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My Cat Is An Alien/Talweg “The Secret of the Space Bubble / > Eternal Beyond > IV” (Opax/Elliptical Noise/Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers!, 2025)

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This latest opus from the Opalio brothers is a pair of single-sided art LPs devoted to two very different performances featuring the duo’s longtime collaborator Joëlle Vinciarelli (Talweg/La Morte Young). In classic Opalio fashion, The Secret of the Space Bubble was inspired by a vision that Roberto had of four astronauts performing in zero gravity. 

The lucky fourth astronaut in this case is Talweg’s other half (Eric Lombaert) and the combination of his virtuosic freeform drumming with Vinciarelli’s strangled flugelhorn partially steers things in a more Sun Ra-esque spaced-out free jazz direction than usual. There are, however, some other unique factors in play, as the Opalios exclusively used Vinciarelli’s collection of unusual and ancient instruments rather than their usual gear. Also, it was recorded using only two ambient mics to create a “vortex of sound” where all of the sounds and their reverberations were “centrifuged/blended together” to achieve the necessary “space bubble” effect.

Even by MCIAA standards, it is quite a challenging and far out affair, as the aforementioned space jazz uneasily coexists with folk horror flutes, shimmering chimes, an inventively repurposed clock, and wordless vocals that resemble a bizarre experimental opera. At its best, it sounds like an antique clock shop has become possessed by the spirit of an alien gamelan ensemble, which is a quite mesmerizing environment to find oneself in. I especially loved the jangling and echoing metal sounds on this one. In fact, they almost make me wish that the individual sounds could be handed off to a team like Holy Tongue & Shackleton to be anchored by a heavy dub bassline, but that kind of accessibility is simply not on the alien agenda.

The ensemble of intrepid psychonauts is reduced to a trio for the fourth installment of the decade-spanning “Eternal Beyond” collaboration, which draws its inspiration from both Georges Bataille’s philosophical writings and Tibetan Buddhism. Unsurprisingly, I could not begin to tell you how those forces ultimately shaped the direction of the piece, but the three artists did pare down their instrumental palette to just an “antique upright piano soundboard,” Vinciarelli’s trumpet, and the usual expected alientronics. 

Roberto’s wordless vocals again add an otherworldly operatic element to the performance, but the rest of the piece feels like massive, rusted metal strings being engulfed in a storm of electromagnetic interference. That is merely the appetizer though, as the whole cacophony soon gets sucked into a hissing and whooshing deep space maelstrom of trippy electronic bloops and gibbering extradimensional jungle sounds wrested from Joëlle’s aggressively misused trumpet.

Needless to say, it is quite an impressively intense and unhinged piece, which makes it a very fitting companion for The Secret of the Space Bubble despite the differing lineups. Given that, this double LP would make a very difficult and indulgent entry point for the curious, but longtime fans will understand that that is simply the price of admission for a synapse-frying experience like nothing else on earth. For those out there who have been wondering how much deeper into the uncharted outer limits of psychedelia the Opalios could possibly go, however, these two albums provide quite an emphatic answer.  

Listen here.       

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My Cat Is An Alien, “The Sky With Broken Arms – Vol.II” (Elliptical Noise/Aukam Records, 2024)

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Back in 2018, the Opalio brothers released The Sky With Broken Arms, an album which was partially inspired by the surface noise on a bunch of Roberto’s records that had been mysteriously ravaged by oxidation. On its newly released sequel, the sounds of crackling vinyl dutifully make their return, but that feature is now a bit eclipsed by a different and new twist, as Maurizio plays recognizable electric guitar and dabbles in more earthly melodies and scales than he usually does. Whether that constitutes a softening or an enhancement of the MCIAA ethos is in the ear of the beholder, I suppose, but I personally enjoy the grounding contrast between the earthly and the otherworldly and I am not actually sure that the Opalios could meaningfully go further into the outer limits than they already have (though I do expect to be proven very wrong in that regard by some future release). In any case, The Sky With Broken Arms Vol. II is still a characteristically excellent psychotropic deep-space mindfuck and its two longform pieces are instant MCIAA classics (and if there was ever a MCIAA album that could draw in the more adventurous fans of space rock/psych bands like Flying Saucer Attack, this is probably it).

The opening “Empty Spaces Of Swirling Awareness” is the first of the album’s two excellent extended plunges into outsider psychedelia heaven, though its modest beginning deceptively provides no hint of what is to come. To my ears, it sounds like Maurizio sat down to perform a meditative ambient guitar reverie based on a simple, delicate melody of chiming single notes over a lazily oscillating drone. Unfortunately, however, someone accidentally left an interdimensional portal open nearby, so when he played back the tape, he discovered that he had actually been performing a duet with a submerged-sounding maelstrom of squirming, squelching, and gibbering entropy. In more concrete terms, that probably means that Roberto was going wild with the duo’s unique arsenal of self-built alientronics, which in this case approximate an incompletely dubbed-over tape of a turntablist played at the wrong speed and filtered through an aggressively misused vibrato pedal. Eventually, Maurizio’s guitar heads into more discordant territory as well, which results in a shapeshifting mindbomb that alternately resembles a squall of honking and seasick seagulls, a psychotic breakdown in a toy store at Christmastime, and a candy colored descent into a viscous altered state populated by flickering and sputtering phantoms. In short, it is prime MCIAA territory. The brief interlude that follows is lovely too, as backwards melodies and chiming arpeggios tumble over each other as a crackling subterranean rumble undulates and churns below.

