Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Originally released in Carpark back in 2006, Belong's debut album has quietly become a something of an enduring underground shoegaze classic. This latest reissue from Spectrum Spools was actually the first time I heard October Language though, which is somewhat remarkable given that I am a fan of Turk Dietrich's current work as Second Woman and I was already casually familiar with Belong from their more song-based follow-up on Kranky. October Language bears no significant resemblance to any of those other albums at all though, nor does it bear much resemblance to any other album in the shoegaze canon, as Dietrich and Mike Jones conjure up a gorgeous ocean of shimmering and roiling guitar noise that feels like it is emanating from a broken and possibly haunted radio. Obviously, the never-ending stream of "lost classics" being reissued on vinyl these days is a numbing minefield of dubious claims and underwhelming experiences, yet October Language is the real deal, fleetingly capturing a unique vision that is equal parts rapturous and enigmatically eerie.
I suspect a large part of the reason that this album feels like such a wonderful and ephemeral confluence of forces lies in its curious assemblage of participants.While Mike Jones' post-Belong activities are a mystery, it is certainly fascinating that Dietrich eventually left swirling, rhythmless seas of dreamy guitar noise far behind to focus on complex and incredibly precise percussion experiments.Equally noteworthy is the participation of Telefon Tel Aviv's Joshua Eustice, who contributed to some of the album's strongest pieces.One intriguing feature of October Language, however, is that is impossible to ever see where anyone's individual playing or personal aesthetic asserts itself, as all traces of melody or songcraft are deconstructed and dissolved into a churning and shimmering dreamscape.It is quite interesting to try to imagine how some of these pieces initially took shape and similarly diverting to guess at the influences that led Jones and Dietrich towards their radical transformations, as October Language is very much a studio creation (most of the heavy lifting definitely took place at the production stage).It is probably safe to say that the shadow of Fennesz looms over this album as a major inspiration though, as October Language hits a similar aesthetic of stuttering, distressed, and sun-dappled melodicism.I suppose that makes this album a necessary autumnal counterpoint to Endless Summer in some ways, but beneath all the warmth, billowing chords, and soft hiss runs a deep undercurrent of achingly beautiful sadness and ruin.Those darker, more enigmatic moments tend to be album's most haunting pieces, like the submerged, slow-motion warbling of "I'm Too Sleepy…Shall We Swim?" and the corroded and quivering rapture of "Who Told You This Room Exists?"It takes a light touch to get that balance just right and Jones and Dietrich seem to nail it whenever they try, which is a bit surprising given that the duo are also quite fond of howling, gnarled roars of guitar noise ("The Door Opens The Other Way").
The album’s centerpiece is unsurprisingly the title one though, as "October Language" beautifully expands the expected swirl of shimmering guitar noise with some lazily melodic slide guitar.Again, Jones and Dietrich employ a very light touch, as the poignant glissandi adds an additional layer of emotional depth without emerging far enough from the roiling, hissing drones to disrupt their fragile, dreamlike spell.While several of the aforementioned pieces also stand out as clear highlights, it bears mentioning that the rest of October Language is uniformly excellent, as the baseline vision of warmly beautiful shoegaze drones dynamically filtered through disruptive laptoppery is wonderful enough without any additional twists or layers (even if it is nice when they happen).The more distinctive pieces simply provide variety and stand as recognizable landmarks along a slow-moving and lysergic river of engulfing and richly textured drone heaven.In fact, Belong's knack for intriguing textures plays a crucial role in making October Language the uniquely compelling album that it is.Jones and Dietrich evoke an immersive and womblike environment of layered guitar bliss as well as anyone, but their work has a precariousness, unpredictability, mystery, and depth to it that takes it to a completely different level.While always quite lush and lovely, October Language is eternally on the verge of escalating to an overwhelming roar, plunging into a submerged echo of itself, or being torn apart by crackling and stuttering tears in its fabric.It walks the finest of lines, achieving a kind of frayed and flickering heaven that never quite teeters into chaos, nor does it ever cohere into an unthreatened idyll.It is beautiful like heartache is beautiful; a complicated swirl of dark and light emotions and memories far more intense and affecting than mere bliss.
