Cruel Diagonals - Calcite

A Closer Listen

Cruel Diagonals (L.A.’s Megan Mitchell) is quickly becoming one of our favorite artists.  Fractured Whole, recorded only with the sound of her voice, was one of our top albums of 2023.  This year Cruel Diagonals returns with Calcite, a confident EP that is both science fiction story and cautionary tale, spanning the entire history of life on earth in only fifteen minutes.  The brevity is consistent with the fact that humans have only been on earth for 0.007% of its history, while making a monstrous impact on its health and the health and existence of its other inhabitants.  Mitchell’s music is sombre and elegiac, suggesting that species burn bright and disappear, and that any sense of superiority stems from a limited perspective.  Mitchell adopts the geological view of time, and shifts her appreciation of the world’s treasure from living beings to geological formations, especially the limestone and basalt of Southern California.

“Scintillation” is filled with wide-eyed wonder and awe, Mitchell’s voice layered in sedimentary form, reflecting the origins of the earth.  The magma cools, settling into shapes that will last for centuries.  Life has not yet appeared; there is no morality, only beauty.  If Mitchell’s voice might be considered angelic, it is to reflect a cosmic view: an innocent, unspoiled creation.  Alas, it does not last.  “Disobedience,” which might be likened to the Fall, encompasses the entire Anthropocene era.  Humanity goes forth and multiplies, and industrializes, and destroys.  If the tone of the first track is reminiscent of Hildegard von Bingen, the tone of the second recalls the Prokect roster, uneasy voices interrupted by eruptions of feedback and drone, angry and insistent.

And then, like a wisp, humanity is gone.  The last inhabitants stumble through “Euxinia,” a ghostly piece in which many forces have already fallen silent.  These are the EP’s darkest minutes, sparse vocal tones echoing through empty caverns of sputtering electronics.  If one were enamored with humanity, one might view this as a funeral; but when all that remains are “calcified remnants and rock formations,” Mitchell reminds listeners of the initial joy of earth’s creation.  The opening of “Calcite” revisits last year’s “Precipice 1,” bright as the sunlight on a deserted Earth.  Once again, one can intuit the rocks forming, the buzzes reflecting sedimentary stability rather than human intrusion.  Life may not go on, but the rocks endure: a cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. (Richard Allen)