The album’s second half is consumed almost entirely by the album’s other queasily psychotropic tour de force: “New Horizons Out Of Collapsed Void.” It deceptively opens in somewhat familiar territory with the requisite vinyl crackle and eerily quivering alientronics, but soon transforms into something quite revelatory, as Maurizio begins casually plucking out circular arpeggios on his guitar while the hallucinatory haze steadily intensifies. At its peak, the piece evokes the tableau of a solitary man quietly playing guitar in front of a campfire beneath a vast, open sky that has blossomed into a spectacularly vivid aurora borealis that also seems to be alive and sentient. Truly, no one does “cosmic immensity” better than My Cat Is An Alien. That said, the extended duration coupled with the Opalios’ “spontaneous composition” approach means that some stretches are more “locked in” than others, but the addition of strummed chords and something approximating a faulty cosmic radio dial in search of a divine frequency breathe plenty of fresh life into the piece’s second half.

Tragically, the constraints of the vinyl format limit the closing “Postlude: Synchronization Of Light” to a mere three minutes, but they are at least three absolutely gorgeous minutes as delicately tumbling melodies twinkle and ripple in a lysergic soup of smearing electronics, whooshes, crackles, and submerged rumble. As far as closing statements go, it is a hard one to top, as it feels like the alien equivalent of riding off into the sunset, which lies somewhere between “slowly sinking into a gently rippling sea of bliss” and “dissolving into pure light.”  I am tempted to demand that someone commission the Opalios to do a live soundtrack to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris immediately, but it would probably be closer to the mark to say that if a psychedelic and sentient dream-harvesting ocean made an album, it would probably sound a lot like this. In short, this is yet another endlessly fascinating and unique My Cat Is An Alien album (and an unusually accessible one at that).

Listen here.

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My Cat Is An Alien, “Spiritual Noise — RINASCIMENTO” (Elliptical Noise, 2023)

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The latest ambitious durational epic from the Opalio brothers is thankfully not nearly as daunting as its 15-disc physical form suggests, as RINASCIMENTO (“Renaissance”) is composed of 15 movements of varying lengths ranging from 5 to 40 minutes. The reasoning behind the unusual format is arguably twofold, as the Opalios’ belief that “each sound claims its own space” is extended to dedicate a full disc to each movement and listeners are invited to “subvert the order” to make use of “random/chance operation à la Cage.” There is an additional piece to the puzzle as well, however, as the handcrafted box and CD-R format were deliberately chosen as a return to MCIAA’s “radical DIY” origins and as a pointed commentary on underground music’s current maddening dependence on vinyl pressing plants and predatory corporations.

Unsurprisingly, the primary appeal of RINASCIMENTO is the same as that of every other multi-hour MCIAA tour de force: it is a sustained and mind-altering plunge into otherworldly psychedelia that abandons nearly all earthbound notions of harmony, melody, structure, and instrumentation (and that is not an exaggeration). While the brothers’ sonic palette will be a familiar one for longtime MCIAA fans (being a two-person real-time “spontaneous composition” project has some limitations), RINASCIMENTO is nevertheless one hell of a statement, as it collects the duo’s most revelatory flashes of inspiration from an entire year of recordings (several of which capture the duo in peak longform form).

The first movement of this 5 ½ hour epic is a deceptively brief and harsh one, as a miasma of tape hiss, whines, and jangling metal sounds call to mind someone slowly dragging a mass of metal cans (“just married!”) around a burst pipe in a queasy swirl of alien harmonies and gibbering electronics. In theory, the fifteenth and final movement (smoldering feedback slowly streaking over thumping ritualistic percussion amidst a fog of cooing voices) is not radically different from that opening piece, but it certainly FEELS very different when it eventually comes because it is impossible to listen to 5+ hours of MCIAA without feeling like one’s mind has been fundamentally transformed in some way by the sustained plunge into the Opalio’s smeared, unnerving, and otherworldly vision. That said, some of the longer movements can achieve a similar effect in drastically reduced time on their own.

Given the fact that the Opalios are playing everything in real time spontaneously, the strongest movements feel akin to witnessing a solar eclipse: it takes a while for all of the moving parts to lock into the right places, but the spectacle can be quite transcendent once the threshold is finally reached. To my ears, RINASCIMENTO starts to truly catch fire around the fourth movement (“Revenge Of Native Aliens”) and reaches its zenith somewhere between the eighth and tenth movements, but there are plenty of wild deep space mindfucks on either side of that stretch. For example, the second movement fleetingly calls to mind a flock of honking psychedelic birds disrupting a holodeck beach trip, while the fourth movement evokes the feeling of slowly sinking in a space bog while being serenaded by a lysergic chorus of extradimensional frogs and crickets.

That fourth movement kicks off a sustained and increasingly inspired run of highlights, but the top-tier consciousness-expanding mindbombs are movements six, eight, nine, and ten. In “Fury Of The Alien Gods,” for example, it sounds like a free jazz drummer is consumed by a time-bending supernatural haze while jamming with an interplanetary distress signal.

