Nova Cat Purring Sound
Stellarpurr

Nova Cat is an 18-year-old cat (88 in human years) of the American Shorthair Tuxedo breed, or if you prefer, the black and white kitty on the cover, who has a characteristic raspy purr perhaps due to her venerable age. Together with her collaborator Sam Rosenthal, of Projekt Records, she created these recordings with microphones using an equalizer modeled on frequencies for relaxation and brain stimulation through rhythmic repetitions. After lengthy negotiations for the release of her 2022 debut, Nova Cat reluctantly accepted the addition of ambient music by Rosenthal on two tracks of her second work, but the human set his conditions, and Nova Cat decided that she would somehow make him pay for it.

It is said that the sound of a cat's purr, with their frequency emissions ranging between 20 and 150 Hertz, has a positive impact on human health and can contribute to our well-being by reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, even helping infections and broken bones to heal. Even NASA has explored this therapeutic avenue as a potential means to combat bone density loss and muscle atrophy in astronauts heading into space for long periods.

It might be true or not. But it's undeniable that, at least among cat lovers, a content cat makes a human happy when they listen to her performance on record.

Now comes StellaPurr, a forty-minute collaboration between Nova Cat (the cat) and the electronic/ambient artist Black Tape For A Blue Girl (Rosenthal the human), which constitutes the follow-up to last year’s album Relaxing Purring Cat for Sleep, Study, Healing Therapy.

The first piece "Interstellar Purr" is a piece devoid of musical accompaniment. It consists solely of Nova Cat's raspy purr in a loop. The hypnotic sound induces a general relaxation and an increased perception of the detail of the sound in question. Its additional function might be to make the household cat play in search of the sound of the intruder, its similar, but invisible.

"Interstellar Purr (with Ambient Music)" returns for the second track, only this time there are musical textures and electronic atmospheres both ambient and deep space. The last piece is "Stellar Purr (with Ambient Music)," a twenty-six-minute symphony for very happy kittens with a dark cinematic drift in deep space, through which Nova Cat could be the engine of the spaceship taking you to infinite spaces, on a deep subconscious mental journey.

There is no doubt about whose paw was on the mixer while the music was being composed. It's the eighteen-year-old Nova Cat of the American Shorthair Tuxedo.