My Cat Is an Alien / Marclay, Christian / Lee, Okkyung

"From the Earth to the Spheres" Vol. 6

Label: A Silent Place Country: Italy

"This last release in the From the earth to the Spheres split series set up by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio aka My Cat Is An Alien on their own Opax Records imprint, sees the Italian cosmic duo splitting the vinyl with well-known audio visual artist, performer and turntable-art innovator Christian Marclay together with cello improviser Okkyung Lee, ubiquitous figure of downtown NY avant-garde scene.

Their track "Rubbings" on side A is the result of a live performance recorded at Tonic NYC in December 2003. Christian Marclay's trademarked technique of mixing several ranges of Lps on his multiple turntables, manipulating, fragmenting and altering the phonograph records' sonic nature in accordance with his "theater of found sound" esthetics meets the uncompromising and passionate playing of Korean-born performer Lee, whose powerful cello's stabs interact with Marclay's waves of screaming sounds creating a unique, stunning scenario.

On B side, My Cat Is An Alien's piece "Beyond the limits of the stars/ Beyond the limits of the grooves" was recorded in 2003 at their Space Room studio in Torino, and has been kept safely in their archive 'till September 2005, when it's been completely remixed and edited appositely for this release. One of their heaviest conceptions to date, the piece is built on electric guitars' strings moaning onto walls of space drones and electronics like ectoplasmic presences emerging from the brillliance of the Void. The initial minimal and claustrophobic guitar chords become more and more an ocean of howling moduled feedbacks combined with fragmented and distorted real-time inserts of post-romantic classical music from old 78rpm shellac records, sounding like radio frequencies transmitted via ether from the furthest reaches of the Cosmos. As the title suggests, MCIAA's need of a non-finite "space music & art" aesthetics research has led them to insert a ghost track (instead of the final lock-groove you can find on the original vinyl) to un-seal the sounds from their actual support; a purpose expressed throughout the whole "From the earth to the Spheres" series' conception."-Opax

"The seventh and final volume in the Turin [Italy] based Opalio brothers' split series of collaborative, handcrafted LPs proves to be their most ambitious to date. A fitting finale for a series of records that has been a thrill from the very beginning"-Edwin Pouncey, The Wire