Elsewhere, “Aliencentricism” passes through stages evoking everything from “flock of birds enveloping an extraterrestrial kinetic metal sculpture” to “a field of rusted metal wires vibrates in the wind while an insistent distress signal endlessly reverberates around the ruins of an abandoned space colony.” “Matter Becomes Spirit,” on the other hand, approximates some kind of slow-motion industrial dub, as a series of erratically timed metal clanks shudders and echoes beneath a smoldering alien melody of smeared beeps that sounds like the death song of a burning space station. “Alienophony” also evokes a looping distress signal in an abandoned place, but as a connoisseur of the genre, I can confidently report that it has an entirely different character this time around (“squirming and squelching short wave radio transmissions in blizzard-ravaged arctic outpost”).

The descent back to earth from those peaks is a gradual one, however, as the journey has a few more memorable stops before the final station (for example, “The New Verb” sounds like a doomed astronaut trying to navigate through a supernatural windstorm with unreliably bending and warping sonar pings). While the wealth of highlights here is admittedly quite a treat, it is worth noting that MCIAA is one of the rare projects in which the varying appeal of individual compositions is distantly secondary to the overall vision, as one does not need to get very deep into RINASCIMENTO (or just about any other MCIAA albums) to reach one of two conclusions. One of those conclusions is probably “I need to turn this off because this nerve-jangling, unearthly cacophony is burrowing into my mind and rapidly driving me insane,” but the other one is “this unearthly cacophony is burrowing into my mind like absolutely nothing else that I have ever heard and I love it.”

For those that fall into the latter camp, a fresh durational monster from the Opalios is a legitimate event and the fact that there are several highlight reel-level pieces here is just further delicious icing on an already wonderful and unique cake. The Opalios are not wrong in their claim that RINASCIMENTO is future music happening in the present, as their complete rejection of contemporary music’s established framework unquestionably represents at least ONE possible future. Whether or not it represents THE future remains to be seen, yet landmark MCIAA releases like this one are objectively as forward-thinking as many previous innovations that have provocatively challenged the way that people understand, experience, and appreciate organized sound (such as Just Intonation, chromaticism, John Cage’s use of the I Ching, or the birth of noise).

Listen here.

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My Cat is an Alien, “Music for Phantoms (IV)” (Elliptical Noise/Opax, 2022)

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The Opalio brothers have been reliably surprising me with adventurous detours and evolutions for years, but this latest album is a creative leap into even more unexpected territory than usual.  In some ways, that can be attributed to the unusually sparse gear involved (two glockenspiels and a single condenser microphone), which makes it quite a bit easier on the ears than usual for the dissonance-averse.  In fact, I would not even have immediately guessed that this was an MCIAA album if I had first heard it while blindfolded.  On a deeper level, however, this may very well be one of the duo’s defining statements (and a sneakily brilliant one at that).  

The Opalios long ago cast aside earthly melodies, harmonies, and instruments in their journey into the furthest regions of the atonal, psychedelic cosmos, so I would be hard pressed to think of something even more outré for the next phase.  As it turns out, however, I would have been asking the wrong question altogether, as the Opalios nimbly sidestepped that stylistic challenge and opted for something far cooler than another intensification of their characteristic otherworldliness: they dissolved into pure light (musically, at least).  Put in their own words, this album represents “the blinding darkness coming from a dying flame and a new light not yet discernible on an increasingly undefined horizon.”  Given how rampant dying flames and undefined horizons are these days, Music for Phantoms (IV) feels uncannily tapped into the earthly zeitgeist (particularly for a duo who frequently seem to exist in an alternate dimension).

In characteristically colorful fashion, the Opalios describe the genesis of Music for Phantoms (IV) thusly: “recorded in the middle of the night…in the Western Alps with only 2 glockenspiels, wordless vocals and a single condenser microphone to capture the essence of the screaming silence.”  Naturally, the cover art thematically complements that vision, as it comes from a Polaroid that abstractly captured a light installation that the brothers dragged through the snow at night (few artists are as tirelessly committed to finding and creating otherworldly beauty, magic, and poetry as the Opalio brothers).  

While nearly everything about this album feels fresh, inventive, and heartfelt, it is nominally a continuation of a side project that began in 2007 and last surfaced a decade ago.  Notably, this album is a radically different animal than the first three installments in both tone and instrumentation, but it does share the series’ exclusive commitment to acoustic sounds.  Even acoustic sounds can be very weird in the hands of the Opalios, however, as evidenced by the first two minutes of the opening “Traces of Shooting Stars” (it calls to mind a bunch of marbles dropped on a metal platter).  That is admittedly an enigmatic and curious way to kick off an album this tenderly beautiful, but absolutely everything that follows is quietly and mesmerizingly sublime.  

Given the album’s hyper-minimal instrumentation, its three pieces all feel roughly cut from the same cloth, but they each have their own distinctive character.  In “traces of shooting stars,” for example, it sounds like an enchanted music box has become untethered from the rigidity of time signatures and drifted into a reverie of dreamlike, gossamer melody.  The following “ocean of iridescent silence,” on the other hand, takes a more shimmering and rippling approach, as the endlessly sweeping glockenspiel runs leave a quivering haze of celestial bliss in their wake.  

The closing “estranging analog morphologies” initially feels quite similar (sweeping cascades of notes leave behind a blurred and beautiful vapor trail), but it steadily becomes more structured and percussive before unexpectedly dissolving into a quietly lovely and hymn-like final act.  It was a genuine surprise to hear Roberto’s voice used in such a naked and melodic way.  I am reluctant to use the word “ambient” to describe the overall feel of Music for Phantoms (IV), as it is constructed from Coltrane-esque sheets of sound, but it does evoke a pleasant state of suspended animation and strong sense of place: this album makes me feel like I have just stepped out of my remote mountain cabin to take in a gorgeously hallucinatory canopy of swirling and shimmering stars.  

