Has the inevitable happened? Have all the good band names been used up? Did Dinowalrus take the last good band name? Actually, Dinowalrus is a terrible band name. My Cat is An Alien is an awesome band name. It joins a distinguished pedigree of other cool cat related band names (Birchville Cat Motel, My Cat's a Stargazer, The Cats’ Orchestra, Lust-Cats of the Gutters) that have been lucky enough to grace our ears since 2009.
There is a certain joy that comes with planning and careful execution. Lay-ups, timed pyrotechnics at arena rock concerts and surprise birthday parties fall into this category. There is another type of joy; the kind that comes from exploration, discovery and unplanned edits and corrections. Steals, Ornette Coleman, and making love fall into this category. Listening to and watching musicians playing drone-based music of this ilk definitely falls into the latter.
My Cat is An Alien is the deconstructed folk/ambient/improv/drone project of the Italian brother duo Maurizio and Roberto Opalio. Since 1998 they have released collaborations with the likes of Thurston Moore, Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and Jim O’Rourke. These guys have an impossibly huge back catalogue. My Cat’s untitled compositions have a starting point and destination in mind, but the Opalios are not in any hurry to get there. Often they start with a simple, unaccompanied guitar, organ or autoharp (?) and after it is looped back on itself a few times, run through a bevy of filters, is edited, minced to bits and gets all atonal, the track becomes a swirling, breathy whirlpool sucking the nouns (people, places and things) out of wordless vocals and pranging particles of notes together to create chance cluster chords and multi-personality disorder solipsism. This is some serious deconstruction/deconstructualism happening.
Living on the Invisible Line is comprised of four untitled compositions that are brimming with discovery, disruptions and tape-static decay. Three out of the four tracks somewhat follow the blueprint I've laid out above. Music fed into a concrete mixer, folded, buried and fed into itself to create something beautifully overwhelming and a cabin-in-the-woods multitude of terrifying voices. Track four (which in the album order is track three) is a Faust-like tape-edit experiment with traffic jam vocal tracks, feedback and squalor before it fades to a placid and haunting five-minute guitar and vocal harmony that floats, specter-like, into finality. Completely beautiful and transfixing. A near perfect album.
Ryan H.