Cruel Diagonals (album release), Crystal Quartez, (arsonist) - presented by Megalith - 21+

Since 2016, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist, Cruel Diagonals (aka Megan Mitchell), has been creating critically acclaimed experimental electronic music and intriguing visuals. 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. Cruel Diagonals augments these elements with exquisite vocalizations and field recording extracted from decrepit industrial sites and West Coast nature zones in order to reveal their expressive properties, thereby forging a unique sonic palette.

Crystal Cortez is a sound, installation artist & programmer based out of Portland Oregon. They are also a professor of Creative Coding & Sonic Arts at Portland Community College. As someone who never saw themself represented in computer music or creative tech their work focuses on the empowerment of underserved populations gaining access and knowledge around technology. In 2019 they co founded whateverSpace, a maker space offering free and sliding scale workshops and technology rentals with priority going to the BIPOC community. Under their performance moniker Crystal Quartez they transforms field recordings, uses synthesis, audio programming, data sonification, and 3D sound spatialization to produce complex sonic realms. Their practice has recently involved the development of interactive sculptural interfaces and wearable technology that monitor movement and other corporeal methods to liberate the performer from their interfaces. Their art has been shown at NIME, La MaMa NYC, PNCA, Disjecta, PICA, Navel (LA), On the Boards (Seattle) and more.

Pittsburgh's digital collagist {arsonist} unbraids time and decolorizes nature on her debut album Reality Structure. Overpowering blasts of electronic percussion offset lush synthetic beauty on six tracks of perfectly balanced battle between chaos and understanding. The album title plays on the name of a mathematical vector that divides a unit into real and imaginary subspaces. Throughout these pieces, {arsonist} explores subspaces of dreamlike reality and realistic dream states, with alien synth sounds and organic strings cautiously tugging the songs in different, bizarre directions. Otherworldly in a way where you can hear the process of a new world being constructed and decomposing in real time.