My Cat Is An Alien & Jean-Marc Montera

Joining Maurizio and Roberto Opalio on their fourth album for Starlight Furniture Co., legendary French-Corsican guitarist and co-founder of Groupe de Recherche et d’Improvisation Musicales brings his noisy lyricism to three long tracks of oddly sensual and animalistic space howl. As their past collaborations attest, My Cat Is An Alien’s self-sustaining biosphere is an environment where the surreal dreamscapes of mavericks and eccentrics flourish. On this live recording, Jean-Marc Montera’s home-made guitar table, objects, and electronics forge metallic ribbons that twitch between the distant clangs of gigantic spores, while Maurizio (on home-made double-bodied string instrument and effects) and Roberto (on alientronics, effects, and modified electronic devices) set worms adrift in a zero-gravity aviary stocked with narcotized satsuma fowl. Roberto adds disorientation to the trio’s fog-blurred horizon with wordless vocalizations that could pass for billowing laments hooted by mutant sea mammals with enoki mushrooms growing on their larynxes.
“Since the late 1990s My Cat Is An Alien have successfully renewed a commitment to psychedelia as a revealing factor of the soul," says French critic and writer Philippe Robert. "Brothers Roberto and Maurizio Opalio’s interest in John Cage’s thought and in free improvisation is hardly a secret; hence the attraction toward architectures based on the concept of instantaneous composition, created from extended practices. In March 2015, serendipity brought together My Cat Is An Alien and guitarist Jean-Marc Montera in Marseille, for a concert where complicity manifested itself immediately, thanks to simpatico affinities (Montera in France is a pioneer of non-idiomatic improvisation) and encounters (among which we will just mention Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo). The trio set out for the beyond, in search of the Harmony of the Spheres, as they have, again and again.”