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Maurizio Opalio

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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, “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.