For the past decade, under a seemingly endless list of names, Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid has spread her tendrils across vast stretches of the world of noise and electronic music. Her diverse sonic identities—the hazily fluid, manipulated new-age sounds of Mindspring Memories, the more unsettling work she does under her own name or as Pregnant Spore—intersect but rarely significantly overlap. With a distinctive retrofuturistic aesthetic (which predates the vaporwave craze) that she fuses with a modern reinterpretation of older styles, Marcloid has carved out her own place in experimental music without rendering herself inaccessible to curious listeners. Her name has been passed around in the underground for years, but now her profile is rising—and she’s prepared to make an even bigger impact. One of her most disorienting and personal projects, Fire-Toolz, will release the cassette Drip Mental through Hausu Mountain on Friday, February 24, and the whole album is already streaming. (If you buy it digitally today—Friday, February 3—Bandcamp will donate its share of the proceeds to the ACLU.)
The music and its presentation are extensions of Marcloid herself—a document of the process of self-documentation. “My whole life I regarded making music as a passion,” she says. “It’s what I was told it was. I’m learning it’s more of an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I’m a pretty emotional person, definitely an empath, and my brain is the birthplace of more ideas than I could ever remember, let alone execute. There are constantly brewing ideas inside of me, even in the most inappropriate of situations.” This anxiously bubbling, compulsive energy shines from every corner of Drip Mental, as well as from Marcloid’s previous album as Fire-Toolz, Even the Files Won’t Touch You. The drive to create and to catalog one’s thoughts is as maddening as it is empowering, and Fire-Toolz captures this uncertainty brilliantly.
