She’s the musician with many names. 

Angel Marcloid has produced music under more than 50 aliases and bands — including Toad Computers, Nonlocal Forecast and MindSpring Memories — to explore different projects without rules. She also runs Angel Hair Audio, a mixing and music production service. 

Producing under the alias Fire-Toolz, her main project, the Chicago area-based artist released her seven-track EP “I will not use the body’s eyes today.” on Tuesday. She said she doesn’t go wild with as many aliases anymore, though Marcloid’s vibrant, multi-genre music is nowhere near tame. The Daily spoke with Marcloid about her new EP and her experience as an artist. 

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

The Daily: What is different about this release? 

Marcloid: The songs on it are from a huge archive of unreleased songs, so all the songs are very different from each other, even more so than my other albums. If anything, they don’t go together at all. But that’s part of what I do, some clashing different things together.

The Daily: What does being a multi-genreist mean to you? 

Marcloid: I’m always everywhere genre-wise, and there’s really no reason why I shouldn’t just make whatever comes to mind whenever I’m feeling. “Soda Lake with Game Genie” is kind of like an ’80s, cheese vibe and all the keyboards are really beautiful and melodic, and there’s essentially a sax solo, but I’m screaming. I want to bring the aggressive metal style vocals into a totally different environment than what you would normally hear them in because that’s how I think and how I feel.

The Daily: What is something you want your listeners to get from your EP? 

Marcloid: Something I’ve talked about in the lyrics on this EP that is most important to me is probably feelings of abandonment, abandonment issues and how trauma can create those for people when that trauma hasn’t been healed. So “Soda Lake with Game Genie” is about that, which is funny because a Game Genie is a cartridge you put the game in that gives you a bunch of cheat codes so that you’re invincible and never die. Soda Lake on Super Mario is one of the hardest levels you can beat. It’s almost nearly impossible. 

The Daily: What does the title “I will not use the body’s eyes today.” mean? 

Marcloid: It’s basically talking about if your heart and your intuition had eyes, using them. It’s making a statement about logic versus heart or intuition. I really strive to have them balanced for myself. So it’s like saying I will use my intuition and my heart to get through his experience, like an affirmation.

The Daily: Why has Fire-Toolz become your flagship project? 

Marcloid: With Fire-Toolz, there are no rules. Most of my other projects have a loose genre limitation that I stick to, or some kind of theme. But Fire-Toolz is a catch-all container and a display. It’s like me if I turned myself into music. It’s a very important tool for me to explore my own world. Fire-Toolz is basically this sort of documentation of my spiritual and psychological evolution. I can only really write about my own experiences and what I’m going through, and all of that gets channeled into the music and it ends up in the artwork and kind of metaphorical ways, cryptic ways.

The Daily: How would you describe your visual style? 

Marcloid: I don’t stick to a style really, but I really just like rainbow puke — lots of strong colors, some abstract and surrealism in there. The more colorful things are, the better they feel, the more comfortable I am. I’m really just not into things that people would call tasteful.

The Daily: How would you say that rainbow puke style compares to your sonic style?

Marcloid: In the music, there are a lot of harsh sounds and things that sound aggressive. To me, the screaming and the harsh and heavy sounds — they sound like rainbows to me. It feels like colors. When I hear devastatingly heavy, harsh music, I feel really moved and emotional by it. It just sounds like rainbows and shapes and colors to me. 

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @karapeeler

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