Notably, the physical versions of October Language come with a download card for the three bonus tracks that comprised the extremely limited Tour EP, which was recorded in 2005.That is presumably a treat for Belong completists (if they exist), but that EP's primary appeal lies in how it contrasts with October Language (recorded in 2004), as it illustrates how delicately all of the various threads needed to balance to yield such a brilliant album.Aesthetically, the Tour EP replicates almost the same vision as October, yet it lacks all of the necessary bite and vibrancy that might have made it similarly striking.As such, it is pleasant but largely unmemorable.Part of me is inclined to attribute that to the fact that the Tour EP songs were probably rough cuts/sketches exclusively for fans, yet Belong never fully recaptured the singular alchemy of October Language ever again (though they released a few promising vinyl EPs in its wake).Obviously, plenty of people love the follow-up, 2011's Common Language, but that album genuinely sounds like the work of an entirely different band: October Language was a one-time event that no one has ever been able to replicate.In fact, it has been glibly described elsewhere as "Loveless sans the songs," which is certainly an apt description.It is not quite a perfect one though, so I will boldly attempt my own concise summation with "a lovelorn Christian Fennesz on vacation in Twin Peaks."I am not sure that fully conveys the essence of this release either, but the take-home message is clear: this is an exceptionally great album.I am ashamed that it needed to be released three times before I finally realized that.
I can think of few other artists who have amassed a body of work as impressive as Clarice Jensen before releasing their debut album, as she is the artistic director of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) and has appeared as a cellist on albums by a wide array of great artists (William Basinski, Bjork, and Jóhann Jóhannsson among them). The late Jóhannsson, in particular, is a solid reference point, as Jensen's vision shares a lot of common ground with Fordlandia's blend of neo-classical grandeur and contemporary experimentation. In fact, the man himself surfaces here as Jensen's collaborator on the opening "BC," which is one of several intriguing collaborative threads that run throughout the album. Unsurprisingly, that piece is absolutely gorgeous, yet it is Jensen's two-part solo composition that stands as the stands as the album's towering centerpiece.
This album was first conceived as a collaborative multimedia endeavor with artist Jonathan Turner, who created four elegiac and hauntingly beautiful black and white films to complement these pieces.The combination of those films with Jensen's work is admittedly quite mesmerizing and powerful, yet the album on its own does not feel incomplete, nor does it feel like a soundtrack.I am guessing that the music must have come first, though Turner’s languorously dreamlike trips through endless empty hallways is admittedly a relatively blank slate for a composer.In any case, both the films and Jensen's music evoke a profound sense of bittersweet melancholy that is simultaneously majestic and haunted.The lush, glacially swelling cello moans of "BC" are particularly effective at mining that vein of achingly beautiful sadness, as are dreamily swooning strings that drift over the top of it like slow-moving clouds.The central theme is certainly strong enough to have stood out as a highlight on any of Jóhannsson's own albums, yet "BC" feels more like a sublimely hypnotic infinite loop than a composition, steadily flowing along without much change until it finally disintegrates into a wobbly and submerged-sounding shadow image of itself.The following "Cello Constellations" is a bit of a departure from the rest of the album, eschewing the sweeping romanticism and strong melodic component of the other pieces for more of a drone-based approach that incorporates sine tones.That aesthetic detour makes sense though, as "Constellations" was composed by Michael Harrison for Jensen rather than by Jensen herself.It is a bit less immediately gratifying than the other pieces, as it lacks their melodic strength and emotional heft, yet it compensates somewhat by being more overtly experimental and harmonically complex.
