Vapor Talks #7: MindSpring Memories
An interview with underground music icon Angel Marcloid
When I started this interview series, I drafted a wishlist of artists to speak to.
One of the first names I wrote down was Angel Marcloid.
In the last 15 years, the composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist has been making some of the wildest experimental noise music under the name Fire-Toolz. As MindSpring Memories (and Toad Computers), she’s also been a vital force in the vaporwave scene since the mid-2010s.
Angel Faye Marcloid is a self-proclaimed homebody who grew up in Maryland and now lives in a small town an hour outside of Chicago with her wife, dog and a bunch of cats.
Angel identifies as non-binary and trans femme. Like most people with ADHD, she’s engaging in a wide array of creative endeavours, from playing various instruments to music engineering (which she does for a living) and what she cheekily describes as “graphic-design-is-my-passion”.
In her spare time, she occupies herself with religious and philosophical studies that range from Vedanta and Buddhism to Christian mysticism and New Age spirituality.
On a cold winter morning, I spoke to Angel about her roots in noise music, her pioneering role in the vaporwave scene and the hot topic of the day, the use of generative AI in music. (Spoiler alert: She’s not into AI music – except for early Megadeth songs with James Hetfield vocals.)
What kind of music did you like in your teenage years?
I was born in ‘84, so 80s and 90s music has always been really important and emotional to me, even stuff I wasn’t listening to intentionally, stuff that was just in movies and commercials, in the elevator, on the weather channel or news broadcast – just that sound, the sort of 80s fusion of pop and jazz and funk and electronic music and New Age, that really soaked into my brain and has influenced everything I’ve ever done in some way.
I was also raised on arena rock and AOR [adult-oriented rock], just this keyboard-heavy, melodic hard rock with a lot of guitar solos. I don’t sample a whole lot of it in my vaporwave material, because frankly, it’s just harder to work with mixing-wise. But I’d say my vaporwave influences mainly came from childhood and the resurgence of interest in that style of music in my late 20s and early 30s, when I started to get back into figuring out all those bands that I used to listen to, trying to track ID all of the background music I liked and finding the composers of the soundtracks to all the movies I liked.
You started musical training quite early and played in bands even before entering your teens. When did you actually start producing music on a computer?
I got into electronica back in the 1990s, staying up late watching MTV, discovering Orbital, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Underworld, Chicane, Juno Reactor… and I also got really into Nine Inch Nails. That noisy and distorted version of electronic music was fascinating to me. My parents were very supportive of my music career, but they didn’t really like the electronic stuff. They made sure I had a nice guitar to play and my drum set wasn’t a piece of crap, but when I wanted to get turntables and samplers, they discouraged that – for one, they didn’t want to hear scratching, which I understand, but also partially because it was more expensive – and probably partially because they didn’t really like that kind of music.
We did have a computer though, and there was some kind of wave editor that came with Windows, where you could see the waveform and chop it up. So I would load songs off Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral into that wave editor and slow things down or speed them up, chop them up and rearrange them. All of my loop points were choppy, because I was new at this, but I would zoom really close into the waveform and try to figure out where to paste the piece. It was chopping and screwing before I even knew what that was.
That was my first electronic music, and then there’s probably 10 or more years of playing guitars and drums in bands. When I finally got a Mac in the late 2000s, GarageBand came for free with it, so I just started messing with it, just recording acoustic singer-songwriter stuff with some experimental touches. Then I started getting into MIDI, and my first real electronic music project was called Power Windoze. I made a couple of albums under that name.
Can you remember when you first heard the term vaporwave, and how you discovered this type of music?
Yeah, in the early 2010s, I started to see this uprising of a certain type of internet art that I really liked. It would tap into 80s and 90s aesthetics, and there would be music that would come along with it. The terms net art and seapunk were really tied together for me. I moved to Chicago from Maryland around that time, and I was just immersed in all of these weirdos, their art and their music. There’s plenty of experimental music in Maryland, but coming to Chicago, it was really immersive, when it came to underground art or music.
Seapunk had started being a thing in Chicago with people like Ultrademon and this electronic group called The-Drum, who were making MIDI electronic music, but it was very tied in with aesthetics that we would associate with vaporwave now – maybe a little bit more aquatic because it was seapunk, but still very adjacent. When I first heard the term vaporwave, I thought it was just a stupid word for that kind of music, the seapunk stuff, almost a synonym.
