Eternal Home [Instrumentals] [CD]

Over the past two decades, producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has willed a vast ecosystem of music into existence at a rate that somehow seems to intensify as time goes on. Various solo monikers, collaborations, and band memberships stand as monuments in the landscape, focusing in on certain styles associated with each project — the Weather Channel jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast, or the hazy vapor nostalgia of Mindspring Memories, to give a few of many examples. The music of Marcloid’s flagship project Fire-Toolz sits as the bottomless pit in the center of the lush environment, drawing ideas and signifiers from all corners into its depths.

While Eternal Home maintains Fire-Toolz’s role as the outlet for Marcloid’s most overloaded and audacious compositional gambits, Eternal Home [Instrumentals] enters the catalog as the album’s illuminating companion piece. Shorn of Marcloid’s vocal components, the album takes on a new sheen as it highlights the sheer level of detail present in each meticulously sculpted production. Compositional elements that were previously elided in the context of the full vocal album suddenly shine in all their bewildering complexity. Stripped of the shrieks and the clean-toned vocal melodies that supplied the hooks within each track, Eternal Home [Instrumentals] plants Marcloid’s opus a few steps further away from what could be considered pop-adjacent music and situates the album closer to an all-encompassing epic of progressive electronic recombination and unfettered experimentation.