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My Cat Is An Alien - "…Ascends the Sky" CD (Rebis / Whitened Sepulchre)

Those who are lucky, quick, and rich enough to catch limited edition CD-Rs the first time around probably won't be excited about the Whitened Sepulchre label. And why should they? All their hard work at staying ahead of the curve is being ruined by a group dedicated to "reissuing and preserving key recordings of the New Electronic Sublime." As for the rest of us? Well, we finally get to hear the experiments, the missing links, the before-they-were-(relatively)-famous music of the artists that, for whatever reason, decided to print up these ultra-rare editions. Our laziness has paid off.

Sepulchre's first release is from Italy's finest investigative free/drone duo, My Cat Is an Alien. The two may be best known for their use of kid's toys, drones, and spinning oscillators, but …Ascends the Sky was recorded in 2001, a time when they sat at the fringes of guitar-based music. While much of their more recent material has leaned in the direction of wasteland drone electronics, …Ascends the Sky bridges that territory with the sound of instrumental Slint and Charalambides' stripped psychedelia.

In a perverse chronological reversal they've added a new track, "Meditation on …Ascends the Sky," at the start of the reissue. Recorded in 2005, it's a distillation of the album's feel without moving in exactly the same waters--it appropriates the tools of post-rock without a thought for the reclamation of rock. Beginning as nothing more than a slowly warming piece of circular guitar, it grows as Ramona Ponzini backs it with faint Japanese wind chimes. These reverberant notes wash over the repeated motifs as a thunderhead assembles overhead. A heavy cymbal shiver dissipates this threat of engulfment.

Tracks two and three are actually the same piece, split between the more obviously human half and its more electronic twin. "…Ascends the Sky Two" starts with a melancholy plucking and is soon joined by a single electric drone that rises up, delicately fizzing to the surface. This is the sound of Mogwai drinking red wine on warm Italian summer nights--a song that is all the better for never reaching a battlefield scrum of pig-out noise.

The final track picks up where "…Two" finishes, in subtle wobbles of electric drone and repeating lulling vocals. A tightly plucked guitar passage grows into a digital hailstone, dents appearing in a torrent of Geiger dripped sound. Utilizing guitars again, though this time less obviously, they stretch pure tones over the racks of crackle. These unlikely elements come together to shift the song into new waters, polishing each other like mating snails and constantly curling in a sticky, tenuous embrace.

Having access to this expanded reissue makes you wonder how many other releases are sitting out there, wrapped in plastic and unlistened to by hoarders. Hopefully it will be the start of a very long list of releases. This is the perfect debut album for the label and a strong reminder of My Cat Is An Alien's allure.
(Scott McKeating, August 2006, Stylus Magazine)

Painting Petals On Planet Ghost - "s/t" LP (Time-Lag Records)

Prolificacy’s double-edged. Should an artist release (x > 1) albums per year, naysayers will arise lid-capped from their trashcans and spew the familiar catcalls: “Indulgent! Unfocused! Unfinished!” Unfortunately, the grouches are too often right; otherwise there wouldn’t be so damn many of them. On the other hand, prolific musicians are usually dedicated musicians, capable of more quality albums than the industry standard. No need to punish anyone for exceeding expectations, right?

Let’s zoom in for a case study: Roberto and Maurizio Opalio, known ’round these parts as My Cat is an Alien, not only exceeded their quota in 2005, they play improv psychedelic, a dreaded tag bringing to mind the overflowing landfills of Acid Mothers Temple discs littering Japan (as if the country weren’t cramped enough!) The symptoms of Templetitis recur in the duo—the cosmic vocabulary, a seat at the table with Ed Hardy of Eclipse Records, similar ambient signifiers. The stage is set for a slip in quality. But like AMT in their prime, My Cat is an Alien hasn’t fallen victim to their own energy and enthusiasm.

A key to staying fresh is collaborators, which brings us to Painting Petals on Planet Ghost, a project pairing the Opalios with songstress Ramona Ponzini. This album is a soothing nightcap for a hectic year—short, sweet, easily digested, but still full-bodied. Five songs, not reaching half an hour, of Japanese poetry backed by the Opalios’ sparse instrumental investigations. For the notoriously long-winded brothers—who would just as soon unleash a seventy-minute track as brush their teeth in the morning—the seething restraint on Painting Petals on Planet Ghost is positively revelatory.

