My Cat Is An Alien - Il Segno

***Beginning with a gloomy text entitled "The Sign" written by guitarist / lyricist Roberto Opalio, My Cat Is An Alien entered The Space Room and recorded this dark and concrete improvisation, a single piece of howling and caustic ruination stretched over two sides of vinyl. Maurizio Opalio comes out of the fog with desolate acoustic guitar scratches, Roberto's electric space guitar scribbles as he spits out his words of urban alienation, and Viggiu Vortex joins the brothers on percussion. Piano toy and toy keyboard were added later to enhance the surreal lyrics inspired by ghosts, a sense of psychic, cultural and social isolation in their hometown Torino, Italy, and the infinite lightness and beauty between the cement and the sky. Il Segno is about the mark of chance, avenues full of dust and fallen leaves, the Torino skyline's abandoned factories and chimneys with the mountains all around, and the dance of swallows at twilight, just before the darkness envelops everything.

My Cat Is An Alien are improvisors, noisicians, and, perhaps most importantly, sound sculptors. Improv for them represents the union of intellectual process and instinctive emotions in real time-- creative free sounds that live in the instant. Noise eludes easy definition, and comes from a willingness to go further and further beyond their experience. But their overriding aesthetic focuses less on notes and technique than on the limitless free expansion in space of sound, a pure ether essence that belongs to the cosmos and the spheres.

The brothers Opalio have been involved in painting, glass-art, sculpture, photography, art-installations and audiovisual art, often in combination. They have released numerous art-edition CDRs through their own Opax label in painted and etched wood packages, as well as an LP-and-a-half on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label.

My Cat Is An Alien ... hits its own stride ... mining the seething coalescence of trance acoustics and ambient feedback.... [They] imbue rhythm in fractured chaos, like prompting a celestial monolith to sway in 4/4 time ... a rare and beautiful ability, and one seldom wielded with deliberate sentimentality.... Blue-collared psych-noise ... volcanic, both in sound quality and seeping magnitude ... indebted largely to the parameters of acoustic melody and floating, impressionistic noise. -Tom Roberts, Dusted

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