The last half of the album is devoted to Jensen's two-part tour de force, "For This That Will Be Filled."The first part is quite brief, clocking in at mere five minutes, yet that brevity is entirely appropriate given its churning and volcanic nature.In a sense, it could be considered yet another drone piece, as it has a shifting foundation of sustained cello tones and a spectral haze of overtones and lingering delay, yet it is very easy forget that that structure is even there, as it is being continually strafed by densely fluttering and swooping masses of arpeggios.It kind of feels like trying to appreciate a lovely garden, then being dive-bombed by a flock of supernaturally immense predatory birds.As such, it is quite a satisfyingly explosive and dynamic piece, perfectly condensing all of its firepower into a sustained and intense catharsis.The second half that emerges from its ashes is a considerably longer and more complex composition, acting as a culmination of sorts that synthesizes all of the album's previous threads into a single powerful package.It opens as a slowly throbbing drone reverie, albeit one with a bit of a grinding, metallic sheen.Gradually, however, it blossoms into darkly billowing chord swells as a melancholy cello melody languorously unfolds.That theme eventually gives way to quite a lovely interlude, however, as a slow-moving and heavenly motif of groaning cello swells appears amidst an undulating haze of floating harmonics.It is absolutely lovely, yet Jensen treats it as a mere starting point, unleashing a gorgeously churning and snaking cello solo as the backdrop slowly fades away.That turns out to be the album's final transformation and it is an absolutely heavenly one, as the final moments of the album cohere into a coda that is both gently hallucinatory and warmly, organically intimate, as Jensen's undulating arpeggios leave a fluttering and spectral trail and a mysterious voice gently reverberates in the distance.
Given Jensen's pedigree, it is not at all surprisingly that she has such a wonderful and distinctive vision, nor that it is executed with such an unerring hand.Even so, I was still caught off-guard by how much this album exceeded my expectations: the beautiful moments are rapturous and the darker plunges are wonderfully visceral.Also, more subjectively, I simply love the sound of a bowed cello when it is in the right hands, as its deep, warm, and woody resonance makes every note feel poignant and timeless.My only faint critique of For This From That Will Be Filled is that it feels more like a collection than a planned album with an arc of thematically linked pieces.That makes sense, given that there are three different composers involved, but it is definitely a collection packed with absolutely sublime work: "BC" is 12-minutes of lushly languorous heaven and the title suite is on a plane all by itself.There is a lot to love here, as Jensen has a strong gift for melody, an unerring intuition for dynamics and density, and a healthy sense of experimentation, augmenting her cello's natural sounds with an array of pedals and tape loops to vaporously dreamlike effect.It is truly rare to encounter such an inspired and pitch-perfect blend of romanticism, depth, and elegantly hallucinatory production flourishes.This is a legitimately amazing debut.
Anne Guthrie's strange and beautiful Codiaeum Variegatum was one of 2014's most delightful surprises, but I was admittedly perplexed by the early samples that I heard from this follow-up. Brass Orchids is quite a radical departure from its predecessor, as the erstwhile French horn player has now plunged deeply into a hallucinatory miasma of collaged and murky field recordings. As such, Orchids is quite a challenging and abstract album, but its dense fog of unusual textures and found sounds occasionally coheres into something quite compelling and unique. Also, Guthrie definitely gets points for so boldly swimming against the tide of the experimental music zeitgeist, reminding me favorably of the golden age of the early '80s when serious Italian composers were making bizarre noise tapes.
Guthrie does not waste any time at all in plunging into the shadowy depths on Orchids, as the opening "Bellona" is quite an uncompromising and surreal swirl of disparate environments woven together to create a disorienting tableau.Initially, it sounds like someone is fiddling with the record button of an uncooperative tape player as they trudge through deep snow, but that scene is soon mingled with a deep, gurgling rumble that suggests that I am perversely also at the bottom of the sea.Some ghostly melodies also surface from time to time, though they prove to be too flickering and elusive to ever cohere into a structure.I would like to be able to say that it evokes the final fragmented dreams of a doomed scuba diver before he unexpectedly washes up in a quietly dripping grotto, but even that is too linear to describe the disorienting trajectory of the piece.That phantasmagoric and drifting web of field recordings is more or less the template for the entire album, but the beauty of Brass Orchids lies in how Guthrie's deep immersion into the impenetrable mists of the subconscious occasionally open up into an unexpected and emotionally affecting window of lucidity.In the regard, the center of the album is where Orchids starts to become something more fascinating and mysterious than mere experimentation.
