Skinless X-1 - CD

Fire-Toolz is one musical moniker used by a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. Though her work fits under the wide umbrella of beat-focused electronic production, Fire-Toolz sculpts her tracks from warped signifiers of genres including jazz fusion, electro-industrial, new age, black metal, vaporwave, and noise improv. Far from a passing tourist cherry-picking the juiciest chunks of each of these traditions, Angel has worked through an improbably rigorous musical self-education that seems to compress several entire discrete lives into one: a teenage student of prog and metal, tracing the linear compositions of Rush and Dream Theater on drums, then guitar and bass, then keyboards; touring the country at the front of multiple emo bands before touring the country for years again under myriad monikers in the harsh noise circuit; falling headfirst into the internet abyss of mangled smooth jazz samples and ultra high-resolution sound design. Each of these skillsets and memories collide in the production of Skinless X-1, as sketches of knotty fusion complexity untangle themselves before our ears, only to melt seconds later into hard-panning clouds of alien texture or pads of angelic synth.