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My Cat is an Alien/Jean-Marc Montera/Lee Ranaldo, “MCIAA XX Anniversary” (Antigravitational, 2019)

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The Opalio brothers close an exceptionally productive year with this third and final release of 2019. I suppose just about every My Cat is an Alien release could be described as a live album, given the duo’s devotion to “spontaneous composition,” but this one is live in the traditional sense: it was performed in front of an actual audience. More specifically, it is a document of a 20th anniversary concert that the brothers gave in their hometown of Torino back in 2018. 

As befits such an auspicious occasion, the Opalios were joined by a pair of their favorite collaborators: Lee Ranaldo and French composer/guitarist Jean-Marc Montera. Needless to say, it is always fascinating to see what transpires when unpredictable outside elements are invited into Maurizio and Roberto’s shared consciousness and this release is no exception, as the quartet gradually wind their way into some truly uncharted frontiers in mind-melting, cosmic psychedelia.

I sincerely doubt that there is much that rattles Lee Ranaldo at this point in his career, but the prospect of sharing a stage with My Cat is an Alien for a spontaneously improvised live performance would probably be an extremely daunting endeavor for a lot of artists. For one, a huge amount of one’s previously acquired musical knowledge would be instantly irrelevant (or even a liability), as the My Cat is an Alien aesthetic long ago transcended the use of any conventional scales, chords, harmonies, or rhythms. Secondly, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio have been closely collaborating for two decades now and they are very much on a wavelength that is uniquely their own. Furthermore, rehearsing or planning out how the performance should unfold is very much anathema to the MCIAA vision.

Given their past work with both the Opalios and each other, however, both Ranaldo and Montera showed up with some solid intuitions about how they could seamlessly expand the MCIAA vision without running roughshod over its essential character. In fact, for the first ten minutes or so, it is almost possible to forget that Ranaldo and Montera are even present at all, as they mostly just hang back and provide a percussive backdrop to Roberto’s queasily spectral vocalizing. For his part, Ranaldo does periodically take the microphone to contribute some spoken word, but it never becomes the focal point. Rather, it has the feel of a fragmented overheard conversation with an enigmatic context and an elusive trajectory. Once Ranaldo and Montera shift their focus to their guitars, however, the performance rapidly snowballs into a visceral and explosive twist on the Opalios’ smeared and swirling deep space reveries.

Obviously, getting to experience a noise-ravaged and volcanic twist on the Opalios’ hallucinatory maelstrom of alientronics and repurposed toys is a huge part of XX Anniversary‘s appeal, but there are also some wonderfully transcendent moments along the way that feel like something altogether new. While I would be hesitant to say that the performance is ever less than otherworldly, the quartet sometimes delve into evocative passages that feel like something distinctly different from the Opalios’ expected transmissions from the outer reaches of the universe. 

The most surprising one occurs quite early on, as there is a brief window where the performance feels like an ancient ritualistic dance, as the foursome’s palette is pared down to little more than bells and an Irish frame drum. That stage of the piece’s evolution is admittedly short-lived, however, as the ensemble soon finds their way into some even more unfamiliar vistas. Moments later, for example, it sounds like a cartoon robot is falling down a flight of stairs as a churning bed of guitar noise howls and a tight formation of jet fighters strafes the neighborhood.

Other times, the endlessly shifting cacophony resembles musique concrète, a roomful of strange and clattering mechanized installations, air raid sirens, or a violently distorted public address system getting sucked into another dimension. There are also some moments in which the quartet sound exactly like My Cat is an Alien, but the best possible version of it, approximately an even more nightmarish version of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in which scores of disturbed and jabbering memory-ghosts emerge from the walls all at once.

The only caveat with this album’s adventurously shifting trajectory is that it unavoidably carries some significant instability and ephemerality along with it: there are definitely some passages that I wish had lingered and evolved much longer before being subsumed by the next wave. That tends to comes with the territory in any four-way improvisation though, so the important thing is whether or not the rewards are significant enough to counterbalance that tendency. In the case of XX Anniversary, I would emphatically say that they are: Montera and Ranaldo steer the Opalios into some truly fascinating territory that they never would have gotten to on their own. 

In fact, there are a handful of themes that could easily form the core of their own full-length albums if Maurizio and Roberto had any interest at all in revisiting or cannibalizing their past work. Of course, they do not, so the most beautiful moments on XX Anniversary are exactly that: flashes of brilliance documented at their moment of conception, but destined to never appear again in any other form. 

For the most part, it is the sheer number of such moments that make this performance a compelling and one-of-a-kind listening experience. Beyond that, I quite enjoyed some of the more unfamiliar elements and juxtapositions that found their way into this album, such the acoustic percussion or the way that Roberto’s rattling and broken-sounding “self-made double-bodied string instrument” blended with the guitar noise of his collaborators. XX Anniversary does not quite offer the same pleasures as some of MCIAA’s more focused and sustained plunges into the lysergic depths, but this alternative course is quite a satisfying experience in its own right. I wish I lived closer to Torino.

Samples can be found here.