In "Serious Water," for example, a warbling haze of strangled-sounding feedback drones blossoms out of the murk.It is quite a cool motif to begin with, yet it is further enhanced by some impressive textural sorcery, evoking the sensation of having an otherworldly vision of a submerged world while inside a burning building.And then, an Indian shopkeeper inexplicably interjects to extol the virtues of some random product, though his delightful appearance is similarly fleeting, as he is quickly replaced by a ravaged tape of tinkling jazz piano in a haze of queasily dissonant spectral harmonies."Red Wolf," on the other hand, sounds like an especially unsettling nightmare that takes place in an abandoned subway station, where impersonal recorded voices sporadically appear amidst a warped and rumbling chaos that sounds like reality itself is bending and dissolving around me.The album's centerpiece, however, is "Spider."The opening minutes resemble someone enthusiastically tap-dancing in an empty house as an electromagnetic storm rages around them.I am not sure it is accurate to say that things only get stranger from there, but Guthrie certainly unleashes a visceral, gnarled, and volcanic squall of howling noise, corroded machinery, shuddering electronic squelches, and cryptic snatches of dialogue.The final piece, "Glass," is the album’s only real nod to melodicism, as a melancholy French horn melody languorously snakes its way through a bleary soundscape of dissonantly shimmering glass drones.
Aaron Martin’s album A Room Now Empty sees him returning to the memory-based recordings of previous albums such as Almond, River Water and Chautauqua, where layered meanings in the music and titles don’t allow a single clear-cut reading of the music.
"A Room Now Empty is similar to the concept of Day Has Ended where Christoph Berg and I created music to encompass the passing of a day, but stretched out for the passing of a lifetime or at least a portion of a lifetime," says Aaron.
Using cello, electric guitar, bass, roll-up piano, banjo, concertina, acoustic guitar, voice, ukulele, singing bowls and lap steel, A Room Now Empty keeps the same intimacy and directness of Aaron’s previous albums, with a slightly more processed sound creating distance within the music.
Collects the Universal Tongue and Small Doses Ostara 3"CDr tracks that have never been re-released. Newly mastered, the LP/CS downloads include 2 out-of-print cassette-only releases from Gold Soundz, Woolgather Visions and Mechanical Elements. Mother Universe features Matt Hill from Umberto on analog drum machine, synth and bass alongside Justin Wright's tripped-out guitar ambiance. The session was hugely inspired by Manuel Göttsching's legendary recording E2E4.
"Fluxion's Ripple Effect is the film score for a non-existing motion picture. This nine-track album is the result of experimentation and the combination of the producer's two most cherished art forms: electronic music and score music. Ironically the two worlds rarely seem to meet, despite the fact that score music has adopted a looser form in order to better adapt to film accompaniment, bringing it closer to electronic music which attempts to contradict form or shed it altogether. Fluxion felt the need to bring these two musical forms into dialogue with each other, lending structure to electronic and deconstructing score music to create a malleable and expressive hybrid. The album's production took two years from its original conception for the subliminal story to unfold into the completed product. Fluxion wanted to say as much as possible through the music, leaving the visuals as a blank canvas for the listener to create their own story. In the end, the goal is to give each member of the audience a unique audiovisual experience based on their own perception and interpretation."
For over 10 years, Bart De Paepe has sated the appetites of psychedelic searchers with his label Sloow Tapes. A peerless curator, De Paepe has unleashed crucial underground transmissions ranging from paint-peeling Japanese rock to bedroom American Primitivism in microscopic editions. Those fortunate enough to have heard five or six of Sloow Tapes' releases may be prepared for what Pagus Wasiae- De Paepe's latest solo offering - has in store. The Stekene, Belgium-based artist's Beyond Beyond Is Beyond debut, Pagus Wasiae trades in lysergic texture. Like Tangerine Dream's early work, Pagus Wasiae casts off a ragged rock shore into a bubbling sea of electronics and navigates by dark starlight, leaving in its wake shadows and smoke. De Paepe charges waves of synth ambience, swirls clouds of electric guitar and summons subtle beats of the earth to make Pagus Wasiae a fully enveloping and dynamic listening experience-astral traveling without moving.
