Contact Wave: Cruel Diagonals
04.02.23
Co-hosted by Chris Kissel and Chuck Soo-Hoo, the twice-monthly dublab program Contact Wave enthusiastically celebrates the best experimental, avant-garde, psychedelic, and off-the-grid music crafted in L.A. and beyond.
This week’s show features special guest Cruel Diagonals, AKA Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Megan Mitchell. Though classically trained as a vocalist and well-versed in jazz standards as a youth, Cruel Diagonals applies her brilliant voice to compositions and improvisations that are the antithesis of staid tradition or arid academic exercises. Rather, she optimizes her minimal gear setup with an instinctual adventurousness and an acute sense of the most chilling and moving atmospheres and timbres, favoring fluidity of tones over the grid-like modes of much electronic music.
These skills first manifested on her 2018 debut album, Disambiguation (Drawing Room), which earned rave reviews in The Wire, Pitchfork, NPR, and other publications. She has gone on to record for respected labels Longform Editions and Doom Trip, and her releases include Pulse Of Indignation (2018), Monolithic Nuance (2018), A Dormant Vigor (2021), and her new album, Fractured Whole (2023).
Tracklist:
Cruel Diagonals – Monolithic Nuance (Longform Editions) (2018)
**Cruel Diagonals Interview**
Cruel Diagonals – Inurement – from “Fractured Whole” (Beacon Sound) (2023)
Cruel Diagonals – Inurement – from “Fractured Whole” (Beacon Sound) (2023)
Cruel Diagonals – Reconciliation – from “Fractured Whole” (Beacon Sound) (2023)
Electric Indigo – Troi – from “5 1 1 5 9 3” (Imbalance Computer Music) (2018)
Heather Stebbins & Christopher Chandler – Heather Stebbins: Among Arrows I. Arrow I – from “Roots” (New Focus) (2023)
gabby fluke-mogul & Nava Dunkelman – Momo – from “Likht” (Relative Pitch) (2023)
Playbackers – Plenty of Potatoes On the Table – from “Playbackers Record” (Tripticks) (2023)
Richard Thompson – Treadwell No More – from “Music from Grizzly Man” (No Quarter) (2022)
Emergency Group – Inspection of Cruelty Pt. 1 – from “Inspection of Cruelty” (Island House) (2023)
nat birchall – Spirals – from “The Infinite” (Ancient Archive of Sound) (2023)
Field Lines Cartographer – Crystal Statues – from “Tone Maps” (quiet details) (2023)
David Edren – Uurwerk – from “Relativiteit Van de Omgeving” (Not Not Fun) (2023)
M. Sage – River Turns Woodley (for Frogman) – from “Paradise Crick” (RVNG Intl.) (2023)
Alex Smalley & Lucia Adam – Atlas – from “Shapes” (Hush Hush) (2023)
Davide Cedolin – A Water Relief in the Drought of Summer ’22 – from “Ligurian Pastoral” (Island House)