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My Cat is an Alien, “Spiritual Noise, Vol. 2” (Antigravitational, 2019)

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Earlier this year, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio debuted an ambitious new phase of their long-running My Cat is an Alien project with Spiritual Noise. Vol. I. Appropriately, this sequel is a continuation of that vein, but there is no such thing as a predictable linear progression in the Opalios’ universe: each fresh album is like a veil being pulled back to reveal an otherworldly and deeply hallucinatory vista quite unlike anything anyone else has ever recorded. In fact, this project calls to mind a lonely satellite that just keeps drifting deeper and deeper beyond our solar system, sporadically sending back increasingly haunted and alien images that have no earthly analog. 

Naturally, music this unapologetically outré is an acquired taste that can challenge even the most adventurous ears, as there are no recognizable reference points or even nods to Earth-bound modality, but the closing “Silver Glimpses of Infinity” is the closest that the duo have come to comparative accessibility in years…probably. It is equally likely that listening to so many MCIAA albums has irrevocably rewired my brain at this point and I am now fully desensitized to the more queasy and reality-dissolving elements of their aesthetic. Either way, it is still quite an amazing piece.

As is established tradition, this latest installment of Spiritual Noise documents a series of “instantaneous compositions” performed at the Opalios’ studio in the Alps. If My Cat is an Alien were a more conventional project, I would translate that as “improvisations,” but “channelings” feels far more apt in this case. I do not get the sense that the two brothers are consciously playing off of each other’s contributions (no one would mistake this for jazz), yet there is an uncanny sense that Maurizio and Roberto achieved some kind of shared trance state and that their actions were unconsciously in harmony because they tapped into the same cosmic vibrations or ur-mind.

I suppose that is quite an accurate summation of the duo’s appeal in general, as each of their albums is essentially a dispatch from an altered state that only the Opalios have managed to achieve and the sheer otherness of it can be absolutely mesmerizing. The shape, scope, and emotional contours of that hallucinatory landscape can vary quite a bit from album to album, however, even though the Opalios’ palette consists largely of just Roberto’s bleary and disorienting cooing, some space toys, and a small arsenal of homemade or repurposed gear. With this album, the driving force is an uncharacteristically rhythmic one, as Roberto plays a “modified analog drum machine.” In fact, the art edition of the album includes a bonus track that is essentially a clicking, popping, and phase-shifting rhythm experiment that feels like a weirdly hypnotic and infinite vinyl run-off groove.

The three pieces from the regular album have a similarly clattering and rickety backdrop, but they are vibrantly fleshed out with Roberto’s unsettling vocal haze, buzzing electronics, and a disorienting host of lysergic effects. Maurizio is credited with playing a “self-made double-bodied string instrument” as well, though I am hard-pressed to tell which sounds are coming from that and which ones originate from the duo’s electronics. Of course, trying to figure out where each individual sound comes from is generally a fool’s game with My Cat is an Alien, as everything swirls together into a smeared, twinkling, and uneasily dissonant miasma by design. Each of these three pieces actually feels like a variation of the same mind-warping, cosmic miasma, in fact, but each one is an ingenious deconstruction akin to heavy outsider dub.

The central motif in each case can be best summarized as a buzzing bass throb slowly moving through a supernatural fog of eerie vocals and queasy sustained tones that evoke glimmering, malevolent stars. The opening “Rage and Beatitude of Pain” is the most visceral of the three incarnations, as its phantasmagoric reverie is enhanced with distorted bass tones, roiling swells of tape hiss, and reverberant metallic clangs.

The lengthier “As Meteors Before Disintegration” then strips away all of the bottom end and sharp edges to leave only a sustained floating nightmare of dissonant harmonies. The final piece, “Silver Glimpse of Infinity,” lies somewhere between those two divergent poles, slowly converging into a slow-motion rhythm of corroded, stuttering bass thrum and a looping melodic fragment of electronic buzzes. It is quite a wonderfully hypnotic and slow-burning piece and the Opalios make the most out of its potential by enhancing it with a host of gibbering and fluttering sounds that resemble field recordings from an extra-dimensional jungle.

While the sheer otherness and boundless imagination of MCIAA’s vision is the primary draw, there is a second (and arguably more substantial) appeal in the immersive, reality-distorting vividness of the spell that the Opalios cast with that vision. As such, there is an endless push and pull between focusing/distilling their deep space lysergia for maximum impact versus expanding it into an epic mind-melting plunge into sustained sensory saturation. Both sides can be wonderful, but I am especially fond of the latter, as experiencing an album like Psycho-System feels akin to stumbling out of a sweat lodge after experiencing a divine revelation.

As a result, the Opalios’ recent run of shorter albums tend to leave me wanting more, but they offer a different kind of pleasure that does not consume a significant chunk of my day. Which, of course, means that albums like Spiritual Noise, Vol. II are considerably better-suited for repeat listening than their more sprawling predecessors (and presumably much less intimidating for the unindoctrinated as well). In that regard, this installment of Spiritual Noise makes a fine addition to the Opalios’ current hot streak and adds one more stone-cold classic to their oeuvre in the form of “Silver Glimpse of infinity.”

Samples can be found here.

