When someone talks about "shapeless" music, they're usually referring to the ambient or noise genres. But on Rainbow Bridge, the fifth LP in four years from Angel Marcloid (a.k.a. Fire-Toolz), shapeless simply means the act of smashing together disparate musical modes until it loses all structure and meaning.
Over 12 tracks and 46 minutes, Marcloid crafts vapourwaves of MIDI-assisted muzak underneath black metal-urged screeches and IDM polybeats. But tracks like the anthemic/synthetic guitar heroics of "(((Ever-Widening Rings)))" and the surprisingly funky, noisy "ER = EPR ~ EoE (EP ∆ P = ER)" reveal to be more than just the sum of their parts, as the Chicago musician drags the listener through labyrinths of sound, mood and time, assuring her tracks are as adventurous as they are novel.
Although Fire-Toolz uses only a few musical modes throughout the LP, there's not a moment on Rainbow Bridge that's predictable or forced, leaving the listener with an album so amorphous but with such ingenuity.
(Hausu Mountain)Over 12 tracks and 46 minutes, Marcloid crafts vapourwaves of MIDI-assisted muzak underneath black metal-urged screeches and IDM polybeats. But tracks like the anthemic/synthetic guitar heroics of "(((Ever-Widening Rings)))" and the surprisingly funky, noisy "ER = EPR ~ EoE (EP ∆ P = ER)" reveal to be more than just the sum of their parts, as the Chicago musician drags the listener through labyrinths of sound, mood and time, assuring her tracks are as adventurous as they are novel.
Although Fire-Toolz uses only a few musical modes throughout the LP, there's not a moment on Rainbow Bridge that's predictable or forced, leaving the listener with an album so amorphous but with such ingenuity.