Then I discovered Telepath, and I was like, “Oh God, I know these songs he’s sampling. I remember these from my childhood, from staying home from school on snow days and listening to the weather channel.” I went sample-hunting and finally figured out more about what vaporwave was, learned about why it’s even called that. At first I thought it was just a dumb and fun name referring to the sound of the music. But when I discovered its roots in the term vaporware, that was really exciting, because I loved vintage computer aesthetics as well.
It makes sense you were interested in the visual aspect. You even had a little graphic design company making merch for metal bands, didn’t you?
That was way before vaporwave, in the mid-2000s. But when I started getting into vaporwave, I felt the style of art that I was best at, I could finally start doing it right. When I was making shirt designs for metalcore bands, I was decent at it, but I was really trying to fit what they were going for. And with vaporwave aesthetics, I could just go crazy with my graphic-design-is-my-passion and drop shadows and rainbow gradients, because that’s what naturally wants to come out of me, and in vaporwave-adjacent scenes like net art and the nostalgic electronic music sphere, that kind of artwork works fine.
Before discovering Telepath, did you listen to any of the early vaporwave stuff?
Well, I was really into Oneohtrix Point Never, when he was just cutting DIY releases with small labels, doing synth drone and ambient. And I knew who James Ferraro was from his super lo-fi stuff, but I considered him a noise artist. I was way into noise when I started getting into vaporwave, and I had a bunch of his stuff, but I didn’t know about Far Side Virtual, and I didn’t know about Chuck Person either until later, until after I heard Telepath.
Did you try to figure out what Telepath was doing?
I knew instantly what he was doing. I know what processing sounds like. I did find the barberpole phaser sound bewildering, because I hadn’t heard at the time of a phaser plug-in or pedal of that particular type, and I knew that was his signature slushwave sound. I’ve always stayed away from that type of phaser, just to set myself apart a little bit. But I listened to his stuff and I could tell exactly what was happening. I could tell that a lot of them were VHS rips from YouTube. I could tell it was slowed down. I understood what he was doing with delay and phaser and reverb.
One day I was just pretty much like, “Okay, I’m gonna do this.” I sat down, found a Billy Ocean song and tried it, and I didn’t like the result, so I stopped. A couple days later, I tried again with a Kenny G song, “Songbird”, and that ended up on my first album as MindSpring Memories.
Which came out in December 2014. There was so much going on that year, so many new vaporwave releases and artists. Did you follow the scene at the time?
I followed it all, I was a really big nerd about it at first. Everything felt so faceless and anonymous and scattered around. Vaporwave was still underground and rare in a way that excited me – and I have no issue whatsoever with it being more popular now, I think it should keep getting more and more popular – but there is something about discovering a niche underground thing where you have to do research to find stuff. Now that it’s so big, it doesn’t feel like hunting for weird stuff anymore. It’s just everywhere, and that’s fine, but at first it was really fun. I would just type in ‘vaporwave’ on Bandcamp, and weird stuff would pop up, and it would be really exciting. No one would respond to my message, and no one’s name was anywhere. I loved that.
I remember MindSpring Memories being more of an anonymous project at first as well. Was that on purpose?
Not really. But when I first started doing vaporwave, it was so disconnected from the scenes I’ve been a part of before. Like I said, I was knee-deep in the noise scene, but I grew up playing in punk- and hardcore-adjacent bands, a lot of early emo and screamo stuff, so when I got into vaporwave, I didn’t think anybody would give a shit about it or like it in any way. I didn’t try to make it like “Angel’s vaporwave project” – I didn’t want to cross-promote. Any facelessness that was part of MindSpring at first was just me not caring about crediting myself too obviously. Now I just don’t give a shit, and I will just cross-promote everything with everything, because to me, it’s all just good music and art.
How did you actually go about setting up your slush effects chain?
Well, for a long time I didn’t really have one. I would just build it per song. It would have been more effective if I’d had more of a go-to chain, I guess, but I just always liked to mix it up, change it up. On some songs it’s just several different kinds of reverb, and no delay happening. Sometimes the delay repeats are pitched up an octave, which is a cool trick I like to use. Proud to say Desert Sand has started trying that too. And I’ve always been a huge fan of intense watery modulation, just coming from the 80s. Most people, they hear a flanger and it’s already a meme. But for me, I just love making things blurry, so I use a lot of flanger and phaser as well. Some songs are so drenched in 10 different delays going at different speeds that it just sounds like a cloud. One thing I always rely on though is the Logic stock phaser – that’s my go-to phaser, it’s on almost all MindSpring Memories songs.
What’s your process of finding and selecting the right samples?
