Yapping Portal “blue fifty-six” cassette (Blue)

Angel Marcloid is a human of many names and personas. As Fire-Toolz and Nonlocal Forecast she is the visionary architect of entire new sound worlds.

I don’t mean ‘sound worlds’ as in ‘this is an interesting palette of sounds’, I mean it as ‘this is an artist with an imagination so fertile and detailed that her albums feel as though they contain whole planets’ worth of information, language, technology and new physics.’

Despite traceable roots to several scenes – vaporwave, harsh noise, new age and black metal, to name just four – the music of these projects is unreproducible, blissfully impossible to reverse-engineer.

As MindSpring Memories, she alchemises deep, absorbing and emotive meditations from the most unlikely sample sources – unrecognisable scraps of 80s soft rock and AOR.

I genuinely believe Angel Marcloid to be one of the most innovative and important musicians of our times.

Now, Blue Tapes is proud to present Angel’s latest sonic incarnation, Yapping Portal.

“Fire-Toolz is a fully formed sculpture, refined and detailed in a very careful way,” Angel considers. “but Yapping Portal leans further into ‘lets see what happens, and whatever happens, is the story.’’”

Here Angel’s psyche manifests in spontaneous, constantly-combusting and self-reconfiguring noisescapes. It is extreme music, sure, but it glistens with infinite surfaces and textures, eruptions of colour and points of light.

“Yapping Portal material is composed in several stages” Angel continues. “There are hours of exploration and experimentation that go into it: Yapping endlessly. An open portal of expression.

“Often, the source material for Yapping Portal is absolutely rife with random voltages and different things reacting to or triggering other things at different unpredictable intervals. It’s amazing because it feels like watching life happen just as much as it feels like controlling it.

“With every knob turn I feel like I’m trying to squeeze some kind of nebulous thought-form into a sound, but there’s not really anything to learn from that thought-form that you can put your finger on. Once you can hear it, its meaning is its energy, texture, and emotional weight, rather than a soundtrack to any kind of concept or message. So far, anyway.”

While its method of creation may differ from the writing processes of Fire-Toolz et al, something Yapping Portal certainly shares with all of Angel’s music and her work as a mix engineer is its state-of-the-art production and hyper-focused attention to detail. Psychoacoustic and binaural techniques are intricately laced through the mix, making the result as immersive and consuming as modern music gets.

It should be listened to on headphones and with eyes closed for maximum effects.

“All the sounds manifest as shapes and colors in my mind. This album just kind of sounds like a room full of objects of different textures, pieces of things that are unclear or hard to make out as far as their identity, though you can see the shapes and feel the textures easily. It kind of reminds me of really early AI art that just looked like you were having an aneurysm, but without all the fear. I love the discomfort the music can induce at times, but it’s completely benign.

“So much of my work has this weird sense of having a profound statement but it’s always out of reach. At least one that is obvious. Who knows what could be revealed in time, when high, or tired, or whatever else.”

PRAISE FOR ANGEL MARCLOID

“The album is an exploration of texture, of the relationship between the body and the computer in symbiosis, altering each other to create noise. It contains both the mechanical glow of a cool, white laptop screen and the grinding of stone against stone, the scraping of her voice.” – Spin

“Fire-Toolz’s blasphemous potion composed of glitchy breakcore mashed into airy new age synth sections, Marcloid howling underneath the profanity of a fretless bass guitar, decked in corpse paint and burning down a church designed by Lisa Frank. None of it should work, and yet Fire-Toolz has enjoyed a growing legion of fans and near-universal critical acclaim.” – Pitchfork

“In an American electronic music scene that feels increasingly syncretic, where metal, noise, jazz and techno collide like atoms converging into new molecules, Marcloid stands apart, conjuring a universe as Day-Glo, manic depressive and unpredictable as life itself.” – Resident Advisor

“Angel Marcloid’s music as Fire-Toolz is a riddle wrapped in an enigma exploded through a reality bending sonic onslaught. Surreal electronic vistas bleeding into blast beats, new age transcendence melting into gargantuan shred.” – The Quietus

“Upon a casual listen, it might seem as if Marcloid is throwing sonic ideas at the wall to see what sticks, but an attentive ear reveals her care and attentiveness as a producer, where every disparate sound is held in place right where it belongs like the pieces of a multicolored Jenga tower.” – Popmatters