Fire-Toolz In Conversation with Warp
2021 words, 00:06:44
GESAMTKUNSTWARP
Your home, your cats, your tattoos of your cats, a soccer ball that appeared in a dream and then materialised in your backyard, your spiritual practice, your dress - none of this feels like "influences" or "context" for the music. It feels like the same thing as the music. Is there a version of your life where any of these things exist separately from each other, or has the whole thing always been one continuous act?
It's a continuation of the same thing since I was born. I'm not sure exactly what that thing is, though I have suspicions. It might be an artifact of aligning with something deeper, or interdimensional.
At a time where artists define album cycles as 'eras', I appreciate that Fire-Toolz is total. And that when I call you, it looks like you are inside one of your videos. There seems to be such a small gauze between your actual life, and the look of this music.
Yeah. I mean, I don't live in a fantasy world as much as my music can sometimes illustrate. There actually is separation, because I don't live day-to-day in a weird dreamland.
But it definitely comes from the same place. If fantasy or mythical elements appear in my music or artwork, they're usually symbolic of something in real life.
It does feel very much like all the same thing because I'm not censoring or obstructing myself. Like, I'm not editing or holding back when I'm decorating my home, or listening to music or making music or getting dressed or spending time with my cats.
My music happens when it all resonates together. I try to create my life as much as I can, as much as I am able, in that mindset. There's all kinds of inconveniences and limitations that come into play when I don't conform or put up a front in any avenue, but I have to have it that way or I feel uncomfortable at best, and in violation of my own soul at worst.
So maybe my music offends “good taste” but I like to feel free. I have to feel free or I’ll get jammed up, like gunk stuck in a pipe.
Your home looks like an oxygen supply for you. As if you fill the tank before going into the real world. Does your project live in tension with the normative world? I see this in the cover artwork by Meredith Guerrero: there's the panel on the inner that shows a boring empty office. It feels like an indictment on the real world, while front and back radiate optimism.
Yeah, I really appreciate that panel. If Fire-Toolz was a mansion, it would include empty rooms like that. True maximalism encompasses minimalism. When I look at that panel, I get a good unsettling feeling. It creates a beautiful tension.
INSTRUMENTS & SOVERIEGNTY
You are capable of writing, performing, producing, mixing and mastering everything yourself - every guitar line, every synthesiser texture, every shriek. And yet you’re this generous collaborator in your scene. I guess we talked about this when I first reached out to you for Warp: it might have been easier to present this radical music as 100% your own. Born of a semi-anonymous bedroom producer somewhere outside Chicago, but instead it’s all very embodied. You’re online. You’re in the comments. You chose a set of songs with lots of features. Why do you think that’s so important to you?
There wasn't any conscious intention to use a debut on Warp as an opportunity to collaborate. And I don’t think of it as collaboration as much as wanting certain people to provide a certain touch. This is a puzzle piece to complete my vision for the song. I am still that person alone, sitting behind a computer somewhere sucking on their weed pen with their mind in the DAW.
ON MYTHOLOGY
Fire-Toolz albums have their own internal cosmologies with recurring symbols, geometries, celestial objects and lore that accrues across records. You've described the discography as one long story still being written. What are the rules of that world? What can and can't exist inside a Fire-Toolz record?
I'll tell you what I've observed because it feels like observations and not stuff I’m deciding. I feel like this shit writes itself.
I let things come to me, and I don’t have to work hard to let them in. They’re always knocking. I might do some interpretation, and there are always some kind of limitations I’m dealing with, and I might tweak that thing that spontaneously landed, but I never feel like I'm sitting down and being like, “okay, I need some lore.” There's none of that.
Both the music making and the visual is this flowing call and response thing. Listening to the universe or my music or whatever. But not following instructions…
I had no idea the fire hydrant was going to become this recurring motif. My friend Faye made it the main attraction on one of my album covers. She was already familiar with my aesthetics, and my obsession with suburban iconography. We're both big Rush fans and so we both know that the red fire hydrant on bright green grass is on the front of Signals. I'm sure that Faye was was thinking “Angel's going to like this because, you know, it's Rush, and it has that mundane American suburbia thing going.”
I was like, wow, that really resonates. That feels good. It feels good to see this big, red, shiny, familiar, beautiful, nostalgic hydrant dominating the cover art of that EP. And then when my friend Gretchen made artwork for my next EP, she decided without me asking that she was going to go with the fire hydrant idea as well. It was her idea to carry that on. And when she did that, I was like, wait a minute. This is a thing. This is a Fire-Toolz thing now.
