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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, “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 & 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.