My Cat Is an Alien - "The Cosmological Eye Trilogy" 3CD set (Last Visible Dog) Christian Marclay & Okkyung Lee/ My Cat Is An Alien - "From the earth to the Spheres" Vol.7 (Opax Records) No time to breathe lately, but this blog has "week" in the title for a reason...so this'll be quick, and unfittingly so, as the clock-expanding work of Italian duo My Cat Is An Alien deserves reams of attentive time. These guys had been on my to-do list for way too long (especially the stuff on Starlight Furniture and Ecstatic Peace that I inexplicably slept on); luckily I finally got to dig in via a gift of what must be their most epic work, the 3-CD Cosmological Eye Trilogy on a label familiar with epic releases, Last Visible Dog. Seven tracks spread across the 3.5 hours, and I can't think of many bands for whom such extreme durations are more necessary (there are some for whom such durations are as necessary, but few moreso)...MCIAA tracks are so beyond-time that the fact that "Into the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy" lasts 55 minutes seems fully logical yet oddly impossible - there's no way a human hour could last this short or long. In fact the entire set evokes the time-fucked aspects of space travel explored in "2001"; when Bowman sees himself as an old man and then turns into a baby, time explodes in all directions, and the same goes with this duo's extraplanetry, perception-defying music. Of course MCIAA's stuff is drenched in space references
(which they explain nicely here), but they don't really play space rock
- more like space noise, or heavy atmopshere - i.e. they're not making
music so much as they're building environments. Each track is filled with
windy drones, percussive mysteries, distant oscillations, and unidentified
events, and sounds less like a collection of sounds than a document of
a place, some outer region made of natural reverberations, intelligent
transmissions, and unknown phenomena. The "Jupiter and Beyond the
Infinite" moment comes on disc two's 40-minute "Into the Sombrero
Galaxy," whose metallic whine is so overwhelming you can practically
see Bowman's color-reflecting helmet shaking in the speakers. I wish I
could further describe this set's massive weight, but I'm too bleary -
just check out the track below (and some killer live footage via Ecstatic
Peace) and if you still need more explanation, I'm not sure I'll ever
be sharp enough to oblige.
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