I cannot think of any other album that successfully casts a similar spell and it is quite a lovely and immersive place to linger, so Music for Phantoms (IV) will probably connect with a hell of a lot more people than My Cat is an Alien’s more characteristically challenging vision.  It certainly deserves to reach a lot of new ears, as it feel like one of the strongest and most focused albums of the Opalios’ career.  

Samples can be found here.

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My Cat Is An Alien & Joëlle Vinciarelli, “Eternal Beyond III” (Elliptical Noise/Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!, 2021)

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This is the third and final installment of the Opalio brothers’ wild and oft-brilliant collaborations with Talweg/La Morte Young’s Joëlle Vinciarelli, as “according to arcane, ancient cultures, sometimes things must come to an end to be ‘Eternal.'” While something wonderful tends to happen just about every single time these three artists convene, this Arthur Rimbaud-inspired installment is the one that the Opalios personally consider the best of the series (at the moment, at least). 

I do not think I could choose a favorite album from the trilogy, but the opening “Eternal Fanfare for the Warriors” is definitely one of my favorite MCIAA-related pieces to date. While the trio are currently unsure whether the conclusion of the trilogy is their collaborative swansong or just one phase in their continuing evolution, they can safely lay claim to having conjured some of the most visceral and unique sounds to reach my ears in recent memory. Vinciarelli’s intensity and unusual collection of instruments is a perfect foil (and grounding force) for the Opalios’ otherworldly psychedelia.

This album combines two separate sessions recorded in Vinciarelli’s studio in the French Alps, which is notable because 2018’s two-part “Eternal Éternité” was spontaneously composed in a very different world than “Eternal Fanfare for the Warriors” (which dates from May 2020). On one level, that makes a lot of sense, as “Eternal Fanfare” has a certain go-for-broke intensity that befits such dark and troubling times, yet that interpretation cannot hold up in light of the similarly feral second half of “Eternal Éternité.” 

In any case, both pieces are memorable for both their volcanic ferocity and their expanded sound palette (as far out as they are, the Opalios’ vision inarguably features some eternally recurring and instantly recognizable elements). In the case of “Eternal Fanfare,” however, the expected space ritual features a big surprise in the form of strangled trumpet squawking from Vinciarelli (along with some similarly unexpected sleigh bells from Maurizio). It is the exquisite feel of an ancient war procession passing through a rip in the dimensional fabric for a hissing, bleary, and lysergically smeared adventure into the unknown.

Naturally, the first half “Eternal Éternité” offers no respite at all from the cosmic phantasmagoria, as the album only becomes more of a harrowing mindfuck and there are no longer any friendly or familiar sounds like trumpets and sleigh bells to provide solid ground: just fifteen unnerving and unrepentant minutes of howling, dissonantly harmonized drones rising and falling. As radical art, it is admittedly impressive, but I prefer the more human-sounding terrain of the second half (like the dissonance-averse coward that I am). 

“Eternal Éternité (Pt. 2)” initially returns to more traditional alien fare (Roberto’s wordless vocalizations, spacey electronics, and something that sounds like an out-of-tune zither), but Vinciarelli soon joins in with some vocal drones akin to Tuvan throat singing. As the layers accumulate, however, it blossoms into something that resembles an even more nightmarish version of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in which the protagonist violently scrabbles at a piano soundboard while being sucked into a roiling maelstrom of static. In short, great stuff (as always). While I am not sure I have a strong enough constitution to revisit the first part of “Eternal Éternité” any time soon, Eternal Beyond III handily meets my criteria for prime My Cat is an Alien: a pair of great pieces, a few new stylistic elements, and the kind of mind-melting deep space cacophony that only the Opalios can channel.

Samples can be found here.

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My Cat is an Alien with Joëlle Vinciarelli, “Eternal Beyond II” (Elliptical Noise/Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!/Opax, 2022)

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The Opalio brothers have had quite an impressive history of adventurous collaborations over the years, as they have been joined by many of the most iconic figures in underground music, as well as an inspired array of interesting folks that I had not previously encountered. Naturally, a number of those unions have yielded wonderful results, but one of my favorites was the Opalios’ pairing with Talweg/La Morte Young’s Joëlle Vinciarelli for 2016’s Eternal Beyond. 

Several other artists have gamely and effectively adapted themselves to the brothers’ unique aesthetic and working method over the years, yet Vinciarelli is the one who was most successful at finding and filling a space that made the collaboration feel like something more than the mere sum of its parts. More specifically, she brings some welcome bite and visceral intensity to the Opalios’ phantasmagoric and alien reveries. Consequently, I am absolutely thrilled to report that this trio has now become a recurring project and that Eternal Beyond II is every good as its predecessor (if not even better).

I have not delved very deeply into Joëlle Vinciarelli’s work in Talweg at this point, but I have heard enough to grasp that “black metal” is a woefully inadequate and misleading term for her art. In fact, nothing about Talweg (or Vinciarelli) is remotely conventional at all, which is perhaps why she makes such a perfect foil for her fellow Alps-dwellers. In her own way, she is every bit as genre-defying and radical as the Opalios, but the key difference is that she is driven towards earthy, timeless, and primal forces rather than looking towards the stars for inspiration. 

