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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 split albums
(with Text Of Light, Steve Roden,
Keiji Haino and Mats Gustafsson).
Black Magic Disco (2008) is a side-project by the Opalio brothers.
MCIAL released
Fragments Suspended In Time (2011)
(for guitars, zither, handmade harp, gong, percussion, cymbals, wordless vocals, toy keyboards, handmade xylo-piano, handmade electronics)
and the three-cd set What Space Is Made For (2011), whose mostly mediocre
and sketchy material includes the
22-minute Praying For The Light To Last Forever.
Living on the Invisible Line (Divorce, 2011) was recorded in a remote region of the Western Alps.
Art Is a Tear Of Noise & Infinite Silence (Discrepant, 2012) for homemade string and electronic instruments instrument, contains the 20-minute Raga Of The XXII Century.
The Opalio brothers also backed Ramona Ponzini on her project
Painting Petals On Planet Ghost that released the mellow acid-folk lullabies of
Fallen Camellias (A Silent Place, 2008)
and Haru No Omoi (PSF, 2009).
Music For Phantoms, i.e.
Maurizio Opalio on acoustic guitar and
Roberto Opalio on classical guitar and field recordings, debuted with
three untitled albums (the first one released in 2007 ) that were later
collected on
the triple-disc Music For Phantoms I-II-III (Elliptical Noise, 2012)
recorded in the mountains and only at night.
Another side-project, the purely acoustic
Brothers From Another Space, is documented on the triple-disc
Alienacustica (Elliptical Noise, 2012), that contains all the material
they recorded since 2006.
Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, instead, a hybrid folk and classical collaboration with Ramona Ponzini, yielded
Painting Petals On Planet Ghost (2005),
Fallen Camellias (recorded in april 2006), Haru No Omoi (recorded between winter 2004 and january 2009), Transparent Winter
(Seven Solar Metals, 2012) and the live
Le Voci Del Buio.
Ocean Above Your Heads (Starlight Furniture, 2013) documents a
collaboration between My Cat Is An Alien and Nels Cline.
Opalio's
Alien All Too Alien, (2013)
contains two electroacoustic side-long suites.
The triple-LP Abstract Expressionism For The Ears
(Opax, 2014) documents colossal performances with
Belgian guitarist and keyboardist Cedric Stevens (aka Acid Kirk), such as
the 34-minute When The Sun Goes Down There's Nothing Left To Tune,
the 25-minute Shifting At Zero Gravity and the 25-minute
Intersection Of Shadows. Furthermore.
Roberto Opalio also released the solo
Aurora Coelestis (2014), containing
two new compositions for
electronically-manipulated glockenspiel and voice.
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