Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

Thu, Sep 21 2017 8:00 PM


8:00pm: Cruel Diagonals - unsettling, ethereal music
9:00pm: Modify - abrasive ambience from Minnesota

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 with her field recorder and camera in tow. Mitchell is additionally an accredited archivist with a Master of 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. She has additionally performed DJ sets for Holly Herndon, Shifted, and Elysia Crampton. Influenced by early experimental filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Maya Deren, Cruel Diagonals has been described in cinematic terms, 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.

Modify is the experimental electronic project of Dean Berlinerblau. Over the past three years, this project has manifested into a cacophony of texture and meditative severity. Berlinerblau's music harbors a reflection of societal flux and the interplay between chaos and order in the brave new world we now inhabit. Modify is a boilerplate reconstruction of auditory sculpture and processing.

Cost: $6-10 sliding scale