I go for stuff that sounds beautiful and emotional to me when I listen to it in its original form. I don’t just sample stuff because it sounds cool slowed down. I don’t go for the cool beats or the stuff that’s funky or energetic. I want to take parts that already sound moody, and then make it way more so by slowing it down, adding all this ambience to it. It’s like turning it into a new song by exaggerating all of the sentimentalness that might have already been there. The majority of the songs that I’ve sampled are from smooth jazz, mostly sax-centric albums. I go for sax that sounds like crying, and then I make it cry more. Sometimes there’s a song that’s not super awesome, but the intro or the bridge is perfect, so I’ll just take that part and make a whole song out of that. I just go for stuff that makes me feel something. That’s why MindSpring Memories has such an emotional sound to it.
“I go for sax that sounds like crying, and then I make it cry more.”
How much influence did vaporwave have on your main musical project Fire-Toolz?
It definitely had an impact, because the stuff I was sampling in MindSpring Memories is all music that I listen to anyway, and all the music I listen to anyway influences Fire-Toolz. It has a lot of jazz fusion in it, it has a lot of 80s sounds in it, a lot of sax and guitar solos. But Fire-Toolz is not inspired by vaporwave – it’s inspired by the stuff that people use to make vaporwave. Early Fire-Toolz stuff actually had legit slushwave sections in the songs once in a while though, and honestly, blame my ADHD, but I just forgot about doing that, and now that I’m thinking about it I’m like, “Fuck, I need to put some more slushwave in Fire-Toolz.” I don’t know why I stopped doing that, so I’m glad you brought it up.
Which are your favorite MindSpring albums from that early period that represent that stage really well?
The clouds and snowflakes one, that’s what I call it. The title is just cloud and snowflake emojis. I feel like I built a very specific universe with that one. There’s definitely something special about that, and I think that other people could sense that as well, because it’s been re-released on three or four different labels at this point. That one really feels like childhood at home, cozy and comfy, playing in my backyard or watching TV in the living room.
My first one, I didn’t exactly know what I was doing but I really like that about it. It sounds like an artifact of a time. I’m a mix and mastering engineer for a living, and if you listen to those early records, they sound like shit, and I just really liked that, because I was going into it from a noise scene where the distorted sound was just part of it. My habit now is to make it sound a lot more refined, but looking back at that, it’s really special to me. Global Pattern did a re-release not too long ago, for the 10-year anniversary. I’m glad that they saw something in it and thought that it should get a re-release, because it still feels pretty special to me.
Did you actually become a part of the scene after releasing your first couple of vaporwave projects?
The only people that I really talked to about vaporwave at the time, in the very beginning, were the few people from more experimental and noise music scenes who were getting into it. But I was active in a lot of the early Facebook vaporwave groups. Definitely met a lot of horrible, problematic, racist or transphobic people there, so it wasn’t all fun and games. There was definitely a lot of drama. There still is, I guess. But yeah, it started on Facebook and Reddit, and for some reason, it was completely unheard of for a while to see anything vaporwave-related on Instagram or Twitter. That’s not the case now, obviously.
Slushwave has seen a resurgence in the last couple of years, with a new generation coming up led by artists like Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night, who was clearly inspired by Telepath and you.
Yeah, it seems like that. It’s so cool how these microgenres actually became communities. Slushwave, when it first started to become a term, it was synonymous with phaserwave. I remember that Telepath would tag his albums with both of those, and I know that there was some humor in them. It’s crazy that slushwave actually became something that people started taking seriously, to the point where now it’s got its own music festival, let alone its own Twitch and YouTube channels, which is crazy. Now what we still need is a mallsoft fest. That would be incredibly sick. Despite being a slushwave artist, that’s probably my favorite subgenre. The concept of mallsoft is just so perfect.
I love mallsoft as well – and signalwave!
Yeah, I was gonna bring that up too, because I have a side project called Toad Computers that dabbles a bit in signalwave and broken transmission. I used to do a little kind of lo-fi slushwave with it, but now I’ve gone a bit more experimental and sound collage-y.
I noticed you released a new album under that name in 2025. Wasn’t that the first one after five years? What was going on there?
It’s not really intentional. I just go with the flow, whatever I’m feeling. The way these side projects pop up and fade away is really just dependent on dopamine and free time. Inspiration arises and falls, and every once in a while I really just want to go crazy with sample-hunting and cutting things up, making weird signalwave stuff that sounds like messed up radios in small rooms. It’s just an urge that I’ll get every once in a while, and I focus on different things at different times.
