|
Minimal duo My Cat Is An Alien (Maurizio Opalio and his brother Roberto)
delivered a post-rock version of Tim Buckley's sublime dejection on the totally
improvised three-part jam Landscapes Of An Electric City (1999).
After the poetic digressions of Ascends the Sky (2001), inspired
by a William Blake poem, and Il Segno (2003 - Starlight Furniture Co, 2007), a dreamy soundscape and a ghostly blues jam with their own lyrics,
the duo approached a more structured format with The Rest Is Silence (2004).
Through The Reflex Of The Rain (Free Porcupine Society, 2005)
suffers from the excess of music that the duo produced over the years.
The overall ambience is seductive, but the album is too long for the few
ideas that it packages. A ten-minute EP would have been enough.
They also started a series of collaborations with their musical mentors, first
with Thurston Moore on From The Earth To The Spheres Vol.1 (Very Friendly, 2004), then with Thuja on
From The Earth To The Spheres Split Series Vol. 2 (Very Friendly, 2005), etc.
The (improvised) music on the
triple-cd The Cosmological Eye Trilogy (Last Visible Dog, 2005)
attained an even higher form of nirvana: astral and subliminal soundscapes
sculpted with an arsenal of sound-producing objects at the transcendent border
where acid-rock meets post-rock and free-jazz.
Tracks: The Cosmological Eye Introduction (14.01), Into the Sleeping Beauty galaxy (55.19), The Helix Nebula (7.59), Into the Sombrero galaxy (40.03), The Trifid Nebula (21.33), Into the Whirlpool galaxy (33.03), The Orion nebula (34.52).
The prolific duo used the trilogy as the launching pad for an increasing
"cosmic" theme:
Listen Before Black Falls (Root Strata, 2006),
There's A Flame (Rococo, 2006),
Cosmic Light of the Third Millennium (Important, 2006)
were all studies
on texture and soundsculpting that evoked a fragile blurred galactic amoeba.
Cosmic Debris (A Silent Place, 2008) is a series of collaborations
(with Text Of Light, Steve Roden, Keiji Haino).
Black Magic Disco (2008) is a side-project by the Opalio brothers.
MCIAL released
Fragments Suspended In Time (2011) and the three-cd set
What Space Is Made For (2011).
Rocco stilo writes:
Two new albums by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio's My Cat Is An Alien. Fragments Suspended In Time, from Opax, comes as an LP, CDR, and also DVD-R, following a long period of self-isolation up in the Western Alps. Containg two long suites, Alba it is a Tramonto. One-time pressing of 250 copies. Maurizio plays electric and acoustic guitar, old zither, handmade small harp, gong, percussion, cymbals, disassembled electronics, and a modified ring modulator; Roberto contributes wordless vocalizations, electric guitar, space toy guns, modified space toys, mini-keyboard, prepared toy piano, re-assembled xylo-piano, handmade shortwave receiver, assembled loop-circuit frequency analyzer, and alientronics. As they advise: «To you who follow the so-called 'avant metal' shit, to you who are slave of the trends of the moment, to you who think experimental music must be soulless, to you who consider music only as a mere entertainment while doing 'more important' things, to you who believe art is not poetry, please DON'T buy this LP! You won't like it the same way we don't like you». It was recorded in February 2009 and November 2010. What Space Is Made For, recorded in the same period, is instead a 3xCD boxset from Elliptical, minimalism-oriented, with cosmic, mantra and tribalism influences, with a large use of electric and acoustic guitars, space toys and percussion, but also self-made, modified, and assembled/disassembled primitive electronic equipment. It has all brief and very brief pieces, except for the 22-minute Praying For The Light To Last Forever.
Living on the Invisible Line (Divorce, 2011), recorded in a remote region of the Western Alps.
|
(Translation by/ Tradotto da xxx) Se sei interessato a tradurre questo testo, contattami
|
