#Nines is devoted if I had to chose between cat and a human I would stay with the cat

[fandom-necromancer]

1182. Please, don’t hurt me!

This was promted by the awesome @detroitbecomestickman! Hope it’s funny, I tried XD Enjoy!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900

Cats loved Nines and Nines loved cats. Gavin seemed to like cats too, given that his phone had hundreds of pictures of them saved although there was little to no space left for important data. As they moved in together, Nines had asked him whether he owned one, but Gavin had just shaken his head with regret and the android hadn’t asked further. He would have loved to have a pet, but if he had to choose between Gavin and a cat, the human won.

Most of his calculations ended that way. Being promoted to Lieutenant and move to another precinct or stay Gavin’s partner? Spending his time with maintenance or steal a few more minutes with his human? Allow his love to get harmed or catch the bullet for him? Easy decisions from Nines’ perspective and maybe even no decision at all. No, he would stay with Gavin forever. Solving mysteries, finding clues and chasing suspects through Detroit was something he loved nearly as much as his human, he thought, currently doing the latter. They ran through dark alleys, their feet disturbing puddles from the last rain, while the sound of cars from the next street followed them.

‘Damn, he’s fast!’, Gavin panted by his side, keeping up with the android. Nines wasn’t running at top speed, but given the nature of their suspect, it might be better to corner him together. He was extremely fast and agile, and Nines didn’t know if he could handle him himself. The criminal had managed to escape his cell completely on his own, running for his life as the duo began chasing him outside the building and down the stairs. ‘We could always call backup’, Nines offered, but only earned a sneer from the human: ‘Like hell we are. We wanted to beat Hank and Connor in this month’s arrests, don’t you remember?’ ‘Then I hope you still have some stamina left. Our suspect has climbed the fire escape of the next building.’ ‘Oh, you gotta be kidding me!’, Gavin practically whined. But as he followed the fugitive, Nines’ observation proved itself to be true. ‘Should I throw you?’ ‘Ugh. Anything to get that bastard.’ Nines nodded, swooping his human from his feet and throwing him at the fire escape before jumping himself. Gavin managed to climb up the remaining steps, the manoeuvre a common tactic by now. But instead of climbing to the roof, their suspect jumped from the platform to a near wall and down to street level on the other side again. ‘Damn parkour. Why couldn’t he just stop at “Freeze, DPD!”?’, Gavin complained, before following the fugitive. He was less elegant, but it got the job done. Nines followed him, but Gavin now had the lead and was close enough to take the chance. He leapt forwards and managed to pin their suspect to the ground.

‘Mreeoow!’ ‘You have the phcking right to remain silent!’ ‘Mreow!’

‘I don’t think he can understand the Miranda Rights, Gavin’, Nines commented, while his human got up to his feet the thrashing cat in his arms. ‘AH! Phck! Please, don’t hurt me! Phcking bastard kitty. We are just trying to get you back to your – ah, ah, achoo!’ Nines watched Gavin near losing his grip on the cat sneezing. ‘Back to your goddamn owner!’ He sniffed and his eyes were red. ‘You are allergic to cats!’, Nines finally noticed. ‘Yeah, tell me something I didn’t know!’, Gavin barked. ‘Just get that ca- achoo! Phck, take him!’ Nines hurried over and took the cat, trying to calm him down. Meanwhile Gavin took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘We should get back to Mrs. Gomez’, Nines said, and Gavin nodded, following the android and the cat in some distance.

