Indexical is pleased to present NYC musician Dominic Coles and vocalist and producer Cruel Diagonals. For this performance, Coles will share a new piece using a type of listening he calls alphabetic listening, attempting to establish an alphabet through the association of a word and an abstract, synthetic sound. Cruel Diagonals presents new voice-centered electronic music compositions.

Dominic Coles is a musician based in Queens, NYC. Through composition and improvisation he investigates the interactions of place, personhood, and power as they are articulated in sound and speech. Documents of this practice have been presented by Edition Wandelweiser, Tripticks Tapes, Spricht Editions, and performed at Café OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), Les Ateliers Claus (Brussels), Shift: FourOneOne (NYC), Alyssa Davis Gallery (NYC), Casa Del Popolo (Montreal), Indexical (Santa Cruz), and in DIY spaces throughout the US and Europe. Dominic has been a resident artist at Baldwin for the Arts and a Qubit Innovator Lab Fellow. He also runs the record label Party Perfect! with collaborator Hunter Brown.

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, informed by ancient folk musical traditions, as well as contemporary classical ones, thereby forging a unique sonic palette. 

A new lecture / film / slideshow that attempts to tell the entire history of North American music in ninety minutes!
 
Mississippi Record label and store founder Eric Isaacson will guide you through this whirlwind presentation of archival film, sound clips and images.
 
Subjects include:

This performance is standing-room only. A handful of stool seating will be available on a first come first served basis.

Indexical is thrilled to close 2024 with Japanese electronic producer Foodman, and SF-based experimental electronic musician Nathan Ho. Santa Cruz multimedia artist and producer kinch opens the night with an eclectic DJ set.

Takahide Higuchi a.k.a Foodman, creates music that defies categorisations –and is one of the few artists that actually fit this overused description. There are traces of almost every electronic music genre, from juke, footwork,ambient, house, techno, to noise, but those elements are dissected and morphed together then driven to extreme without giving you a second to come up with a definitive genre. The noisy technicolour of these borderline versatile or schizophrenic collages is borne out of his experiments (or accidents) and has titillated, confused, and enchanted music obsessives far and wide. After releasing his debut album from NY/OH experimental label Orange Milk, his music has been released from international labels including Diplo's Mad Decent and its offshoot Good Enuff. His ever-evolving and mutating musical vocabulary draws from every kind of music he stumbles across, from Chicago footwork to Okinawan folk music of his roots, ambient to J-pop, Talvin Singh's Indian classical music/drum 'n' bass fusion to classic video game soundtracks, then twists them all with his playful psychedelia. This extends to his remixes and DJ mixes, including his monthly residency at NTS radio mix, which was picked up on Pitchfork's 10 Best DJ Mixes of March 2017 list. Since playing his first show outside of Japan in mid 2016, he has appeared on Boiler Room, Low End Theory, and Unsound just to name a few, as well as headline shows across the US and Europe. In July 2021, the album Yasuragi Land was released on Hyperdub. The album was voted best of the year by various national and international media, including Pitchfork's The Best Electronic Music of 2021. The new EP "Uchigawa Tankentai" was released from Hyperdub in November 2023.

Nathan Ho is an SF-based experimental electronic musician combining contemporary classical music with heavy sound design artillery drawing from glitch, breakcore, and bass music. His debut album "Haywire Frontier" was released on the Japanese label Tokinogake in 2023. He produces his music "ex nihilo" without using any samples or recorded instruments, instead using an arsenal of custom techniques for sound synthesis and algorithmic composition all done in the music programming language SuperCollider. A public communicator as much as a musician, he documents his artistic and technical process extensively in his writing on sound synthesis and digital signal processing.

kinch is a multimedia artist and producer from Santa Cruz, CA, merging abstract soundscapes, driving rhythms, and collaborative experiences, with a strong focus on accessibility and open-source tools. Their work embraces freeform experimentation, blending past influences with contemporary techniques and a strong DIY ethos.