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My Cat is an Alien, “Spiritual Noise, Vol. I” (Antigravitational, 2019)

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My Cat is an Alien has always been very much an “outsider art” phenomenon, as the Opalio brothers have spent the last two decades tirelessly conjuring and reshaping a hermetic alternate reality replete with its own unique philosophy and cosmology. In the process, they have released some truly original and beguiling auditory dispatches from their remote home in the Alps, but music is just one part of their larger vision and that vision has drawn increasing interest from the art world. For this latest release, the brothers unveil a new collaborative imprint with gallerist and publisher Marco Contini that seeks to bring the various threads of the their artistry together into a focused and harmonious whole. That endeavor is off to an excellent start, as Spiritual Noise is quite an impressive achievement as an art object. It is also an excellent album, as each of the two lengthy pieces unveils a fresh new facet of the duo’s deep space trance states.

The opening “Spiritual Apocalypse” unquestionably earns at least half of its title, as it sounds like a vast, shambling intergalactic entity trudging slowly across space and time. If I were ever to accidentally reawaken one of the Old Ones by foolishly reading a cursed incantation from The Necronomicon aloud, I would definitely expect to hear sounds in a very similar vein right before the sun was blotted out and the screaming began. Uncharacteristically, “Spiritual Apocalypse” is a very percussion-driven piece, as its cumulative power centers around a slow yet relentless rhythm of seismic thuds and their shuddering aftermath. 

There is a bit more to the piece than just the steady approach of a world-eating juggernaut, however, as bits of structure gradually start to emerge from the miasma of deep throbs and eerily harmonizing layers of warbling, spectral vocals. Some additional entropy creeps into the scene as well, as the aftershocks seem to feed back into each other to create a host of new echoes and reverberations. Those slow and seamless transformations beautifully set the stage for quite a brilliant final act. In the piece’s last five minutes, the slow-burning escalation of tension and dread transcendentally blossoms into a darkly lysergic feast of buzzing synth tones, feedback whines, and the gorgeously wounded, warped ripples of some homemade guitar-like instrument. I am tempted to describe it as something like “pure phantasmagoric brilliance,” but it is far too broken-sounding and unsettling to be considered “pure” anything. I will grudgingly settle for “impure phantasmagoric brilliance” instead.

While Maurizio and Roberto tone down the cosmic horror quite a bit for the album’s second half, “Noise Deliverance” does share its predecessor’s focus on rhythm to some degree. In fact, it sounds weirdly dub-influenced, as the skipping pulse resembles the crackles of vinyl looped and fed through some effects pedals. The other similarity between the two pieces is Roberto’s omnipresent haze of ghostly cooing vocals. The mood and trajectory of “Noise Deliverance” are quite a bit different than “Spiritual Apocalypse,” however, as it feels like I am slowly becoming submerged into swirling, disorienting, and vividly phantasmal pool of bizarre and ravaged sounds. 

The unlikely heart of the piece lies in an obsessively see-sawing motif of strangled feedback buzzes. It is both naggingly insistent and uncomfortably dissonant, but I found myself mentally clinging to it like a life-preserver as the only reliably constant feature in a chaotic and unfamiliar landscape of chirping and whooshing space toys. It is the sort of intense and difficult listening experience that few others artists could possibly get away with: the Opalios drop me the middle of a viscerally queasy and harrowing nightmare, but it is such a richly textured and vibrantly alive one that I cannot turn away from it.

After regularly immersing myself in the otherworldly vision of My Cat is an Alien for the last several years, I sometimes forget how incredibly far beyond recognizable, earthbound sounds the Opalios have traveled in their twenty years of recording. Aside from Roberto’s spectral signature vocals, Spiritual Noise feels like it could have been crafted almost entirely from haunting and mysterious transmissions picked up by the SETI institute.

That said, the Opalios’ unique approach to melody and harmony is even more impressive than their unique choice of sounds. They have somehow managed to erase the entire accumulated musical wisdom of human civilization from their minds in order to start fresh with a radically different sensibility all their own.That is an incredible feat in general, but it is even more remarkable that something actually listenable emerged from such a categorical rejection of all things familiar to human ears. There are no recognizable chords, there are no recognizable scales (Western or Eastern), there are no recognizable instruments, and there are absolutely no apparent influences from other artists. 

Obviously, all of those things are true for quite a lot of MCIAA releases, but that has not stopped Roberto and Maurizio from tirelessly honing and perfecting their vision. That is what makes Spiritual Noise a significant new entry in MCIAA’s extensive discography. My favorite albums have always been their massive, reality-dissolving epics like Psycho-System and Abstract Expressionism for the Ears, but this release continues the trend of The Dance of Oneirism towards a more distilled dose that retains roughly the same power. Both of these pieces (especially “Noise Deliverance”) are mind-bombs detonated with surgical precision, seemingly firing up long-dormant synapses in hopes of processing the unexpected onslaught of bizarre auditory stimuli and the similarly unfamiliar sensations they trigger. Record store shelves are full of well-meaning bearded men wielding tablas and tamburas, hellbent on prying open my third eye or kicking down my doors of perception. Some of them have made some absolutely wonderful albums, but none have gone as far as My Cat is an Alien.

Samples can be found here.