I made two records as Nonlocal Forecast because I was feeling inspired to make that kind of music for a time, where it wasn’t anything heavy and I didn’t have to worry about vocals. It was all intricate instrumentation. But after the second album, I’d just rather do other stuff for a while again. That’s the only reason why you see any music of mine getting released, then you don’t hear anything for a while, and then it comes back. It’s just me doing what I feel like doing at the time for whatever reason.
Speaking of dopamine, you’re outspoken about being neurodivergent. I think that vaporwave is a culture where many neurodivergent people find a musical home.
Well, I totally believe you if you say you’ve noticed that there’s a strong correlation with vaporwave and neurodivergence, although I maybe haven’t seen that in particular. I’m not ever surprised though if a vaporwave artist is trans, has ADHD or is autistic. Those seem to be the three common things. I’m not autistic, but I do have ADHD, and 75% of my friends are autistic. I don’t even know why, but this music really attracts trans people.
What’s your stance on generative AI and the recent Bandcamp ban of it?
There’s so many different factors and angles and implications. Things can be bad and good at the same time, so my stances have fluctuated a little over time. I was more into the idea of using it in creative ways when it was really terrible, because the art you could make with it was just so fucking weird, all of it was hallucinatory, it couldn’t do anything right, and I absolutely loved the way that looked. I would just play around with AI sites that popped up and said you can generate music, and it would just sound so creepy and strange, because nothing was good at making music yet, and that really excited me.
The only AI that I use when it comes to sound is this old shitty software called Text To Sample. It’s only a couple gigabytes, there’s no data centers or anything, and it’s trained all on royalty-free music. It sounds horrible, so I like taking clips of the bullshit that it makes and get a little experimental with it, processing it, chopping it up, maybe using bits and pieces of it for a beat.
Other than that, I don’t mess with AI, because I think the industry is doing a lot of damage, especially in creative circles. There’s amazing uses for it in the health and medical industry. It’s just a shame that it’s done at the cost of hurting the earth, hurting people and ruining entire towns. I wish that we could develop and innovate AI in a way that just benefits the world, that doesn’t replace anybody, and if it does, it maybe moves them to something adjacent that they can still thrive in. I just care about the Earth, and I care about creatives and I care about the state of humanity.
You can use tools to hurt people, or can use them to help, and I’m all for AI that helps, that’s non-pollutive and doesn’t exploit people. I don’t really like generating entire songs and releasing them as your own work. I actually hate that. The only fun thing I’ve been listening to on YouTube is old Megadeth songs with James Hetfield from Metallica singing instead. For some reason that sounds good. I also really like Spongebob and Patrick covers of songs. I will listen to any song with Plankton singing. But I don’t condone using AI for music in a way that disrespects creatives.
The last MindSpring Memories project, a collaboration with Desert Sand Feels Warm At Night, came out in late 2022. Can we expect a vaporwave or slushwave project from you anytime soon? Are you still following the scene?
Yeah, I’m still following it and it follows me. If I open a social media app, so many of the people that are in front of my face are involved in that scene. I do have a new album that’s been finished for some time. It was produced around the same time Magical Realism was. There’s a label who has had it in their queue, but they’ve been going through a lot and it’s thrown a wrench in their release schedule. But it will definitely come out at some point. There’s really beautiful artwork for it that was designed in Blender by a 3D artist.
Is there an up-and-coming artist from the scene that you like and that might have even inspired you lately?
Well, I wouldn’t say Days Of Blue Skies is necessarily up-and-coming, because they’ve been making vaporwave- and slushwave-adjacent stuff for a while now, but pretty much anything they do is going to be excellent. They are innovating in a big way. I know slushwave prog metal is hard to imagine, but it’s gorgeous and they’re such a wonderful person.
Listen to MindSpring Memories on Bandcamp
Angel Marcloid’s Top 10 Vaporwave Albums
(unranked)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – ゲートウェイ (Dream Catalogue, 2014)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – アマテラス (Dream Catalogue, 2014)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – アンドロメダ (Dream Catalogue, 2014)
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – アンタラ通信 (Dream Catalogue, 2015)
Cyberlust – online_4ever (self-released, 2014)
Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza – Daily Night Euphoria EP (Business Casual, 2013)
Miami Vice – Palm Haze (Illuminated Paths, 2013)
Ran Misato Ran – サマータイム退屈2014 (self-released, 2014)
Nmesh – Pharma (Orange Milk, 2017)
Vaperror – Polychromatic Compiler (Plus100, 2015)