Consequently, the improbable collision of Vinciarelli’s “Cro-Magnon grunt and cultic energies” with the Opalios’ mind-melting, deep space lysergia is a perfect, unholy union, enhancing the brothers’ smeared and disorienting psychedelia with a healthy dose of seismic, elemental power. That said, it seems like Vinciarelli also brings out some of those normally latent elements in the Opalios themselves, as the churning and jangling intensity of the opening “Eternal Rage Against the Dying of the Light” is driven primarily by the brothers’ violent misuse of an “antique upright piano soundboard.”

It is truly impressive that Maurizio and Roberto managed to unleash such an apocalyptic cacophony in real-time, as the crescendo of “Eternal Rage” sounds like a heaving maelstrom of countless rusted steel strings being viciously attacked at once. There are a lot of other great and unexpected elements to the piece as well, however, ranging from sharp metallic scrapes to looping, angelic vocal melodies. And, of course, there are also the expected elements: disorienting falsetto vocal drones, buzzing electronics, and howling eruptions of noise.Happily, all of those various threads coexist quite organically and seamlessly, resembling an inspired collision of an ancient throat-singing ritual, a pack of howling wolves, and a goddamn supernova. Unsurprisingly, those ingredients make for quite a potent cocktail and “Eternal Rage” easily ranks among the best MCIAA pieces in recent memory.

The album’s shorter second piece is considerably less extreme, as it is largely centered on the chiming of an “old pendulum clock mechanism.” In fact, once Vinciarelli’s melodic, wordless vocals appear, “Eternal Ectoplasmic Communication” almost feels like a lullaby of sorts. That resemblance does not last particularly long, however, as that melody gradually wanders off course as queasily lingering electronics and Maurizio’s broken-sounding self-made string instrument creep in to curdle the idyll. The overall experience feels akin to waking up in an unfamiliar house to find a supernatural fog slowly rolling out of a haunted antique clock.

While it never quite catches fire or builds towards anything more substantial, it casts quite an effective spell of seething uneasiness and the strangely warbling vocals call to mind a beloved stuffed animal that is trying desperately to warn me of imminent peril, but is too paralyzed with fear to do anything but gibber helplessly. While it is quite a solid and likable piece, the earlier “Eternal Rage” unavoidably steals the show on Eternal Beyond II, as it beautifully transcends everything I usually expect from MCIAA. “Eternal Ectoplasmic Communication,” on the other hand, feels a bit more familiar (and considerably less apocalyptic).

It is hard to explain why I love the Opalio brothers’ albums with Vinciarelli so much without making it sounds like their other albums are in some way lacking, but I will try anyway: a “normal” My Cat Is An Alien album is like a window into someone else’s deeply weird and inscrutable dream (and I can think of no one else who reliably conjures up otherworldly vistas as strange and absorbing as those of the Opalios). When Vinciarelli is involved, however, it feels like that dream state is tenuously anchored to a recognizable physical world rather than a straight-up free fall into a bottomless rabbit hole of swirling, nightmarish unreality.

Plunging into that altered state is always a compelling experience, but it is a more profound and dynamic one when I can still see distant vestiges of what I left behind (nods to conventional scales, scraping metal, guttural voices). In essence, it is a matter of grounding and contrast. No one does deep space psychedelia better than My Cat is an Alien, but with Eternal Beyond II, the Opalios and Vinciarelli evoke something significantly different that I cannot find anywhere else: the singular collision of the imagined past versus the imagined future, the spectral versus the corporeal, and flesh-and-blood humanity versus the unknowable, abstract vastness of the cosmos.

Samples can be found here.

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Roberto Opalio, “Once you’ll touch the sky you will never return to dust” (Elliptical Noise, 2018)

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Seemingly birthed from the same fascination with vinyl surface noise as The Sky With Broken Arms, Roberto Opalio’s solo companion piece is perhaps even more unique and consciousness-expanding than its sister. It is also unexpectedly varied and weirdly beautiful at times, blurring together the usual deep-space lysergia with viscerally unnerving dissonances and hypnotically looping crackles and pops. While those added touches certainly delight me, this album is unmistakably and absolutely Opalio-esque to its core, standing as one of the most sharply realized and distilled releases in the MCIAA oeuvre. If The Sky With Broken Arms is a brief glimpse into a hypnotically otherworldly scene, Once You’ll Touch The Sky is a phantasmal travelogue of the troubled dreams that follow in its wake.

In the eternally shifting cosmic fantasia of My Cat is an Alien, few things can ever be said to be normal or expected, but “Preludio” finds Roberto opening the album in relatively familiar territory, albeit only briefly. It is a curious sequencing decision, as the bleary haze of spectral vocal cooing and gently blooping and whooshing alientronics does nothing to prepare me for the sustained plunge into the swirling and hallucinatory altered reality that follows. Knowing the proud Opalio tradition of “spontaneous composition,” I am rather amazed at the scope, depth, and nuance of the title piece, as Roberto seamlessly transforms its shape again and again like an alien mirage.