"Cluster, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Pink Floyd's deepest space excursions may be waypoints to Pagus Wasiae, but ultimately the destination is the journey and Bart De Paepe has drawn a new map and laid it to tape for us to discover." - Jeff Conklin (WFMU)
The NY-based producer returns to Umor Rex with a new album, in which the musical discourse and the physical form of the release have an equal, crucial importance. Sirimiri is made of four long and mid-length pieces, each composed of different perspectives, processes and identities. However, Rafael seeks to blend subjective time with the listening experience. A sort of loop and repetition, sub-sequence-based sound. Following Eno, nothing happens in the same way twice, perception is constantly shifting, nothing stays in one place for long.
The sum of the four pieces is 36 minutes; the cassette edition lasts 72 minutes in total, since both sides have the same four songs joined together. Physically, the format allows us at least two automatic repetitions. In the digital version the songs are independent, but we also include a bonus track made of the 36-minute loop.
The desolation and despair (in a sort of positive way) that we got to hear in The Shameless Years (Umor Rex 2017) is present in Sirimiri, but the impression is concrete, with cruder, less rhetorical landscapes. If The Shameless Years was located between beauty and active tragedy, Sirimiri travels inside the beauty and melancholy of an observing eye, a quiet rebel insurrection. Another substantial difference is the distance from general and globalized concepts; in these unfortunate times, Sirimiri looks for personal sorrows, and places its focus on the particular. Even the names of the songs evoke this in small ways, like in "Sonder", the feeling of realizing that everyone, even a complete stranger, has a life as complex as one's own.
Rafael has two guests in this album; Taylor Jordan in "Mountain Stream", and Rafael's hero Carl Hultgren (from Windy & Carl) in "Sonder."
Sirimiri means 'drizzle' in Basque, and we cannot find a better word to describe its content.
High quality reissue of the monumental work August 1974 by Japanese experimental music ensemble Taj Mahal Travellers. Pressed on 180gr. vinyl with extensive liner notes by Julian Cowley.
In April 1972, a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the changing scene and to differing ways of life. Midway through May they reached their destination, the iconic Taj Mahal on the bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, India. The Taj Mahal Travellers had fulfilled physically the promise of the name they adopted when they formed in 1969. But their music had always been a journey, a sonic adventure designed to lead any listener's imagination into unfamiliar territory.
The double album August 1974 was their second official release. The first, July 15, 1972, is a live concert recording, but on 19th August 1974, the Taj Mahal Travellers entered the Tokyo studios of Nippon Columbia and produced what is arguably their definitive statement. The electronic dimension of their collective improvising was coordinated, as usual, by Kinji Hayashi. Guest percussionist Hirokazu Sato joined long-term group members Ryo Koike, Seiji Nagai, Yukio Tsuchiya, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa and Takehisa Kosugi.
The enigmatic Takehisa Kosugi, whose soaring electric violin was such a vital element in their music, had been a pioneer of free improvisation and intermedia performance art with Group Ongaku at the start of the '60s. Later in that decade, before launching the Taj Mahal Travellers, he had become known internationally through his association with the Fluxus art movement. During the mid-70s the Travellers disbanded and while his colleagues more or less stopped performing as musicians, Kosugi continued to reach new audiences across the course of several decades as a composer, regular performer and musical director for the acclaimed Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
August 1974 captures vividly the characteristic sound of the Taj Mahal Travellers, haunting tones from an unusual combination of instruments, filtered through multiple layers of reverb and delay. Their music has strong stylistic affinities with the trippy ambience of cosmic and psychedelic rock, but the Taj Mahal Travellers were tuning in to other vibrations, drawing inspiration from the energies and rhythms of the world around them rather than projecting some alternative reality. Films of rolling ocean waves often provided a highly appropriate backdrop for their lengthy improvised concerts. This is truly electric music for the mind and body.
Newly reissued on his own Black Truffle imprint, this 2004 album (originally released on Touch) stands as one of the most enduring and transcendent gems in Ambarchi's lengthy discography. Obviously, he has released plenty of interesting and inventive music since, yet his early 2000s Touch albums are the ones that resonate most deeply with me and this one is my favorite. Grapes From The Estate has a wonderfully languorous and lovely melodic sensibility akin to relative contemporaries like Labradford, yet that is only one of the many threads that Ambarchi pulls into this quietly visionary suite. Part of me wishes Oren would someday return to something resembling the languid, sun-dappled beauty of this era, but I would be hard-pressed to come up with a valid artistic reason for him to do so, as I cannot imagine a more perfect distillation of this aesthetic vein being possible. Almost 15 years later, Grapes still sounds like a wonderfully distinctive, absorbing, and unrepeatable convergence of vision, inspiration, and execution.