Gretchen made green slime come out of it. I didn't ask her to do that. And when I saw that, I was like, oh, this is evolving I guess. It immediately gave me beautiful feelings of nostalgia. it started to take on meaning. Oftentimes, symbols come before their meanings.
Yeah. I always cite the example of Michel Gondry putting robots in the Around The World video for Daft Punk. And the guys latch on to it and take the robots with them. That concept wasn’t 'decided' by the band. They see it and reuse it and give it meaning. So for you, the hydrants first appear as a reference to Rush, but because of the way they're rendered, they evoke Super Mario. And they start to leak slim and ooze, and we think what that could represent: I read it as a portal system running under suburbia. Weirdness plumbed into our homes. It can be profound.
It really does. It does become profound. The symbols start showing up in daily life for me. I see them in everything. They’re a fun way to talk about stuff. It’s kind of like a religion. But they are not the ultimate story or true reality. The hydrant and the slime relate to some of my inner emotional and mental experiences, and they relate to Internal Family Systems, which is a type of psychotherapy. And there's terminology associated with it that includes figures like firefighters, managers, and exiles.
Then I started to think of the green slime like emotional sludge, maybe even residue of trauma. And when it comes out of the fire hydrant, it's expressing itself out of dire need, or it's over-producing and overflowing all over the street, or through a gorgeous meadow. I've also talked about it in other songs as lava. It's how the universe formed over billions of years, things start to take shape, interact with one another, and change slowly.
THE SUBURBAN UNCANNY
There's something quietly violent about the art you make - not in the obvious black-metal sense, but your music sounds like the product of someone raised on the Weather Channel and nu-metal and Advaita Vedanta. It refuses the idea that taste requires editing. And there's inherent friction between these elements. Growing up, what were you surrounded by that you needed to escape? And what are you taking forward?
Um, okay. I'm trying to think of escaping. Escaping.
I don't know if I relate to the idea of escape aside from the act of recovery and relaxation, maybe staying safe from danger or discomfort. But I've never been one to want to dissociate from any kind of truth or anything real, whether it's awful or not. And maybe my refusal to do it is because of how horrible my experiences have been whenever I’ve tried to escape.
The things that I make are about presence. Presence actually helps ease the pain and make me feel safer. So this music is less about escape and more about exploiting the joys and beauty of life among the horror. I think that's always what I've done.
“AUDIENCE” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You've described your fans as genuinely strange: noise heads and jazz fusion devotees and screamo kids and Autechre fans all finding their way to the same record. That suggests something in the work is operating at a frequency that bypasses genre entirely. What do you think they're actually hearing? What's the thing underneath it all that seems to reach such different people?
People are picking up on the throughline. It might just be something that's felt. Something that can't be explained easily. I don’t mean to make it into something entirely mystical, but maybe it actually is. Several people have told me they aren’t even sure what to think, that they need time to process it all.
To me, your music sounds like the world sounds like. It is all these things. But what’s great is it's not just childish accelerationism. It’s not ‘flattening’ media, time and genre. If anything you make these different components brighter. And as a listener, you know there’s a real person and point of view behind this music.
When you watch a really good film there might be 100 different scenes and all these different characters that never meet, but it all feels connected. You can feel the world is logical and the themes of the film-maker carry through it all. The further you zoom out, the more coherent everything feels. There there might be like a collage element to a lot of it.
I don't think you make a collage actually. It's a mosaic.
Yeh it’s of the same planet. It might look like a lot of different things at first but if you see it from space, you know it immediately.
LAVENDER
If you had to distill the story of Lavender Networks down to a movie log line, what would it be? What is the Lavender Network?
It just feels like me. Here. Now. For right now... Each song looks different in my mind, they have different colors and shape and textures. They show up in my awareness almost immediately when I hear a sound, or feel a song.
That's interesting to me. I often think synesthesia is misdiagnosed in music press all the time because we’re musicians use computers with a colourful UX and they are all applying colour association to sound in the session. But that's different to what you've described for the record.
It’s automatic and it is very sculptural and visual because you're layering and fitting things together with sight and tactile experiences at play. It's funny, in the DAW I make my drums yellow, my vocals light blue. The guitar is always green. The bass always red. I don't fucking know why?
Returning to my first question about the very thin veil between your music and your life: the chair you are sat on right now is covered in a rainbow throw with all those colours on it. They are like blocks in the daw.
Totally. The chair only came in black and I hated it, so I hung the blanket on the back.
You literally sat within your song.