Fire-Toolz Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace)

[Orange Milk; 2019]

Styles: subatomic tuning forks, electric narratives covered in varieties of skin, “vapo…” – nah that’s dumb
Others: Nonlocal Forecast, MindSpring Memories

It was proven, it remains proven, that we are all electric narratives covered in varieties of skin, and that perfect sound can forever connect us to the infinite possibilities of being. We’ve lived these lives before, we’ve decayed through half-lives till chemicals and organics ceased to be different, merging instead at a subatomic level where electrons act as millions of tuning forks that have been perfecting themselves over millennia to form melody. They’re still evolving, obviously, awesomely: there’s no need for the utter endpoint of absolute perfection. We love our anomalies because those are what make everything interesting; they’re what spice up whatever we’ve got going for us at any given moment.

It was tracks in the snow that set it off, put me on a path of rigorous biological self-scrutiny, as words formed beneath revival tents of sound and blended into the sky while I contemplated the mystery of footsteps. These can’t all have been made by the same thing, the same being — there’s too much variation, too much separation of species to accurately convey a fitting reality. Yet I knew every single marking was mine, and the enigma deepened the more I thought about it. There was me as I expected me to be, human, “normal,” but there was also me in various other forms: bear, puma, peacock.

As the sun shone, the snow melted, and every single footprint that was created by me-not-me lost focus and reduced its solid impression into a uniform flowing liquid, reducing clues to memories of hope and lost opportunities. But the air still holds its chill, and breath sharpens lungs to distinct points of reference in the midst of the clouding reality, a focus distinctly pinpointed, a beacon continuously glimpsed through the swirl of perceptual confusion.

Those points of reference are part of the body/part of the experience, a line increasingly blurred as external and internal commingle, digitized and encoded by Angel Marcloid into triggers of reaction. As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid has mastered the visceral and the aesthetic, allowing each to coexist in the confines of single time-demarcated sound fragments organized into the conceptual frameworks that we baffled and bewildered money-wielding apes refer to as “albums.” But with Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace), Marcloid has perhaps come as close as ever to offering a collection aligned so fully to the points of view of so many. In thrall, I move my shaking paw containing crumpled currency ever-so-dutifully closer to the human being behind the cash register.

But as fantasy and reality and other reality and maybe even further reality cease to achieve separation from the others, all possibilities enter the conscious mind at a cosmic rush and reduce the ideas of “corporeal” and “electric” and “soul” and “data” to meaningless fragments of the ever-widening Experience. As Marcloid steers us like a sheepdog toward the corral of the infinite center — in this case the “Crystal Palace,” a physical concept we can grasp while we are hurtling toward it — we are enlightened by Field Whispers until we plunge past the boundary of physicality where the snowmelt assumes the mantle of true metaphor and we/I manifest as All-Is-Me. Skin shed, we/I fully equal electric narrative, pass through a patch cord, and are/am saved to a server housing the Field Whispers (Into the Crystal Palace) masters, forever becoming synapses in its programming.

Eureka!

Some releases are so incredible we just can’t help but exclaim EUREKA! While many of our picks here defy categorization and explore the constructed boundaries between ‘music’ and ‘noise,’ others complement, continue, or rupture traditions that provide new forms and ways of listening. Not all of our favorites will be listed here, but we think each EUREKA! album is worthy of careful consideration. This section is a work-in-progress, so expect its definition to be in perpetual flux.

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