Initially, "Girl With The Silver Eyes" feels an awful lot like a reprise of "Corkscrew," albeit one where the bass harmonics actually cohere into a languorous groove of sorts.In fact, Ambarchi soon bolsters that foundation into a slow-building simmer with some throbbing sub bass and a slowly shuffling snare rhythm thrown in, marking the first appearance of any conventional percussion on the album.He also fleshes out the piece's melodic components in characteristically hyper-minimal and restrained fashion, as a sleepy flow of electronic bloops and an occasional electric piano or organ note hint that some kind of actual song may eventually take shape.It is debatable as to whether that ever happens, but something else extremely cool happens instead, as rippling cascades of irregular arpeggios unexpectedly blossom forth, which feels like quite a dazzling splash of color in this slow-boiling context.Notably, that is the first recognizable appearance of a guitar on the album, which reminds me that Ambarchi was primarily known as an experimental guitarist around this time.With Grapes, he expanded that palette dramatically, though I would be hard-pressed to guess where most of these sounds originated.Still, Oren's newly neglected guitar is wielded to great effect when it appears, as the notes in "Silver Eyes" tumble blearily into the picture and hang there lysergically.Ambarchi's guitar talents also surface in the following "Remedios The Beauty" (now acoustic).Again, Oren uses his guitar sparingly yet achieves maximum effect, playing just one ringing note at a time and using the sharpness of the attack to cut through the blurry, undulating web of pulses that form the piece's foundation.The rest of the piece is certainly strong enough without that enhancement though, as those pulses make for an appealingly melodic and woozily dreamlike hook, which Ambarchi later builds into a crescendo of buried strings, layers of arpeggios, and a countermelody of sustained, descending piano tones.He walks a fine line here, masterfully holding together the album's warmly beautiful, hypnagogic spell, while stealthily incorporating some actual solidity and structure.
It is always an interesting experience to revisit a beloved album from an earlier era in my life to see how it holds up against both my evolving taste and the passage of time.When I first heard Grapes, I immediately appreciated that it was an excellent album, but it seemed like very much a part of the Touch milieu (which was having quite a hot streak in those days with Philip Jeck, Phil Niblock, Fennesz, and others).I did not fully grasp, however, how truly unusual this album was nor did I know enough about Ambarchi to appreciate what a leap forward this album was for him.I am not sure if it is quite accurate to say that Grapes was ahead of its time, as it was very much of its time in many ways-it just happened to be an especially brilliant and seamless synthesis of seemingly disparate threads.It was certainly ahead of my time though, as I have much deeper appreciation for details and textures these days.Consequently, I am now properly dazzled by how Ambarchi was able to transform the idea of a bass line into something that resembles slowly moving droplets of shivering mercury and how he was able to slowly transform just a few repeating notes into a quietly gorgeous 20-minute epic of massing overtones and oscillations.As such, the benefit of hindsight has opened my eyes quite a bit and revealed depths to this album that only deep listening can reveal: I used to like Grapes because it had a couple of excellent songs, but now I love it because it is a masterfully executed and elegant tour de force of wonderful textural touches and simmering dynamic restraint.This is more than a fine album–it is legitimately great art.
Seemingly birthed from the same fascination with vinyl surface noise as The Sky With Broken Arms, Roberto Opalio's solo companion piece is perhaps even more unique and consciousness-expanding than its sister. It is also unexpectedly varied and weirdly beautiful at times, blurring together the usual deep-space lysergia with viscerally unnerving dissonances and hypnotically looping crackles and pops. While those added touches certainly delight me, this album is unmistakably and absolutely Opalio-esque to its core, standing as one of the most sharply realized and distilled releases in the MCIAA oeuvre. If The Sky With Broken Arms is a brief glimpse into a hypnotically otherworldly scene, Once You'll Touch The Sky is a phantasmal travelogue of the troubled dreams that follow in its wake.
