To be released on 2xLP, CD, cassette, and digitally on 10/15/21. Artwork by Jeremy Coubrough. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To view the store page, click here.

Over the past two decades, producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has willed a vast ecosystem of music into existence at a rate that somehow seems to intensify as time goes on. Various solo monikers, collaborations, and band memberships stand as monuments in the landscape, focusing in on certain styles associated with each project — the Weather Channel jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast, or the hazy vapor nostalgia of Mindspring Memories, to give a few of many examples. The music of Marcloid’s flagship project Fire-Toolz sits as the bottomless pit in the center of the lush environment, drawing ideas and signifiers from all corners into its depths. In keeping with Fire-Toolz’s role as the outlet for Marcloid’s most overloaded and audacious compositional gambits, Eternal Home enters the catalog as the longest and most ambitious Fire-Toolz album to date. Clocking in at close to 80 minutes, Marcloid improbably maintains the attention to detail and the crushing density that has come to define Fire-Toolz from its inception, treating the expanded canvas as an opportunity to both dive deeper into genre-obliterating chaos and to tighten the reins around more direct, even accessible styles of songwriting. The album joins the Hausu Mountain roster of Fire-Toolz releases including Drip Mental (HAUSMO55, 2017), Skinless X-1 (HAUSMO73, 2018) and Rainbow Bridge (HAUSMO99, 2020). While Eternal Home builds on the omnidirectional compositional styles that Marcloid explored on those previous LPs, the album gains power and momentum from its sheer overwhelming mass, becoming a statement of purpose that showcases all the reliable strengths and unpredictable left turns that Fire-Toolz continues to refine with each new work.

The tracks that Marcloid weaves into the mosaic composite of Eternal Home range from flights of ornate prog rock / jazz fusion shredding, to brief bursts of pent up energy with an almost grindcore ferocity in their shrieking vocals and pummeling blastbeats, to extended collages of fast-scrolling sound design, to songs that zero in on a style in the neighborhoods of emo and nu-metal that balance aggression with clear and affecting vocal melodies. The delineation between these categories of songs isn’t quite so tidy, however. Marcloid has no problem layering the project’s signature black metal-adjacent screams into otherwise placid fields of sound, spiraling off into passages of progressive guitar / bass / keyboard / percussion interplay on a dime, or injecting bursts of textural noise into what may seem like a conventional song structure. The Fire-Toolz toolbox contains infinite strategies to achieve both compositional disfigurement and narrative cohesion, which extend beyond musical forms to include the nuance and thematic depth present in the project’s lyrics. Shards of death metal, jazz fusion, musique concrète, new age, ambient, dance music, and experimental electronic abstraction pop into view at any moment to steer any given track into new territories.  Marcloid further fleshes out Eternal Home with flashes of sound from guest performers, including swirling jazz sax and clarinet by Ian Smith, wisps of flute by 空YAMAHA, synth-noise textures by Bastian Void, and field-recorded barks from various friends’ dogs — adding layers of community input into already densely packed tableaus.

Listening through Eternal Home can feel like floating through an endless ocean of data, finding some wreckage to hold onto in the surf for a moment in the form of a gorgeous melody, a lyrical turn of phrase with profound philosophical implications, or a tightly sculpted prog breakdown, before being swept off by the next round of scattering waves. The 3-to-4 minute songs with more legible hooks and verse-chorus-verse structures serve as island oases for listeners to catch their breath, before Marcloid flips the script with another unforeseen diversion. Despite Fire-Toolz’s penchant for heady genre-mangling, advanced production techniques, and potentially overblown levels of instrumental virtuosity, Eternal Home coheres into a cathartic journey that transcends any intellectual hang-ups to crest into deeply emotional, ineffable zones.

Marcloid’s music as Fire-Toolz has always had a complicated relationship with the institution of vaporwave. The artist has balked at previous albums being situated within the genre, because aside from flashes of sampled spoken word and very rare snippets of ecco-jam loops, each Fire-Toolz track is built from the ground up without the use of external sampled music. Marcloid’s skills as a producer, synthesist, vocalist, instrumental performer, and mixing/mastering engineer all fuse together into works that span so many contrasting styles and fidelities that one could be forgiven for mistaking the music of Fire-Toolz for a well-crafted amalgam of plundered recordings. On the other side of the coin, Marcloid has both embraced and been embraced by the vaporwave community at large, and does in fact make explicitly sample-based vaporwave music in the context of other projects. Marcloid has performed live at the vaporwave scene hub event 100% Electronicon, has released music with projects like Mindspring Memories and Angelwings Marmalade on vaporwave-focused labels, and actively participates in the scene with mixing and mastering services as Angel Hair Audio. The music of Fire-Toolz fits within the internet-borne characteristics of vaporwave, and scratches a similar quadrant of listeners’ brains to the work of adept sample-collagists by way of its constant structural fluctuation and its ability to dredge up potentially nostalgic stylistic touchstones within its pulsating soup of genres. In this sense, Fire-Toolz exists in a dimension parallel to the vaporwave milieu, drawing from the style’s central tenets without exploring the same techniques of sample-based construction and deliberate recontextualization. 

In discussing the themes and inspirations behind Eternal Home, Marcloid draws from a deep well of religious and philosophical touchstones without being tethered to any specific belief system. Overarching ideas of non- (or multi-) denominational spiritual fulfillment and disarray, the clash between the debilitating forces of oppression and trauma vs. the healing powers of beauty and personal safety, and the influence of both the mystical and physical dimensions all factor into the the lyrical text and the musical approach of the project. Angel Marcloid’s statement about Eternal Home is as follows:

“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). Whenever we are not in Heaven, it is because we’ve forgotten we are in Heaven. Heaven transcends and does not depend upon circumstances, labels, experiences, or sensations. It has nothing to do with the afterlife or religious theology. In all of the grief, fear, and stinging emotional pain I have endured in this incarnation, despite the richness and miraculous unfolding that is my beautiful life, it turns out: I am always Home, and Home is always safe.

The album is what settled in the sink after I wrung myself dry. It is full of sensory memories, love of nature, spiritual deliberation, and relating childhood experiences to my present-day psychology, but it is also a metamorphosis. It engulfs the vast darkness in more light than it can handle.”