Into The Music
Angel Marcloid has been making music under the name Fire-Toolz since 2015, and the safest thing you can say about that music is that it does not care what you think of it. A single Fire-Toolz track might contain new age ambience, hyperpop, black metal, smooth jazz, and MIDI-soaked digital euphoria, sometimes in the same two minutes. It is not genre-blending in the conventional sense. It is more like genre indifference, a complete refusal to treat any sonic category as a constraint.
Marcloid, who is trans and based in Chicago, has built a catalog over the past decade that operates somewhere between spiritual and chaotic, and sometimes manages to be both at once. Titles like Skinless X Infinity and Eternal Home suggest the conceptual territory: the body, technology, transcendence, the noise that lives between them. The music is not easy listening. It is also not difficult listening for the sake of difficulty. There is genuine feeling embedded in the chaos, which is what separates Fire-Toolz from the many artists who have tried to work in similar registers and come out with nothing more than noise.
The news this week that Marcloid has signed to Warp Records for a forthcoming album titled Lavender Networks is significant in a way that feels both inevitable and overdue. Warp has historically been one of the few major labels willing to release music that genuinely resists mainstream packaging, from Aphex Twin to Flying Lotus to Squarepusher. Fire-Toolz belongs in that lineage, not as an imitator of any of those artists but as someone pursuing the same fundamental project: finding out how weird things can get before they stop being music, and discovering that the answer is usually further than you expected.
Lavender Networks does not yet have a release date or a full set of singles. What exists is a name and a label, which is enough to build real anticipation. Warp signing Marcloid suggests the album will get the kind of production support and distribution that Fire-Toolz records have sometimes lacked. The catalog is already extraordinary. A Warp album could be the moment that pulls it into wider view.
If you have not spent time with Fire-Toolz before, the entry point is not obvious, which is actually appropriate. There is no safe on-ramp to this music. The best approach is to pick a record and let it do what it does. Eternal Home from 2019 is as good a starting place as any. It will either confirm that this is exactly what you needed or make you understand why it is not for you, and either way you will know something you did not know before.