Ponzini’s approach to Japanese serves the album well. The majority of her audience speaks nary a word of it, so she rightly lingers on the sound of the language. As far as I know, she might be happy as a clam, reciting words of sunshine and bounty, but to get the “K” just right (with the crisp burst at the end), she has to elongate the sound. Japanese suits Anglophone listeners well. All its sounds occur in English (except the unrounded “U,” but that’s a quibble), and it has a syllabic rigidity that provides natural rhythm. Ponzini clearly agrees. In fact, she’s sometimes too focused on the sound, forgetting the emotional significance of the poetry. This disrupts “Haruame No Juru Wa Namida Ka,” in which she deadpans the same line for some time, expecting the words alone to carry her meaning. Luckily the gaffe doesn’t spoil the track, as it was already spoiled by the piercing frequency inexplicably favored by the Opalios.

Otherwise, the album kills, though that’s too strong a word for something this fragile. Barring the overanalytical Orientalist concerns that besiege me upon hearing the gongs of “Haru Wa Akebono”—these three are Italian, after all—these songs are nothing but beautiful; the musical equivalent of brushstroke painting. So despite my earlier hand-wringing, Painting Petals has left me wanting more. Knowing MCIAA, the wait won’t be long.
(Bryan Berge, 2006-01-13, Stylus Magazine)

My Cat Is an Alien - "The Cosmological Eye Trilogy" 3CD set (Last Visible Dog)

I really enjoy the phrase “space music.” It's one of those great open-ended descriptors, like “post-rock,” or “jazz fusion” or “synergistic” that sounds completely specific, but for which no one seems to have a handy real-world definition, because there isn't one. Space music. Like the sound of planets whooshing by, or galaxies colliding like some super-massive billiard break, or the glorious destruction of a supernova. Awesome. Too bad space is a vacuum in which sound can't travel, because that would make the coolest box-set ever. Of course, if you were the world's biggest nerd, perhaps you could transcribe the mathematics of space into tones and waves and pulses and crashing-about. It would likely turn out sounding something like The Cosmological Eye Trilogy.

My Cat Is an Alien are two brothers, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio of Turin, where Jesus died. In addition to being musicians of the abstract-improv fashion that unleashes piles of limited-run CD-Rs every year, they're also both painters and installation artists. Their obsession with space and science fiction and alien life is boundless; their other-media work is just as huge, monolithic, and single-minded as their countless records, mostly released on the small-time by their own label Opax (note all the “not available”s), complete with hand-made “space art” packaging that's actually quite lovely in a minimalist, arts-and-crafts way. The first two volumes—the longest sprawls here—were individually self-released (as in, they released themselves), with the third and final reserved for this set, along with something like an hour-and-a-half of additional material spread over every disc, for a total run time of about three-and-a-half hours.

And that, my little Sputniks, is a lot of space art. And really, on paper its contents read kind of like microwave instructions, so let me put it a different way. Dig: If we were able to watch the universe from a bird's eye view while traveling back in time, we could watch as our ever-expanding universe slowly contracts, as our galaxies grow denser and closer together, and as the radiation builds and light increases in speed, the whole thing heats up, and heats up, and contracts down to just a single, critically dense speck in an endless, yawning void. I know that isn't exactly a description of a sound, but when these guys take the tiniest-possible set of sounds and stretch out the tiniest-possible set of mutations, additions, and subtractions over spans of an hour, you can really only start to describe it in terms of space-time and light years. I can't stress enough the alien-ness of this sound, even within the dark-matter float of drone music. This isn't the recognizable found-sound style much loved by the Finns (Uton, Es), or the almost verbal density of those freaky Kiwis (Birchville Cat Motel, Ashtray Navigations). This is proper minimalism, the art of LaMonte Young; only while Young longed desperately for a trance-state, MCIAA start in one and work from there.

You can't say they don't warn you right off the bat. The first part of the trilogy, “Into the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy,” begins in a fog of oscillators and soft guitar pings. For 15 minutes, they wrap around each other, keeping a steady rhythm. Then a single bass note ticks away regularly, then irregularly, counting off slices of time that only fleetingly resemble human timekeeping, while slabs of static rub against each other like tectonic plates, and disembodied voices describe the edges. These changes in tone and structure—assuming these elements weren't in place the whole time and just out of range—don't announce themselves, but simply filter in, until they're right on top of you. With its few, carefully chosen parts, it's the sort of minimalism that makes shocks out of the tiniest gestures. When they engage in pure noise, as they do on parts of “In the Sombrero Galaxy,” the high pitched whine rides in and out like a crushing wave, alternately in some sort of harmony with its spine of pink-noise feed, and borderline
intolerable.

