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Drawing Room Records

Cruel Diagonals

Drawing Room Records

Megan Mitchell composes unsettling, ethereal music under the alias, Cruel Diagonals. A jazz and classically trained vocalist, Mitchell performs and creates in numerous capacities. Some of her current endeavors include acting as proprietor of the left-of-field music index for women/trans/non-binary composers, Many Many Women, and researching, visiting and documenting places of abandoned industry around the Pacific Northwest and California with her field recorder and camera in tow. A selection of Mitchell’s field recording endeavors was a feature in The Stranger’s “Person of Interest” column. She is additionally an accredited archivist with a Master in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Washington, specializing in audio archiving. She is currently processing the audio archives of music producer, Randall Dunn.

Cruel Diagonals is an outlet for destructive sample processing, vocal exploration, and a palette for inter-media contemplations and applications. Selected performance credits to date include sets at Corridor Festival and Debacle Festival, as well as a live set opener for Pharmakon, High Plains (Kranky), and Pod Blotz. Additionally, her DJ sets include performances with Holly Herndon, Shifted, and Elysia Crampton. Influenced by early experimental filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Maya Deren, cinematic terms will describe Cruel Diagonals as evoking moods and montages of an eerie, surrealist timbre. Warped field recordings and layered vocals incite a beckoning to a phantasmagorical, metallic-tinged state of existence.

Disambiguation…

Disambiguation is the first very album from Megan Mitchell and Cruel Diagonals. With this debut, Mitchell delivers a world-without-day of a record that surrounds the listener with rumbling electronic sounds and tones, inventive vocals, and early origin rhythms that penetrate the astral divine in us all. Stunningly high and gorgeously heavy, the album is in complete sync with the lower earth. Listen, listen again, and repeat. It’s best that way.

“Like white magic or virtual reality, Disambiguation, the debut album from Megan Mitchell’s solo ambient-electronic project, is eerie but objective, an intense experience that leaves a deep impression and few answers.” – Jonathan Zwickel

“When was the last time an album induces goose bumps within its first 10 seconds? Disambiguation’s first track, “Innate Abstraction,” does exactly that, creating the illusion of being swathed in dozens of silk scarves while inside a velvet-lined cave. From that point on, Cruel Diagonals (Bay Area musician, Megan Mitchell) generates a multiplicity of elegant chants and laments to help her express the inexpressible.” – Dave Segal

Album Details:

For its thirty-first entry, Drawing Room is ecstatic to present Disambiguation, the first album from Megan Mitchell and Cruel Diagonals. Disambiguation is dark pleasure of an album that blends electronics and drones, ingenious vocals, and early earth rhythms. Its heaviness is completely hypnotic and forward moving. Lovers of Klara Lewis, Coil, and Broadcast take note. Mastered by Amy Dragon for Telegraph Mastering and pressed on 180-gram vinyl, the deluxe LP comes in a full-colored sleeve accompanied by insert and a 22×22” foldout poster. A digital release is also available.