‘Why is the human body so damn weak?’, Gavin complained, after they had given the cat back to their neighbour who had been about to take him to the vet for a check-up. One that was completely unnecessary in Gavin’s opinion. If a cat could unlock a transport box and sprint through half Detroit, near outrunning the top Detective of the DPD and the most advanced android ever created, he was fine. Now they were finally driving to work, bracing themselves to explain Fowler they were late because they had to chase a runaway housecat. ‘Cats are so cute, and I have to be horribly allergic to them!’ ‘Actually your body is quite strong’, Nines pointed out. ‘Just misfiring due to underutilisation of your immune system.’ ‘Yeah great. Makes me feel better immediately!’, Gavin spat. ‘I wanna cuddle a cat without dying, please.’ ‘You wouldn’t die. But it wouldn’t be pleasant.’ ‘Wow, toaster, you really aren’t helping.’ ‘The most common allergy against cats results from the protein Fel D1 in their saliva. A cat without that could be suitable to have as a pet if that is your type of allergy. There are eight different types of-‘ ‘Okay, Wikipedia, stop. You mean I don’t have to avoid cats all the time?’ Nines cocks his head. ‘There are breeds that you could be unaffected by.’ ‘You see? This is actually helping!’, Gavin smiled. ‘Let’s research that immediately after Fowler dissected us!’ ‘I don’t think he has any arguments to underline his statement. It is our duty as police officers to help the citizens of Detroit. We both returned one back to safety and helped Mrs. Gomez to be reunited with a missing family member.’ ‘It was a cat.’ ‘I don’t see your point’, Nines disagreed. ‘This could even be a successful detainment for our competition with the Andersons.’ ‘Okay, I’m all in. But you do the talking, you got the robot-brain.’

Nines sighed, as they walked through the bullpen. ‘Why do you only admit I’m the intelligent one when it’s saving your ass?’ ‘Come on babe. You can’t press the checkbox to prove you are not a robot…’ ‘I can! But I would lie to get access to-‘ ‘Let’s just agree we are both idiots, okay?’, Gavin interrupted, a loving smile on his lips. ‘Fine. I can live with that.’

#detroit become human #dbh #Reed900 #RK900 #Gavin Reed #How long has it been since I wrote from Nines' POV? Too long #allergies are the worst idea a body can get #well and autoimmune bullshit. #Androids again having an unfair advantage at life #Nines is devoted if I had to chose between cat and a human I would stay with the cat #Funny story my brother is allergic to horses so I am banished to the cellar with my sport clothes XD #Fuck allergies

[misedejem]

Asterisk Holder OC Bios

I’ve been meaning to write about my four asterisk holder OCs in some detail for a while, and after getting back into designing them, I decided to do so now.

Necromancer

The holder of the Necromancer asterisk is Corvusa Spectre, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from northern Harena. Her asterisk allows her to reanimate anything she has killed into a state of undead in order to help her fight.

She is distant, and incredibly secretive, hiding herself away in a hidden library she built in the Harena Sea Caves to conduct her research in peace. You would have to contend with an entire army of the undead and kill her in cold blood if you were to stand any chance of learning her abilities.

After losing everyone she cared about in the Great Plague, the former student of Black Magic in Al-Khampis turned to the forbidden art of necromancy in a desperate attempt to negate the effects of the pandemic.

Likes: Birds, really spicy food, ghost stories

Dislikes: Cats, murderers, fire

Oracle

The holder of the Oracle asterisk is Divinia Parnassus, a thirty-two-year-old woman from the city of Florem. Her asterisk allows her to predict the future and plan out pre-emptive strikes with a divine gift some say is from the Celestial Realm.

She is strict yet fair, but her inability to gauge the emotional weight in a room often makes her come across as nastier than she actually is. She is fiercely devoted to her comrades and to her job, and would do anything to make them realise their full potential.

Divinia runs the Florem Mercenary Guild, using her uncanny ability to see the future to effectively pose as a fortune teller to conceal her true identity as the Oracle. She is responsible for the jobs of several of the world’s best mercenaries, such as Ciggma Khint, Angelo Panettone, and Aimee Matchlock. 

Likes: Warm cookies, interior design, board games

Dislikes: Being disbelieved, remarks on her hair, Nobutsuna Kamiizumi

Geomancer

The holder of the Geomancer asterisk is Luv Gaia, a twenty-year-old woman from Eternia. She can bend the very ground she walks on to her will, both assaulting her foes and protecting her own skin.

Optimistic and bubbly, she can boost the morale of a room just by talking. Calm even in the face of danger, some people find her positive attitude rather jarring and even a little bit frightening, but in dangerous situations her level-headedness can mean the difference between life and death.

Now a research scientist for the duchy of Eternia, Luv pursued the rare form of magic known as Geomancy - the ability to control the terrain through the power of the crystals - after being inspired by her scientist parents’ careers.

Likes: Hugs, hot chocolate, crime novels

Dislikes: Vanity, isolation, insects

Inventor

The holder of the Inventor asterisk is Elektrus Clare Magnus, a technically twenty-four-year-old man from the Eisen region. He employs gadgets and devices to assist him in small increments over the course of battle.