In hindsight, I suspect “Preludio” exists solely because “Once You’ll Touch The Sky” plunges immediately into the lysergic depths rather than wading slowly in through the usual slow accumulation of loops. The opening theme roughly resembles organ drone, though Roberto seems to be playing a modified mini-keyboard through some pitch-shifting and wah-wah effects to weave an unsettling web of undulating and eerily harmonizing glissandi. That opening nicely illustrates an aspect of the Opalios’ work that I always enjoy: their approach to psychedelia is an uncompromisingly complete one, as their best work is an absolutely engulfing experience that provides no solid ground or recognizable reference points to get my bearings. It is not an entertainment—it is an ocean that I am dropped in and I am forced to give myself over to it and go where its tide takes me. In fact, there is no better metaphor for this album than submersion, as its slow transformations feel like being immersed in a viscous liquid that is continually morphing into new colors, textures, and sundry other sensory and extra-sensory phenomena.

Despite the album’s fundamental state of constant flux and celebration of queasily undulating textures and harmonies, its various threads occasionally converge into an oasis of dreamlike beauty. I would not necessarily describe the spell of this album as “nightmarish,” as there is no real sense of menace, yet the dream state it evokes is definitely an unsettling and unnervingly ambiguous one. As such, it can be quite striking and wonderful when the seemingly endless and impenetrable phantasmagoric mists of Roberto’s vision occasionally give way to a glimpse of heaven (such as the languorous and tenderly warbling reverie that starts to cohere around the 15-minute mark). Those glimpses are always elusive and short-lived, of course, but the fact that it can appear at any time is what makes this album such a complex and entrancing experience.

As lovely as the aforementioned interlude is, however, it becomes even more compelling once Roberto’s crackling and popping vinyl noise slowly creeps into the picture. Interestingly, that haplessly ravaged vinyl collection does not get a credit on this particular releases, so I believe Roberto is merely approximating its sound with his handmade shortwave receiver. In any case, he takes a different approach with crackle and sizzle here than he did on The Sky With Broken Arms, as it takes shape as kind of a slow, locked-groove-style pulse.There is considerably more happening than that though, as there are some fascinating microcosmic dynamics unfolding as well: the pops and scratches seems to be slightly out of phase and tumbling over one another. It is a truly wonderful bit of sorcery, completely stealing attention from the more overt motifs unfolding around it. It feels a lot like the sky opened up to slowly wash away the rest of the album with an unnaturally reverberating and purifying drizzle. That is a fine way to end an album.

As with all recent My Cat is an Alien releases, it feels hopelessly reductionist to view Once You’ll Touch The Sky as an album and even the fact that it is art feels somewhat beside the point. Instead, it is something more akin to a religious experience—not in a hyperbolic sense, but it is definitely a ritualistic event that can transform the energy in a room and strip away the veil of consciousness for a while. That said, sometimes the stars metaphorically line up perfectly to create an especially transcendent communion with the Opalios’ extra-dimensional plane of consciousness and this is one of those times.

Once You’ll Touch the Sky is one of the true gems in the MCIAA canon, as it is every bit as immersive and reality-dissolving as I would expect, but goes a bit deeper and further than usual in every sense. This is more than just a gateway into an alien dreamscape, as it has a clear arc that leads far beyond the starting point. Also, it feels like an unusually soulful and tender journey. I do not think I have ever described an album by the Opalios as soulful before, as subtle shades of emotion tend to get hopelessly eclipsed by the all-engulfing scope of their lysergic vision, but this album is understated and purposeful enough to let Roberto’s humanity seep into its ecstatic alien reverie.

Listen here.

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My Cat is an Alien, “The Sky With Broken Arms” (Elliptical Noise, 2018)

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This latest opus from the Opalio brothers continues their restlessly experimental hot streak, taking inspiration from a characteristically bizarre event: two years ago, Roberto discovered that a bunch of his records were corroded by an “inexplicable oxidation process.” After some time, he decided to listen to one of them anyway and found himself fascinated by the way the listening experience was transformed by the surface noise. Naturally, the instantaneous composition that resulted from that revelation is considerably more bizarre and idiosyncratic than a mere celebration of crackle and hiss, but the added layer of noise beautifully adds an evocative textural layer to The Sky With Broken Arms‘ sublime and eerily otherworldly reverie.

Every now and then, I come across an album that has uncannily perfect cover art that not only conveys exactly the tone of the album, but seems to exist as an absolutely crucial part of the whole. The Sky With Broken Arms is one such album, as Roberto Opalio’s blurred and mysterious photograph of a tree and a streetlight is a window into the similarly blurred and mysterious world that this blearily languorous longform piece inhabits. I should note that “longform” in this case means a mere 36 minutes, so this is actually a comparatively concise and distilled dose of the Opalio’s lysergic sorcery, given their recent run of double-, triple-, and sextuple-album epics. Aside from that brevity and the omnipresent crackle and hiss of Roberto’s ravaged vinyl, however, this release shares a lot of stylistic common ground with some of the Opalio’s more sustained plunges into deep-drone psychedelia. All of the expected elements (the alientronics; the eerily floating, wordless vocals; the surreal loops) are in place as always, yet The Sky With Broken Arms has its own very distinct character, as it paints an extremely vivid picture of a very specific scene (for me, at least).

