Angel Marcloid’s candy-colored compositions and distorted, howling vocals defy genre conventions. Chicago’s Angel Marcloid has a roster of alter egos that could make up a basketball team: She makes twisted New Age as MindSpring Memories, trippy jazz-fusion as Nonlocal Forecast, experimental noise as ANGELWINGS MARMALADE, and even weirder noise as Yapping Portal when she’s not working as a recording, mixing, and mastering engineer for clients like King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and No Joy. But the producer and instrumentalist is best known as Fire-Toolz, under which she’s released a torrent of uncategorizable splatters of screamo, vaporwave, prog rock, and IDM reconciled in such a way that it all somehow makes sense. Past projects were usually released through Chicago’s Hausu Mountain label, but Lavender Networks is Marcloid’s first album that arrives via Warp Records, following 2024’s self-released Breeze. Here her candy-colored compositions and distorted, howling vocals defy genre conventions and old-fashioned distinctions between “good” and “bad” taste, with fabulist titles like “Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head” and “Kiss the Bladed Cat, Find Ways to Stretch Time.” The list of guests is just as varied and unpredictable, from Nashville session musician Jennifer Holm on “And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home” (“Now imagine a Nashville mom who sings on country albums and in her church band, being asked by an interfaith transfeminine anarchist from Chicago to sing on her screamy, noisy electronic album,” wrote Marcloid in a press release) to her wife, Sling Beam, and sister, Liverfire.