He appears to be confident and outgoing , which he uses as a ruse to hide the fact that he has no idea what he is doing with his life and that if he was taken out of his comfort zone of mechanical prowess, he would likely cease to function.

From Altair’s era, Elektrus was cryogenically frozen to protect precious research materials in case of mass destruction. He was accidentally awoken during the ducal-orthodox war by the Swordbearers, and eventually ended up in Anchiem as a famous master mechanic known lovingly as Eclare - regardless of whether he wanted to be or not. 

Likes: Yunohana sashimi, the smell of motor oil, pranking people

Dislikes: Slang, creative lulls, cold weather

Full backstories under the cut (slight B2nd spoilers):

Corvusa 

At age eleven, her skills in magic were recognised and she was sent to study in the Land of Learning, Al-Khampis. She became especially adept in black magic, and chose to specialise her research within that field. Her five-stars, gained through dedication and academic brilliancy, gained her access to the restricted sections of the libraries, where she developed her research into black magic further, discovering not only more advanced applications of it, but more horrendous magic as well; things such as alchemical genesis, ritualism and the biggest taboo of them all: necromancy. She vowed then that all her research into this dark side of her specialty would be purely hypothetical.

Four years after she started her research, the Great Plague swept across Luxendarc, wiping out the village where she grew up. Al-Khampis was not a port town, and caught wind of the pandemic quickly, so was able to enact a quarantine before anybody within the city fell ill. There were still students of the university among the dead though – those who had travelled abroad for research purposes – many of whom Corvusa had befriended in her time there. The surviving students and staff began to dedicate themselves to finding a cure, and Corvusa found herself turning to the forbidden magic she had sworn to never actually use in the hopes of finding an answer.

She spent seven years attempting alchemical genesis in the hopes that she could develop a human immune to the plague, trying everything she could, and even but to no avail. That was when she turned to a world half dead and it dawned on her that there was no way to protect the living. Instead, she would simply have to save those who were already dead, even if it meant committing the ultimate taboo. After several more years, enhancing her abilities with a catalyst known as an asterisk, she had finally succeeded.

Divinia

Divinia grew up in a Crystalist household on the outskirts of Florem, where her mother ran the biggest mercenary guild in the country. A bad injury left her unable to take bounties herself, so instead she produced weapons and armoury for the people working under her, but from a young age it was common knowledge that the smithy would die with her. Her daughter, Divinia, was blessed with a gift to predict the future – something that was not unheard of, but that was certainly a rarity – and nobody saw any point in the child learning to forge weapons with an ability like that.

When her mother passed away from an illness when Divinia was eighteen, while she did inherit the role as guildmaster, she began to pose as a typical fortune teller to hide away her business’ true intentions from the general public. Nobody outside of the guild - besides a man named Sage Yulyana who had given her a precious stone to increase the probabilities of her predictions after hearing of her skills - would ever know that the famed mercenary known as the Oracle was the same girl who set up a stall in the marketplace every Sunday and gave people their fortunes as entertainment.

The year after she became guildmaster, one of the best mercenaries in the business and a close friend of Divinia’s announced that she was going into semi-retirement, a few days after the suicide of a famous singer with whom she had been close to. The mercenary, dubbed the Confectioner, had taken in the son of the singer after the Orthodoxy had refused to, and chose to work from home instead of taking on missions anymore in order to look after the boy, who would eventually grow up to be the Glanz Empire’s holder of the Patissier asterisk, Angelo Panettone. Divinia spent the next four years berating her for this, annoyed that such an impressive combatant would give up so easily.

The last time she ever saw her was three years after she took the boy in, wherein the two women had an argument that resulted in the Confectioner retiring for good. A year later, she was tracked down and murdered by Swordmaster Kamiizumi, after the Black Blades had received word that their officials were being targeted by the mercenary guild. They had not been informed of the Confectioner’s retirement. Overcome with guilt over her friend’s unlawful death, Divinia developed a vendetta against the duchy and returned to the bakery where she was killed to rescue her adoptive son. Instead of saving him, for reasons she did not understand, she ended up recruiting him as the Confectioner’s successor and trained him as a student in the hopes that one day, he would help her take down Kamiizumi for what he did.