If this album were a movie, it would be a grainy home video of a sleepy rural town at night: the streets are empty, the one stoplight gently sways in the wind, and the church bell in the center of town hollowly resonates, announcing the time. Something is not quite right, however, as the bell continues to calmly ring again and again long after it has passed any possible earthy hour: time seems to have either frozen, slowed, or gotten stuck in an endlessly looping moment. Also, the bell is not the only sound, as the very air itself seems to have come alive with a crackle that resembles the sparking of a downed power line. And it sounds like a nearby radio has suddenly come to life as well and is now picking up mysterious, swooping transmissions from unknown sources. In fact, it seems like the entire town has been completely enveloped in some kind of unexplained electromagnetic disturbance and I seem to be the only one awake to witness it.

Characteristically, things only get stranger from that point, as Broken Arms is essentially just one long, slow descent into escalating weirdness. First, Maurizio’s queasily rippling guitars make it feel like reality is dissolving into a dizzying fever dream. Then, Roberto’s unnervingly spectral vocals start to creep over the piece like a dense, lysergic fog. Or like a sickly green light emanating from a UFO hovering right above the town. Needless to say, there is nothing else on earth quite like this album (or like My Cat is an Alien). Ostensibly, this is music, but that feels like a hopelessly reductive term for the transcendent, reality-disrupting spell that the Opalios cast. This album is roughly as disorienting as unexpectedly waking up in another dimension. Or at the bottom of the sea.

I suppose there are other My Cat is an Alien albums that I like more than this one, but that kind of earthbound thinking truly misses the point of the Opalios’ artistry. A new MCIAA album is never just a fresh batch of songs—it is both a legitimate event and an invitation to share the Opalios’ hermetic, otherworldly headspace for a brief time. Notably, that headspace is never the same twice, as the Opalios’ music is an evolving ritual. It is quite remarkable how the brothers are able endlessly combine and rearrange their unconventional and minimal sound palette into new experiences with their own distinct personalities. Some albums are like a deep trance, some are like an extradimensional nightmare, some are like a plunge into the subconscious, and some make me feel like I am losing my goddamn grip on sanity. This one is a bit different, as it feels like living inside an especially haunting and surreal episode of The Twilight Zone. On one level, it is a bit less “alien” than some of the duo’s more expansive releases, but the few recognizable touches from our physical world arguably make it one of the Opalios’ more unnerving and striking releases to date, as the border separating reality from the Opalios’ darkly lysergic vision now feels ominously porous.

Listen here.

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My Cat is an Alien, “The Dance of Oneirism” (Backwards/Elliptical Noise, 2015)

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The Opalio Brothers have been on quite a hot streak in recent years, as both Psycho-System (2013) and Abstract Expressionism for the Ears (2014) were massive, tour de force plunges into hermetic, all-consuming, and completely otherworldly psychedelia. The Dance of Oneirism masterfully continues the distillation of MCIAA’s ever-evolving and singular vision, weaving its eerie, lysergic, and wonderfully disorienting spell in just under a hour (remarkably concise, given the duo’s history). As expected, it is yet another near-masterpiece of insular and visionary outsider genius and emphatically reaffirms my belief that absolutely nobody goes deeper or is more intent on scrambling minds than Roberto and Maurizio Opalio.

“Oneirism” is defined by the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary as “a dreamlike mental state experienced while awake,” which also seems like quite an apt description My Cat is an Alien’s career as a whole. Oneirism is basically their natural state, but now I guess there is metaphorical dancing involved as well. In any case, the oneirism on this particular album is induced primarily by Roberto Opalio’s self-made “alientronics,” which weave a queasily twinkling and buzzing web of cold electronic tones throughout the album. While there are ostensibly five different numbered pieces, The Dance of Oneirism is best understood and experienced as a whole, consisting of multiple spontaneously composed variations on a theme recorded over two days in the brothers’ Western Alps studio. 

Explaining the central theme is a bit tricky though, as it is a mixture of mood and complex textures rather than anything resembling a conventional structure or recurring melody. Instead, the vein that runs throughout The Dance of Oneirism is merely the slow pulse of Roberto’s psycho-active electronics coupled with his spectral and sighing wordless vocals. While that certainly creates an appealingly woozy and disquieting atmosphere, the Opalios are not so much a musical entity so much as a pair of psychonauts who use music as the tool for their ritualistic altered state of unreality.

The differences between the various pieces occur primarily in the periphery and in the alternately stuttering or throbbing undercurrent. The most divergent of the lot is the uncharacteristically brief “The Dance of Oneirism #4,” which boasts a stark and lurching drum machine rhythm and pushes the alientronics into the background to make room for a host of spacey whooshes and crackling static (presumably deep space transmissions). 

In general, however, Roberto’s buzzing and hissing electronic reverie is enhanced by Maurizio’s battery of unusual string instruments, which provide an effectively sharp and earthbound foil to the dream-like nimbus of drifting bleeps, buzzes, and hums. Naturally, Maurizio’s homemade pocket harp and “self-made double-bodied string instrument” do not do anything as mundane as play chords or melodies—they too are employed in an entirely textural way, sounding like everything from broken, rusty, and distant church bells (or chimes) to a lazily plucked and detuned tambura. Significantly, these five pieces do not quite evolve so much as sustain a vibrantly hallucinatory stasis: any sort of escalating density or compositional arc is merely a byproduct of their efforts to maintain a rich and multilayered alien headspace.

