
To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on 11/19/21. 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.
While Eternal Home maintains Fire-Toolz’s role as the outlet for Marcloid’s most overloaded and audacious compositional gambits, Eternal Home [Instrumentals] enters the catalog as the album’s illuminating companion piece. Shorn of Marcloid’s vocal components, the album takes on a new sheen as it highlights the sheer level of detail present in each meticulously sculpted production. Compositional elements that were previously elided in the context of the full vocal album suddenly shine in all their bewildering complexity. Stripped of the shrieks and the clean-toned vocal melodies that supplied the hooks within each track, Eternal Home [Instrumentals] plants Marcloid’s opus a few steps further away from what could be considered pop-adjacent music and situates the album closer to an all-encompassing epic of progressive electronic recombination and unfettered experimentation.
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 dive deeper into genre-obliterating chaos. Eternal Home [Instrumentals] joins the Hausu Mountain roster of Fire-Toolz releases including, Drip Mental (HAUSMO55, 2017), Skinless X-1 (HAUSMO73, 2018), Rainbow Bridge (HAUSMO99, 2020) and the original incarnation of this material in Eternal Home (HAUSMO111, 2021). 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 [Instrumentals] range from flights of ornate prog rock / jazz fusion shredding, to brief bursts of pent up energy with an almost grindcore ferocity with their 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. The delineation between these categories of songs isn’t quite so tidy, however. Marcloid has no problem 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. 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 [Instrumentals] 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 [Instrumentals] 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 or a tightly sculpted prog breakdown, before being swept off by the next round of scattering waves. Despite Fire-Toolz’s penchant for heady genre-mangling, advanced production techniques, and potentially overblown levels of instrumental virtuosity, Eternal Home [Instrumentals] coheres into a cathartic journey that transcends any intellectual hang-ups to crest into deeply emotional, ineffable zones.