This is a difficult record to love, or even like, in any traditional sense, but it does have its gut thrills, and commands a certain kind of respect.Like most minimalism, it's all about the duration; listening on as the near-imperceptible ebb and flow wafts by. Which means those short tracks that have been tacked on for this release seem to sort of miss the point. And like most noise, it's about the experience, about that very physical impact that piles of noises, pleasant or less so, can bring. I have a hard time recommending this to someone who hasn't been down a few alien roads before, and God help you if you decide to get through the whole thing in one sitting. But so much of it is so staggering, so mesmerizing, and makes music on its own terms so definitely, that it has a certain menacing, willfully unpretty, and monolithic grandeur, like some intractable slab of rock, or a vast, empty desert. Wouldn't want to live there, but I could stare at it for a good long time.
(Jeff Siegel, 2005-12-16, Stylus Magazine)

PAINTING PETALS ON PLANET GHOST - "s/t" LP (Time-Lag Records)

Melancholy dominates the album. Ponzini’s melancholy is bested only by the Opalios’ melancholy, each track a battle to out-lonely the other. One could wish for more variety, but given the brevity of the album and the potentially endless permutations of sadness, Painting Petals gets by.
Ponzini’s approach to Japanese serves the album well. The majority of her audience speaks nary a word of it, so she rightly lingers on the sound of the language. As far as I know, she might be happy as a clam, reciting words of sunshine and bounty, but to get the “K” just right (with the crisp burst at the end), she has to elongate the sound. Japanese suits Anglophone listeners well. All its sounds occur in English (except the unrounded “U,” but that’s a quibble), and it has a syllabic rigidity that provides natural rhythm. Ponzini clearly agrees. In fact, she’s sometimes too focused on the sound, forgetting the emotional significance of the poetry. This disrupts “Haruame No Juru Wa Namida Ka,” in which she deadpans the same line for some time, expecting the words alone to carry her meaning. Luckily the gaffe doesn’t spoil the track, as it was already spoiled by the piercing frequency inexplicably favored by the Opalios.

MCIAA – “Through the reflex of the rain” CD (Free Porcupine Society/ Revolver USA)

We regret to interrupt your daily information consumption, but terrible news has come over the wire. Cancel the Winter Olympics—Turin, Italy is no more. I repeat, the glorious Italian city of Turin, a beacon of beauty and culture, has been invaded and reduced to ruin by two cosmic beings calling themselves My Cat is an Alien.

According to a sound document recovered from the city, the assault began in a quiet industrial sector. The gentle hum of a normal working day was heard, punctuated by the healthy rumble of automobiles happily starting their working day. It was a pleasant, God-fearing city, not unlike those of our glorious Midwest, making the carnage to come all the more chilling.

Death was presaged by the alien’s horrible radio transmission. A mechanical drone descended on the unsuspecting citizens, pulsing like a hummingbird’s heart. It is unclear what this noise represented (Coded alien language? An alarm? A radar scrambler?), but we do know this: it lasts the duration of the thirty-nine minute recording, alternately annoying and hypnotizing all those who hear it. Scientists at NASA are working feverishly to decipher its meaning, but unfortunately each listening is revealing different aspects.

According to the recording, the people of Turin bravely resisted the overpowering sound for a while. This reporter chokes up when he hears the city in the background, struggling to act normally. But they were no match for what appeared to be mutant space birds. They soon surrounded the city, squawking eerily from every direction. For a short time, an unsettling quiet reigned over the city as the birds presumably awaited instruction. The city sounded almost normal, except for the ringing of emergency church bells and the occasional cry from the hideous creatures.

And then nothing. No one knows exactly how, but ten minutes into the recording, the city quietly disappears, replaced by the psychedelic meandering of an acoustic guitar. These monsters—they brought their degenerate hippie music with them to celebrate the destruction of the city!

The city was soon ravaged, an electrical storm, resembling the cymbal work of nefarious villains Supersilent, washing over the smoking ruins. Percussion clattered madly for five minutes, and one shudders to imagine the awful vista: a dark sky blistered by unending lightning.

Afterwards the unholy victors celebrated with a dark mass initiated by an unsteady foghorn drone. The birds, bells, and alien guitar gods danced on the back of the dead city, coming into and out of the mix as they please, the sounds building urgently in the recording’s last ten minutes, approaching a crescendo that never quite breaks. Finally, they seem to have withdraw to the galactic swamp from which they arose.

Aerial photos are now confirming the audio’s horrible details and it is with heavy heart that I call on you, Mr. and Mrs. America. Only you can prevent a similar catastrophe in the heartland. This is what we know about My Cat is an Alien:
1)They were nice boys, brothers, who were drawn too deep into the dark depths of improvised and psychedelic music.
2) They strike in one take. There will be no second chances, people!
3) They’ve collaborated with known sociopaths Thuja, Thurston Moore, and Jim O’Rourke in the past.

If you hear them in your area, call your local police immediately. Hesitate and it may be too late. The mere sound of their wreckage may fry your brain.
(Brian Berge, January 2005, Stylus Magazine)