Divinia spent the next nine years of her life balancing fighting the duchy in her own, subtle ways, running the guild, and raising a teenage boy as her student, and eventually Aimee Matchlock as well after Angelo brought her, half dead, back to the guild following an attack from the Bloodrose Legion that had also killed most of the guild’s elites. In this time, Divinia made an enemy of another famed mercenary, the Spell Fencer Ciggma Khint, after he took a job serving the duchy’s second division under an Eternian officer and began aggressively terminating, (both literally and in a business sense) any of her employees who went to join him. Shortly after the duchy’s initial defeat at the hands of the Wind Vestal, Angelo had a complete mental breakdown and left the guild to work solo, Aimee insisting on going with him. With half the guild dead, serving the duchy, or absconded, Divinia fell into a depression and was convinced by the remaining guildmembers to take a break from her work, which she kept up until a year following the events of Bravely Second, when the Venus sisters turned up on her doorstep her to return to her post to oversee the restoration of Florem. Shortly after she agreed, once the sisters had explained how DeRosa had drugged his soldiers so they would commit atrocities, Aimee returned to the guild with Angelo, grievously wounded, to apologise for what they had done. She forgave them, and came to be something of a grandmother figure in their family as the years went on, and she remained at the head of the guild, protecting Florem until her dying day.

Luv

Luv’s mother was a magic instructor in Al-Khampis, and her father was a geographer from Eternia. For the first three years of her life, she lived with her father alone in Eternia, only seeing her mother during the summer break. As part of Doctor Vincent S. Court’s research team, Luv’s mother eventually travelled to Eternia following the reconquest, and began to work for the duchy instead.

Luv grew up reading her mother’s old books on magic and hearing stories from her father about his research. She became fascinated with the crystals, and how they shaped Luxendarc into the world she lived in. How the earth crystal encased her home in mountains, how the water crystal kept Florem lush, how the wind crystal powered Harena, and how the fire crystal provided the fertile, volcanic soil and famed hot springs that fuelled Eisenberg. In her mother’s research, she learned of Geomancy, a magic that drew upon the properties of the crystals that caused landforms and allowed the user to control the terrain themselves. It was still an experimental form of magic, being developed by an aging professor at Al-Khampis, but Luv was determined to learn it. Her parents, delighted at their daughter’s enthusiasm for both their fields, appealed to the professor to take her on as an apprentice, and at age ten, she began her career at the school studying Geomancy under him.

Luv spent the next five years of her life travelling all across the world with her mentor, learning how the crystals affected each aspect of nature and channelling it through their bodies to produce magic of their own.  The magic soon became too much for the old man’s body to handle, so he gave up attempting the spells on his own and became entirely reliant on his student to master Geomancy in his stead. But while she managed to have an effect on the terrain, it was not nearly as impressive as she would have hoped. A mysterious old man caught wind of what the two of them were doing, and taking advantage of their disappointment, offered Luv a strange hunk of crystal he called an ‘asterisk’, promising that it would help amplify her abilities. Much to her surprise, this was exactly the case.

A few months after the fall of the duchy, Luv graduated Al-Khampis with five stars and returned home to continue practising Geomancy. She turned down a position in the Templar’s army to use her abilities for military purposes, and instead chose to assist the researchers there, her parents included, by giving them the information she had learned about the crystals in her studies.

Elektrus

After the spacetime compass was stolen, inventors all over Luxendarc became increasingly protective of their work, and took major precautions to ensure that it would not meet the same fate. Part of these preparations involved storing away copies of research notes and devices in various sealed facilities, as well as cryogenically freezing a member of the research team along with them, so that if there was a catastrophic disaster on the level of an apocalypse, the scientific innovations of the current era would not be lost forever. This person selected to undergo this process, selected at random, was Elektrus.

Centuries later, during the civil war in Eisenberg, some of the Swordbearers’ canary boys were digging in the mythril mines when they suddenly came across a metal pod encased in the earth. The soldiers on duty proceeded to investigate, and discovered the ancient research notes, as well as Elektrus. He was carried back to Yunohana, which sided with the Swordbearers in the war, and released from his frozen state, before being nursed to full health by the medics there.