Notably, The Dance of Oneirism is largely impervious to any sort of normal critique, as what the Opalios are trying to do is so far outside the norm (even by experimental music standards) that common barometers of quality are mostly irrelevant. No one else is doing anything even remotely like this and My Cat is an Alien’s only discernible influence at this point in their career seems to be themselves. That said, all of the normal caveats for an MCIAA album apply just as much as ever: Oneirism offers absolutely nothing at all for the casual listener to grab onto, such as songcraft, hooks, power, or conventional beauty. Instead, the Opalios expect prospective listeners to trust them enough to give both themselves and their complete attention over to a sustained dive into some very deep, dark, and strange waters. 

More than almost any other artist, MCIAA demand that the listener meet them halfway in order to fully reap the rewards of their work. As far as I am concerned, however, that is a perfectly acceptable (and even welcome) pact. It seems like a very small price to pay for the auditory equivalent of astral travel far outside my current place in the space-time continuum. As long as My Cat is an Alien keep sending compelling and singular dispatches from their own personal rabbit hole into the subconscious, I will be eagerly waiting to experience them.

Listen here.

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My Cat Is An Alien & Cédric Stevens, “Abstract Expressionism for the Ears” (Opax/Elliptical Noise, 2014)

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No one will ever accuse the Opalio brothers of lacking ambition. Their previous release, 2013’s Psycho-System, was a hallucinatory drone epic that spanned six discs and clocked in at over three hours. Now they are back with a triple-album in a very different vein. Though similar in its staggering scope, Abstract Expressionism for the Ears is often considerably more accessible and organic-sounding than its more insular and deeply warped predecessor. Part of that credit certainly goes to Stevens, who proves himself to be a very sympathetic collaborator, but the primary difference is the focus on unconventionally employed (and melodic) piano strings, which often makes Abstract Expressionism resemble classic Laraaji plunged into an otherworldly rabbit hole. Most other times, of course, there is no earthbound point of reference to be found at all.

The unpredictable tug-of-war between genius, excess, and impenetrability is one of MCIAA’s most endearing traits: they might make some of the most brilliantly strange and beautiful music around, yet they always do it on their own terms, and those terms can be somewhat prickly. Abstract Expressionism is a perfect example of that phenomenon, as it could have easily been a near-perfect single album made up of just “Tasting the New Ether” and “When the Sun Goes Down There’s Nothing Left to Tune.” 

Instead, the Opalios opted to expand their triumph into a complex and challenging tour de force three times as long. Whether that was a good idea or not is difficult to say. On the one hand, it spreads the trio’s best moments a bit thinner than would be ideal, but it compensates by turning Abstract Expressionism into an event rather than a mere album and lures listeners into some darker, stranger waters that that they might not have normally entered.

In any case, the opening “Tasting the New Ether” easily stands as one of the finest moments in the Opalios’ entire discography. Built upon a gently rippling motif presumably played on Roberto’s vertical piano, it weaves a dreamy, hallucinatory spell that is gradually threatened by stumbling, overlapping notes and an arsenal of chirps, snarls, and swells from Maurizio and Cédric. 

I could have easily listened to “Ether” endlessly ebb and flow around its simmering miasma of feedback for another hour and it would have been great. Instead, however, the piece gradually collapses into a black hole and it is gloriously heavy and wonderful. “When the Sun Goes Down There’s Nothing Left to Tune” performs a similarly impressive balancing act between stuttering piano loops, rattling strings, and an increasingly roiling swell of abstract noise and electronics. It succeeds just as beautifully.

The remaining two epic pieces, however, differ considerably. My pick of the two is “Intersection of Shadows,” which sounds like a howling, gnarled transmission from deep space that eventually dissolves into a bizarre soup of flanging noise and something that resembles the garbled, digitized sounds of an alien rainforest. The 25-minute “Shifting at Zero Gravity,” on the other hand, is a floating oasis of languorous calm, gently rattling strings, and echoing electronic chirps. Gradually, however, it begins to evoke the cold enormity of space as Roberto’s wordless vocals create an eerie, subtly dissonant undercurrent and the intruding rumbles, hisses, and distant howls become increasingly hard to ignore.

The album winds down with two comparatively shorter pieces, the 15-minute “The Ineffable Call of Tomorrow” and the 4-minute “Just a Tone of White Over Blue.” “The Ineffable Call” retains the mood of drifting interstellar isolation mingled with menace, but revisits the theme in a more grindingly metallic fashion that elsewhere. “Tone” closes the album with a brief coda-like return to the zither-esque piano strings from earlier, but embeds them in a hallucinatory mélange of reversed noises and blearily dissonant wordless vocals. While neither piece is a reasonable contender for an album highlight, both are strong enough to avoid seeming like filler and provide a welcome gradual transition back to normal conscious after such a prolonged and deep break with reality.

There is no question at all about whether Abstract Expressionism for the Ears is a great album or not. It is. The only real question is whether it crosses the line and becomes too much of a good thing. I am not sure of the answer. It certainly is both exhausting and overwhelming, but the flipside of that is that it is also an album that is not easily or quickly exhausted. 

As alluded to before, this effort is more of a deep psychedelic plunge into the skewed consciousness of the Opalio brothers than anything resembling conventional entertainment: it does not need to be immediately graspable or catchy to be successful; it only needs to be unique and absorbing. On that front, it succeeds admirably and even offers a few surprises besides. Despite its more challenging stretches, Abstract Expressionism is an ideal place to start with My Cat Is An Alien: everything they do well is not only present, but is present in Herculean doses.

Listen here.

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