Cargo Records

From The Earth To The Spheres VOL 4

The fifth volume of the "From the earth to the Spheres" series, set up by Italy's My Cat Is An Alien, sees the brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio split the release with the American queen of psych-free-folk music Christina Carter (Charalambides, Scorces), here at her debut as the new duo-project together with Andrew MacGregor (Gown).

The title of their piece, "We know when we are thinking about each other", gives an idea of the intimate mood which envelops their two guitars' minimal tunes, made of reiterate single notes which recall Christina's last masterpieces as Scorces and Charalambides; her harsh yet warm plucking at the strings and her fascinating vocals, accompanied by Andrew's bass guitar chords and singing, sound as if the listener was called to witness the secret dialogues between two distant lovers' hearts. On the flip side, the title of MCIAA's track, "The circle of life & death", fits as ever before Roberto's cover painting, where the dark imprints left by a white leaf on the acrylic-colored wooden surface create a circle-like representation of life and death. As the violet color recalls transcendence indeed, so do the opening floating-guitar tunes and Roberto's wordless-vocal hymn: this is probably the most melodic piece in all MCIAA's career to date, since the musical texture represents a new starting point from which their space guitar sounds can develop. The piece moving into a sort of Wagnerian epic crescendo, a raging storm of space fragments from beyond the Solar system will imbue the Earth with a blinding light, before everything collapses into the darkness of the Cosmos.