To be released on CD, cassette, digitally, and several merch items with download on 4/7/23. Bandcamp vinyl campaign is currently ongoing. Artwork by Nick Krueger. CD packaged in a jewel case with an 8-page booklet. C48 – clear tape with full color labels and packaged with an 8-panel J-Card. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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Producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid records music under the moniker Fire-Toolz. Though Marcloid’s output emerges in a litany of distinct aliases and projects — from the jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast to the vaporous nostalgia of MindSpring Memories — the Fire-Toolz catalog remains the central focus of the prolific artist’s musical universe and a home for Marcloid’s most ambitious and combinatory work. I am upset because I see something that is not there., the fifth Fire-Toolz album to join the Hausu Mountain catalog since 2017, follows 2021’s sprawling double-album Eternal Home (HAUSMO111) and 2022’s self-released EP I will not use the body’s eyes today. I am upset […] offers listeners a prismatic cross-section of juxtaposed genres and compositional contortions to explore, maintaining Fire-Toolz’s signature density and complexity while tightening the scope of Marcloid’s experimentation into the project’s most focused song cycle to date. Perhaps more than any previous Fire-Toolz album, I am upset […] presents some form of pop music, carried in Marcloid’s passages of clean vocals, in the bright synth and keyboard tones that animate its tracks, in the yearning saxophone lines that pour into view and whisk the narrative onto a new path. The format of a one-person “band” carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting abstract modernist productions that don’t allude in the slightest to various twentieth-century rock-related traditions. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide.
The music of Fire-Toolz draws energy on a moment-to-moment basis from the constant fluctuation between seemingly disparate styles, yet Marcloid pulls off the impossible feat again and again of making chaotic deviations and improbable jump-cuts between ideas sound holistic, as if such compositional gambits were already logical to begin with. Bursts of harsh textural noise cut into drifts of new age synth bliss, while miniature screamo verses bookend passages of hyper-technical jazz fusion. The dance-adjacent branch of the project’s sound expands on I am upset […] into more advanced experiments with breakbeats, which collide with death metal-inspired drum programming into cybernetic spikes of intensity. While ideas plucked from Fire-Toolz’s bottomless musical arsenal fly by at a rapid clip, one vocabulary emerges as a type of homebase to which Marcloid frequently returns: prog and 80s arena rock, with its glistening keyboards and effects-drenched sax and guitar solos — a touchstone for the artist since early childhood. Songs elastically stretch in every direction from the foundation of progressive rock, as if flashing back to Marcloid playing along on the drums to Rush and Dream Theater as a child, jumping ahead to the pit at a nu-metal or mathcore show, and pushing forward to quiet evenings years later listening to ECM records while looking out on a freshly cut lawn. The overarching rhythm of a Fire-Toolz song lays out a sine wave of inhalations and exhalations, a network of sudden detonations that punctuate the flow between meditation and progressive maximalism.
Though Fire-Toolz weaves together far-flung elements of Marcloid’s musical upbringing, the project never engages in outright nostalgia. These distinct vocabularies are not relics of the past dusted off and presented as novelties. They’re living traditions that the artist works with in the present tense. Some moments of I am upset […] paint a mental picture of five Marcloids behind rock instruments on stage, hammering out knotty prog riffs or swaying along to prom night ballads, while other passages barely hint at human presence at all, as if Marcloid has evaporated into a disembodied mist that hangs over the track. Instead of trying to tease out the tension between heart-on-sleeve pop/rock songwriting, electro-industrial beatcraft, and experiments in pure texture, Marcloid tries to get us to see through the delusion that these things are any different in the grand scheme. They all exist within Fire-Toolz, not tucked away in neat little separate compartments, but floating together, melted down and formed into a perfect sphere that hangs over the horizon.
Deriving its title from A Course in Miracles, a spiritual modality and self-study program published by The Foundation for Inner Peace in the 1970s, I am upset because I see something that is not there. exudes a healing light in the Fire-Toolz catalog. The album captures Marcloid’s intense desire to see through the delusions that result from trauma, to perceive reality without distortion or fear, to find union with omni-theological God/Spirit, to experience being fully known and fully loved.
