. When her arrangements shed layers of legible melody in favor of drifting synth expanses, her tracks melt into the realm of ambient or new age music in the spirit of Jonn Serrie or Steve Halpern. Slowly modulating electronic voices build and smear together into fields of sound equally fit to soundtrack cosmological documentary footage or periods of mind-focusing meditation. Born from Marcloid’s lofty thematic frameworks centered on both outer and inner spaces, Bubble Universe! channels the emotion and wide-eyed fascination at the heart of any number of progressive musical styles into some of her most accessible and elementally entrancing compositions to date. Nonlocal Forecast exists in a state of quantum superposition between states of electronic complexity and self-nullifying synth drift, as each of her tracks peers through the glass to observe a particle in position for a moment before moving on to the next trial.