After a few weeks recovering, he began to return to his senses and recall his purpose from before he had been frozen. He presumed that he had been unfrozen because of the current ducal-orthodox war and agreed to help the people who had found him by providing them with his knowledge on ancient robotics, and he began to develop weapons for them. Even though he didn’t necessarily agree with their methods of war, he didn’t know where he was, or anything about modern Luxendarc, and he decided that it was probably safer to stay on their side rather than to try and explain his predicament to people who hadn’t found him.

After the war, he came to realise that perhaps he hadn’t woken up in the apocalypse like he had thought, and like he was supposed to have done, which left him feeling out of place and purposeless. He had heard from the Black Blade officers that much of their weaponry and machinery had come from a place called ‘Ancheim’, and in a desperate attempt to find something he would actually understand in this world, he began to try and make his way there. Upon arriving, almost a year and several accidental detours later, he found himself stuck in a manual labour job pushing gears to power the Grand Mill Works. A man there recognised one of the souvenirs he had picked up in his travels – a strange orange crystal given to him by an old man – and put him in touch with a woman named Mephilia Venus who informed him that he had become an asterisk holder, while giggling at his naïveté and utter bewilderment. He learned from her that the asterisk had been produced by her master, and that it would enhance whatever special skills he possessed – namely the speed and accuracy with which he could built his creations.

Back in Ancheim, his newfound skills caught on, as did his strange backstory, and while many celebrated mechanics in the city thought he was a fraud, those who believed him formed a sort of following. Within a year, he developed some knowledge of Harenan culture (the country hadn’t even existed in his day, so he thought a little knowledge was rather impressive), his own company, and the unfortunate pet-name ‘Eclare’ when people decided it sounded better than his old-fashioned real name. He still didn’t really know what was going on, but he moved that as long as he was doing what he knew how to do, he would probably be fine.

#bravely default #bravely second #misede's ocs

[fire-toolz]

This Nonlocal Forecast Mix Offers Smooth Jazz Fit for Tears and Bong Rips

The Chicago-based artist best known as Fire-Toolz shares a mix of sounds from the world of her proggy computer jazz record ‘Bubble Universe!’


The Weather Channel isn’t really designed to be watched actively. It was part of the fabric of my Florida upbringing, a constant presence amid the stressful storm prep that accompanied hurricane season every year. As cyclones inched closer to our part of the state, my sisters and I would play board games with it on in the background. Some poor man in a poncho holding a microphone would be getting blown down the street in Boca Raton as our parents mulled whether or not this was a natural disaster worth fleeing the Tampa suburbs over.

That went for their musical direction as well. During their local weather segments, the station programmed these beautifully chintzy jazz tracks, borderline muzak so distinctive to the station that they began selling compilations of it. Those compilations don’t really hold up all that well, but there’s this memory in my head of emotionally layered and unrelentingly uplifting music that accompanied these segments. It’s probably some construction of nostalgia for simpler times, when even something as grave as a natural disaster was part of the background noise of childhood. But I feel an affection for the spirit of music like this nevertheless, all these years later.

A tape released earlier this year by Angel Marcloid—a Chicago-based musician who’s best known under the moniker Fire-Toolz—proves I’m not alone. The name she chose for the project, Nonlocal Forecast, is telling of its sonic motivations. In an interview with The Wire this week, she said that she too grew up with The Weather Channel as part of the background of her home environment, which developed into a genuine love of these sorts of sounds—emotional, swooning, and dramatic as they are. “I didn’t really end up finding out the names and faces until years later when the classic Weather Channel website popped up and nostalgic fans would upload recordings of old forecasts,” she told The Wire. “I remember back in maybe 2011-2012 scouring that website and writing down every single name.”

Bubble Universe!, the tape that resulted from her years of appreciating these sax-laden mood-setters, is a fair bit stranger than Weather Channel jazz compilations. Marcloid, who grew up a drummer, consciously evokes proggy rhythmic contortions and computer music editing trickier to create a surreal version of the sounds that one might hear on Local on the 8s. It’s sort of like when a digital TV broadcast glitches out and blurs things up a bit. You can still tell there’s a meteorologist on screen, but the colors are a little more vivid—the boundaries a little more jagged and twisted.

