When I was exploring your website, my cis-white, boring-ass self nearly had a seizure. I lost my composure multiple times and began fading into a color coma before coming to and realizing I was still on the fire-toolz main page, staring at the cover of your latest release, Breeze. After mustering up the courage to have my white bread buttered and toasted, I listened to the album. What a fantastic mix of influences! I hear metal riffs galore, rock and blues, jazzy embellishments. I hear what sounds like ’90s sampledelic music—I like buying those sample CDs from record stores and listening to the music. At first it’s too much and I go into overload, but then I realize this must be how my one-and-a-half-year-old son felt when he experienced the grocery store cereal aisle for the first time.
Can you walk me through how you even begin to produce each track on this record? Is it a hodgepodge of recordings that you splice together and compile in editing, or do you complete each track at a time—like the way I eat dinner: finishing each food on the plate before moving on to the next item?
Often there are a number of songs in the works at one time. When an album is coming together, I find myself going into each song a thousand times until everything feels combed through and complete. It’s rare that I have a number of songs that aren’t being touched, and some that are. I mess with them all until the deadline. Not because I’m never satisfied! But because I like tweaking, adding and changing little things, tidying things up, sealing the package. It’s so much fun. For many artists, endless tweaking is a trap. For me, it’s a party, and very satisfying.
Which leads me to the answer to your first question. It’s kinda just…play and exploration. Until something starts to take shape. Then I start to implement a little more control and direction, still keeping a hugely open mind throughout the process. Visions take shape but they are all subject to morphing, depending on where my heart really needs to go. Where my heart needs to go might be influenced by another song, how it feels to breathe the outside air, or how I’m deathly afraid of dying before those who depend on me die. When I make music, it feels like I’m doing something really important, chipping away at the cure for diseases, or even just the cure for my own heartbreak. Or RELIEF from the intensity of my own joy. As I’ve let myself do things the way I want, rather than sticking too closely to conventions and processes, things have developed. They might be nonsensical in a lot of ways but I’m having fun.
In my opinion, music is a powerful tool. Like fire, it can burn its way into someone’s mind, torching their preconceived notions about the world and leaving a scarred landscape from which new life (and ideas) can flourish—hopefully more productive and balanced thoughts than what lived there before. Or music can serve as a flame that simply ignites someone’s passion for dancing to the powerful rhythms and melodies that inspire them to do so. From your song titles alone, it’s clear there’s humor, repetition, and an urgency and weight to the messaging.
I’m curious: how do you imagine wielding music as a fiery tool? Or am I completely off base with my analogy?
Oh yea. Humor, repetition, urgency, and weight. Those are definitely elements in my work. And they all come and go, show up in different ways, at different frequencies. But despite any humor elements, my work is extremely serious LOL. I laugh, because it’s absurd how seriously I take it. But what do you expect? The depths of one’s soul is always going to be pretty serious business. It doesn’t mean I’m sensitive about my music being mocked. I’m actually so serious about it, that I know it from multiple angles, and could easily make fun of it and tear it down just as much as I could try to explain how much it means to be between sobs.
The humor you find is just one of the colors I can paint serious stuff with. Humor is comforting, and it’s just one of the voices. Without it, my work would be inauthentic. With too much of it, it would be just as inauthentic. The urgency probably comes from both fear, passion, and the need for relief and lightness. The repetition is because I am the same soul that entered my body when I was born. It is the soul making tunes in 2026. It’s all just one big experience, one big life. And so things carry over. Certain ideas and concepts recur. Any time they show up again, I welcome them. I frequently call back to work I made 20 years ago. I occasionally sample it. I use some of the same melodies now as I did when I first picked up a guitar or pressed buttons on a keyboard. I still care about a lot of the same things. I don’t really care about keeping it fresh to some militant extent. I just want to keep it honest.
I’m not really trying to do or accomplish any of the things in your analogy, but that doesn’t mean those dimensions don’t exist in what I do. If anything, they are not conscious most of the time. I’m really just riding this wave I can’t get off of. If, in doing that, I’m torching preconceived notions, or fueling more balance, or igniting passion, then those things are just artifacts. Artifacts are the spice of life! Especially when it comes to art. The crumbs that drop on the floor when you eat. You could make some crazy dishes out of those.
But when I sit down to create, or when I think of my music, there’s no charity, no goal, just open gates and windows and doors through which all my bullshit can fly through and land somewhere. Of course, I have things to say with it all, but mostly because I simply need to say shit, or I’ll die.
I do think what I do can have a number of positive impacts on people and the world, though, depending on how it’s wielded or experienced.
The constant shifts (and fusions) between genres are something to behold. The colorful production is absolutely met by your visual art style: vibrant, harlequin, and harsh contrasts between wide-ranging color palettes. Everything about your art is bold. Some highlights in the tracklist for me are “Thin Neck Of The Woods,” with its fusion of glitchy electronics and fiery rock solos that erupt around the midsection, giving way again and again to propulsive rushes of distortion and, well, fire! That moment (and the album) is later followed (and concluded) by another personal favorite: “Removed From Everything & Everywhere,” which I’m in awe of for its sitcom-emotive piano playing, interspersed with heavy metal riffs, and then a bangin’ piano solo to close the show out—a real curtain-closing moment. Those are just a few moments I thoroughly enjoyed.
I’m curious how you decide how much to ramp up the intensity before fading or cutting to another riff or moment on the record? I’m sure it’s not a science, but I’m curious whether you have any perspective on it.
I’m very happy you enjoy those moments, specifically! Removed has a strong closer vibe, which is why I let myself elaborate quite a bit off the outro of that song with the “field recordings.” To really leave the listener in a place they deserve to be after putting themselves through the album.
It might be a science, but I’m not an expert in that science. I may be an expert in experiencing it, but my perspective about what’s going on is limited. I am sure there are perfectly reasonable neurological, biological, and spiritual explanations for how this stuff comes together. I do know that while working, I will have sudden uprisings of craving a particular sound, compositional shift, dynamic shift, or whatever. When it happens, if it resonates or makes me excited to imagine, I’ll try to implement it. If it feels good to listen back to, or if I feel like I manifested whatever was bubbling up inside or elsewhere effectively, then hooray!
You draw from a diverse mix of Buddhist, Christian, and Indian beliefs. Additionally, you’re someone who is non-binary and trans-femme. I’m sure this diversity of ideas and qualities about you makes your music and self-expression all the more intricate—but how does music interact with you?
In other words: how do these facts about who you are inform your thoughts behind the music and how it serves you in your personal life? Sorry; I didn’t want to get too heady with the final question, but there you are. 🙂
Heady is chill.
Though it’s not intentional, I think my spirituality and how I make music share some pretty glaring similarities. As far as spiritual traditions, I generally see most of them as different but equal paths up the same mountain to enlightenment, or God, or happiness, or whatever. Similarly, I see genres and elements of those genres in the same way. There is no real difference between Humanity’s Last Breath, Autechre, Alison Krauss, Mineral. It’s all joy, it’s all important, it’s all moving, it’s all interesting, it’s all insanely resonant.
Blending elements of different genres together at the same time, or even just having songs that explore different genres on the same unified collection of songs, is the most sensible and normal thing I can think of.