In the eternally shifting cosmic fantasia of My Cat is an Alien, few things can ever be said to be normal or expected, but "Preludio" finds Roberto opening the album in relatively familiar territory, albeit only briefly.It is a curious sequencing decision, as the bleary haze of spectral vocal cooing and gently blooping and whooshing alientronics does nothing to prepare me for the sustained plunge into the swirling and hallucinatory altered reality that follows.Knowing the proud Opalio tradition of "spontaneous composition," I am rather amazed at the scope, depth, and nuance of the title piece, as Roberto seamlessly transforms its shape again and again like an alien mirage.In hindsight, I suspect "Preludio" exists solely because "Once You'll Touch The Sky" plunges immediately into the lysergic depths rather than wading slowly in through the usual slow accumulation of loops.The opening theme roughly resembles organ drone, though Roberto seems to be playing a modified mini-keyboard through some pitch-shifting and wah-wah effects to weave an unsettling web of undulating and eerily harmonizing glissandi.That opening nicely illustrates an aspect of the Opalios' work that I always enjoy: their approach to psychedelia is an uncompromisingly complete one, as their best work is an absolutely engulfing experience that provides no solid ground or recognizable reference points to get my bearings.It is not an entertainment–it is an ocean that I am dropped in and I am forced to give myself over to it and go where its tide takes me.In fact, there is no better metaphor for this album than submersion, as its slow transformations feel like being immersed in a viscous liquid that is continually morphing into new colors, textures, and sundry other sensory and extra-sensory phenomena.
Despite the album's fundamental state of constant flux and celebration of queasily undulating textures and harmonies, its various threads occasionally converge into an oasis of dreamlike beauty.I would not necessarily describe the spell of this album as "nightmarish," as there is no real sense of menace, yet the dream state it evokes is definitely an unsettling and unnervingly ambiguous one.As such, it can be quite striking and wonderful when the seemingly endless and impenetrable phantasmagoric mists of Roberto’s vision occasionally give way to a glimpse of heaven (such as the languorous and tenderly warbling reverie that starts to cohere around the 15-minute mark).Those glimpses are always elusive and short-lived, of course, but the fact that it can appear at any time is what makes this album such a complex and entrancing experience. As lovely as the aforementioned interlude is, however, it becomes even more compelling once Roberto's crackling and popping vinyl noise slowly creeps into the picture.Interestingly, that haplessly ravaged vinyl collection does not get a credit on this particular releases, so I believe Roberto is merely approximating its sound with his handmade shortwave receiver.In any case, he takes a different approach with crackle and sizzle here than he did on The Sky With Broken Arms, as it takes shape as kind of a slow, locked-groove-style pulse.There is considerably more happening than that though, as there are some fascinating microcosmic dynamics unfolding as well: the pops and scratches seems to be slightly out of phase and tumbling over one another.It is a truly wonderful bit of sorcery, completely stealing attention from the more overt motifs unfolding around it.It feels a lot like the sky opened up to slowly wash away the rest of the album with an unnaturally reverberating and purifying drizzle.That is a fine way to end an album.
As with all recent My Cat is an Alien releases, it feels hopelessly reductionist to view Once You'll Touch The Sky as an album and even the fact that it is art feels somewhat beside the point.Instead, it is something more akin to a religious experience–not in a hyperbolic sense, but it is definitely a ritualistic event that can transform the energy in a room and strip away the veil of consciousness for a while.That said, sometimes the stars metaphorically line up perfectly to create an especially transcendent communion with the Opalios' extra-dimensional plane of consciousness and this is one of those times.Once You'll Touch the Sky is one of the true gems in the MCIAA canon, as it is every bit as immersive and reality-dissolving as I would expect, but goes a bit deeper and further than usual in every sense.This is more than just a gateway into an alien dreamscape, as it has a clear arc that leads far beyond the starting point.Also, it feels like an unusually soulful and tender journey.I do not think I have ever described an album by the Opalios as soulful before, as subtle shades of emotion tend to get hopelessly eclipsed by the all-engulfing scope of their lysergic vision, but this album is understated and purposeful enough to let Roberto's humanity seep into its ecstatic alien reverie.