It’s a wonderfully strange record, and today, she’s offering another peek into her love for this music with a mix of fusion-y new age sounds. It’s beautiful, sweeping stuff, that Marcloid says should be fitting for just about any pleasant activity you can imagine doing, including, but not limited to: staring out of a window, crying, and taking bong rips. Listen below alongside an interview with Marcloid about the project.

NOISEY: How are we meant to enjoy the mix? What’s the perfect setting?


Nonlocal Forecast: Although this mix is generally uplifting, it’s an emotional roller coaster for me. For some reason the first song makes me cry every time I hear it so I can’t listen to it at work. But then other songs are pretty adventurous. Track 2 makes me see lightning. In my world, it’s the perfect accompaniment to whatever you love doing the most. Sitting by yourself and listening to a light rain shower beating against your window. A windy chilly walk through a meadow where the sun is warming your skin. Driving through the desert. Floating in space. Sucking down bongs in your room with a nice pair of headphones on and a cat in your lap.

Was there any specific concept to the mix?


I have a lot of music, and I acquire a lot at once. I throw it all on shuffle. Songs will stick out like sore thumbs, so I drag them to a folder. This process leads to getting lost in full albums of course, but this folder of songs just becomes so fucking charged. I took songs from that folder.

Do you have a favorite moment on this mix?


Perhaps the violin solo build-up in Jerry Goodman’s “I Hate You.” My least favorite moment however, is when Goodman chose a name for the song.

Is synesthesia a real thing? If so, what color is this mix?


My experience is that I see shapes, textures, colors and shades, emotional qualities, sentiments and values, recollections of past experiences, all sort of molded together in one matrix. It’s quite a rainbow of things if I look at the mix linearly. As a whole, it’s warm, glowing, glassy, full of green growth, completely safe, watery and flowing, cushy and fluffy, soft but refined. Blankets, rivers, lens flares, stuffed animals, wide open night skies, cats purring, maybe a little facing traumas with LSD as an aid.

When we chatted about the last Fire-Toolz release we talked about the function the more peaceful moments served on that record. What does it mean to you to do a record like Bubble Universe! that’s more consistently focused on that sort of headspace?


That album flowed out of me so quickly and easily. I felt an effortless flow and peace putting it together. The drive to create was because I had just finished my next Fire-Toolz album and felt a strong momentum to keep going. Writing Bubble Universe! I felt no need to be hyper-focused on the compositional detail I put into Fire-Toolz productions. I guess to some people Fire-Toolz sounds like a mess while Nonlocal Forecast might sound meticulous and intricate in comparison. Screenshots of the programs I use would convince you otherwise. I felt like I made no conscious decision in composing this record besides deciding what preset to start with. Play a chord, next preset, play a chord, next preset. Next thing you know I had a full length. No second thoughts, no months of going back and forth and tweaking like I do with any given Fire-Toolz track.

I know I’ve seen you post tracks on Twitter before that are kind of like this mix and sound a bit like the stuff you’ve done on the Nonlocal Forecast record. Do you, as your name implies, have specific memories about hearing this stuff on the Weather Channel?


The name Nonlocal Forecast has a double meaning. It is a reference to classic Weather Channel vibes, but it is also (and mostly) a reference to the phenomenon of Quantum Nonlocality, and viewing it through the lenses of both ancient spiritual wisdom and cutting edge physics.

I didn’t have this idea to make a record that intentionally ~channels~ the sounds of 80s and 90s new age, jazz fusion, and easy listening. Nor did I have the idea to adopt a Weather Channel theme. I just wanted to make some music and this is what came out organically and naturally. Probably because I haven’t listened to much of any other genres in the past several years.

As a listener, what specifically catches your ear in songs like these?


There are melodies or chord progressions that will emerge out of these songs that stop me dead in my tracks. It’s what makes me drag them to my favorites folder. I really love the saxophone as a melody instrument, but somehow a lot of guitars and violins wound up on this mix to fill that role. Sonically, it’s all about the spaciousness, that unapologetically saccharine lead, and the timbre of popular 80s digital synthesizers and MIDI instruments. Put them all together with some jazzy chords and I’m drooling or crying.

