MUSIC FOR PHANTOMS – ‘I-II-III’ 3CD boxset
This is the official debut of the Opalio brothers’ new project called MUSIC FOR PHANTOMS. It is a totally acoustic and a very ambitious project dedicated to “total quietness”, recorded in the mountains and ONLY during the night. This is the most haunted music you can ever imagine, created playing exclusively wooden instruments: a classical guitar, and an acoustic guitar; all instrumental. This music makes you taste the distant echoes coming from the other side. Nothing can be more true. In November 2007 Maurizio and Roberto Opalio released the first album of this collection (entitled ‘I’) as a private press art edition cd-r of only 99 copies. On April 28 and July 20, 2010, they recorded the following two albums (‘II’ and ‘III’), presented for the first time in this triple box set.
BROTHERS FROM ANOTHER SPACE – ‘ALIENACUSTICA’ 3CD boxset
‘ALIENACUSTICA’ is a superb collection of works by Maurizio and Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) as you have never heard before. Forget all MCIAA’s noise records… this is a totally different affair: starting from January 2006 they have released 3 unusual, completely acoustic works, all in limited and sold-out editions: a soloist split lp, a private art edition cd-r, and an out-of-print cd. The different approach to these works shows another side of the Opalio brothers’ musical universe: all of the electric guitars and electronic effects that have been characterizing My Cat Is An Alien from the beginning are here left aside to give space to classical and acoustic guitar strings, and to Roberto’s “human” voice as a primordial instrument. Indeed, they decided to collect these precious gems under the pseudonym of BROTHERS FROM ANOTHER SPACE, so to point out how much these works are “alien” to the rest of their immense corpus of work.
PAINTING PETALS ON PLANET GHOST – ‘Transparent Winter’ CD
After the enthusiastically acclaimed release on Tokyo’s legendary P.S.F. label, hailed as a return to the ancient spirit of Japanese national poetry, PAINTING PETALS ON PLANET GHOST simply demonstrate there’s anything else like their music around the world right now. The trio of Ramona Ponzini (Praxinoscope, Z’ev, Black Magic Disco) with Roberto & Maurizio Opalio (aka My Cat Is An Alien) returns on planet Earth for a new full length release of extended songs. You already had a little taste of the work in October 2011, when Blackest Rainbow Records released a limited and now sold-out LP edition featuring 2 tracks of the album (‘Mars Appears’ and ‘The Mountain’), presented here in an alternate mix version. This CD contains the whole recording session of the work entitled ‘Transparent Winter’, including 33 minutes of previously unreleased material (‘Notes From A Telephone Conversation’, ‘Winter Is Coming’, ‘Ochitsubaki’), plus a bonus ghost track, for a total of 80 minutes of entranced music! While the short, final track ‘Ochitsubaki’ is still inspired by Yosano Akiko’s poetic work, the entire rest of the work features lyrics excerpts from Takamura K?tar?’s poems carefully selected by Ramona Ponzini. “Otherworldly is maybe the most apt description for their fragile, distanced songcraft, compositions which transport us to liminal fantasy spaces of gently suspenseful psychedelia, strangely inviting and comforting trance-like states.