My family’s beloved 16-year-old Siamese cat, Webley, died in my arms last year. He’d been a sleek fat kitty before he got ill, but he’d lost weight and lost weight till he was little more than a bedraggled shadow. At the end he could barely lift his head, and then the vet gave him the shot and he couldn’t lift his head at all. I was scratching his ears as I’d so often done before, and suddenly they dropped, and whatever I was petting wasn’t Webley anymore. It’s one of the worst memories of my life.

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From as early as she can remember, Marcloid says, music made her feel things “that are just so abstract and visceral and hard to put your finger on.” She was born near Annapolis in 1984 to a music-loving family; her parents constantly played CDs of hair metal, the Beatles, and her all-time favorite band, Rush. Marcloid started making little drum sets out of pots and pans almost as soon as she could walk.

Shadow Gov’t by Shadow Gov’t

Marcloid has featured Breakfast in tracks throughout her oeuvre. “Spirit Spit” from the 2017 album Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain), for example, is a short wordless suite in which Marcloid imagines the usually shy Breakfast grown adventurous enough to go exploring in the house during a storm. The track opens with Breakfast engaging in some Siamese vocalizing and squawking, with thunder in the background. The rest of the narrative unfolds through auditory cues. “She comes down to the basement and turns on her ancient computer, which dials in to AOL,” Marcloid explains. “Then she puts on a Telepath CD, which is a vaporwave artist that I absolutely love. You can hear the CD drive opening, you can hear the Telepath song start. And then she types some stuff and is meowing. And then she turns off the computer and goes back upstairs.”

The Binary Ocean by MindSpring Memories

“Heaven has no location,” Marcloid howls near the end of the track. That’s a statement of spiritual hope; heaven is everywhere, Marcloid believes. “It’s not any particular place. It’s something that is all-encompassing,” she says. “I think that it’s everywhere and everything. It’s the flow of life.” You can hear that hope on tracks such as “⌈Mego⌉ ≜ Maitrī,” which is all gentle surging keyboards and pattering electronica, encouraging you to gently drift into an ether of soft fur and purring.