Ninety-nine percent of the synth sounds on the Nonlocal album come from VST’s of the Korg M1 and Wavestation, and those instruments are scattered throughout the mix and staples of 80s music in general. I was definitely able to translate vastness, oneness, peace, vivid color, observing the beauty of weather patterns, inner-eye gazing into natural micro/macroscopic marvels, experiencing humanity as a single being. However I am nowhere near the jazz geniuses some of these artists are, and I couldn’t possibly have come up with their melodies and progressions if I tried. I’m coming at jazz fusion from a terribly unseasoned perspective. I’ve no legit jazz background. The Weather Channel raised me, but I was playing metal, punk, emo, noise. I rejected Tony Williams and Buddy Rich and embraced Chad Sexton and Mike Portnoy instead. Yes, Chad Sexton, and that gorgeous-sounding snare drum of his.

New age music sits at this interesting boundary between being functional music (whether for meditation or commerce) and like vaguely spiritual practice. Does any of this inform the way you listen or approach making music like this? What aspects of the packaging—for lack of a better word—of this stuff do you feel resonates with your approach?


For some artists making new age music, spiritual or nature-themed track titles and artwork was a marketing trend. But for many others, they felt personally drawn to nature, relaxation, simple beauties and pleasures, presence and awareness, love and devotion. Often this music would be specifically presented as an assistant to a spiritual practice from a mystical and contemplative tradition. I think things like nature, relaxation, and spirituality are tight as hell. So naturally this music meshes well with my interests and passions. However my love for the music came long before I uncovered an unquenchable thirst for understanding the nature of reality and experiencing higher vibrations.

It’s all extremely functional music to me. It doesn’t blend into the background. It’s not shallow or plastic. It has a significant personality and value. Even the most bland, directionless sax solo over the most generic 80s electro-pop tune has an emotional depth and safe harbor to it that I could never finagle language to describe.

So this being a pretty focused genre-exercise, do you have any more projects like this kicking around your head? Are there other new directions you want to pursue outside of the Fire-Toolz stuff?


I didn’t even want to do a new project at first. I felt completely fulfilled with Fire-Toolz and MindSpring Memories because I can do anything I want with Fire-Toolz and it still sounds like Fire-Toolz, and I can use songs I already love as my toolkit with MindSpring Memories. Nonlocal Forecast happened because that emotionally intuitive creative stream was flowing, and I was whining to Max from Hausu Mountain about how annoying it is trying not to get too backed up with new Fire-Toolz material. At the time I wouldn’t have a new LP out for another year and I was in raging MIDI mode, ready to translate insights into rectangles on a grid. I sent him some songs I was working on that were originally intended to be a new direction for Fire-Toolz. He told me to just pick a different moniker, forget the vocals as to separate it further from Fire-Toolz, and they’d release an album of it. Two months later Bubble Universe! was fully produced and mixed. I felt like I had just taken a big pee. All over Max.

There are a lot of sounds that I haven’t explored enough. New age ambient ska with death vocals and mixer feedback maybe? No new monikers, though. Exploring new things is what Fire-Toolz albums are for.

Tracklist: 0:00:00 Fowler & Branca - Etched In Stone (Etched In Stone, Silver Wave Records, 1993) 
0:04:40 Brian Bromberg - Sedona (Brian Bromberg, Nova Records, 1993)
 0:11:00 Jerry Goodman - I Hate You (It’s Alive, Private Music, 1987) 
0:15:54 Tom Grant - Journey Within (The View From Here, Polygram, 1993)
0:21:04 Doug Cameron - Vertigo (Passion Suite, Spindletop, 1987) 
0:24:32 Tom Scott - Water Colors (Flashpoint, GRP, 1988) 
0:29:47 Checkfield - Live At Five (Through The Lens, American Gramaphone, 1988)
 0:34:34 Christophe Franke - Black Garden View (Pacific Coast Highway, Virgin, 1991)
 0:39:13 Trammel Starks - Old Town (Gentle Storms, Intersound, 1995)
 0:43:48 Victor Biglione - Za-Tum (Baleia Azul, WEA, 1987) 
0:49:00 Dancing Fantasy - Happy Harry (California Grooves, Innovative Communication, 1991)
 0:53:16 Allan Holdsworth - Dodgy Boat (Wardenclyffe Tower, Restless, 1992) 
0:58:42 Maxxess - Castle On The Mountain (Landscapes [1990-1995], Klangdesign, 2011)