A j i u o

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 31:58] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"Words that seem part of some spell:

A j i u o | o u i j A

Sonorously, phonetically ... they would refer, perhaps, to African roots. At least in the imaginary of those who hear and read them.

Roots that have direct reach with Haiti.

[Let's bring out a more anthropological and mythological view so that I can try to reference the new Melgacian sound Piece.]

Voodoo is an important religion in Haiti. When Haiti beat the French in a war and became its own country, the people of Haiti believed that voodoo had helped them win. Also, in Haiti there are both good priests and ´dark´ sorcerers (called bokor). The bokor acts like a kind of religious policeman, and may curse bad people. It is the bokor who are said to make zombies; becoming a zombie is the worst curse because it means a person loses their soul.

The word voodoo, which has many different names and spellings (like vodun, vodou, voudou, vudu, vodoun) is the name of a West African religion. Voodoo is animist and spiritist, and a lot of voodoo beliefs have to do with ancestor spirits. Some of it is based on Catholic beliefs, but most of voodoo is from the Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba peoples. The word vodún is the Fon-Ewe word for spirit.

In voodoo many gods and spirits are prayed to or called on. Both spirits of nature and of dead people are important. The spirits of family member who have died are especially important. Voodoo often has rituals with music and dancing. Drums are used to make most of this music. In voodoo people often believe that a spirit is in their body and controlling the body. Having a spirit come into is wanted, and important. This spirit can speak for the gods or dead people you love, and can also help to heal or do magic.

Notice the magnificent bond that Otacílio proposes betwixt Ouija (all its prospect) and (represented by percussion) traces/ballasts of ´voodoo music´. Again Melgaço demonstrates his raised ability, like the most fertile surrealists, to make surprising and fascinating joints.
Around this core, peculiar inventiveness:

A voice pronouncing the letters of the alphabet in Portuguese (making mention of the board). The only non-pronounced letters are those that make up the word O U I J A - which will be heard later in the sequence;

(Still on the board) the noise of a glass breaking at the end (sorry if it's a spoiler);

Citation, in the first bars, to a typical Brazilian instrument, the berimbau (recalling that Brazil is a country of Indigenous, European and African matrices with, in this case, a significant legacy of the Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba cultures);

The strategic use of tenor saxophone probably creating a point link with jazz (just as there´s Christian music, there was music that came from voodoo rituals, which influenced jazz, and many of the original jazz players are rumored to have had a connection to voodoo in some way, including Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. Storyville, a district in New Orleans, was a place where, at night, Jazz was played and hoodoo was sold. There, jazz thrived and pulsed with the voices and instruments of Jelly Roll, Sweet Emma Barrett, and many others);

The insertion of electronic interventions would be paradoxical in terms of the teluricity of the original theme however this is precisely what the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist purposely does. He moves toward the epicenter of paradoxes without any pudency because he knows that one can only reach top levels in his craft: breaking paradigms and not mummifying himself in the comfortable zone of styles, tendencies or doctrines. ´Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire´, wisely uttered Gustav Mahler;

The presence of a spine made of (contemporary) Strings, as an element that (another pertinent Melgacian metaphor) snakes through all the polyrhythmical ´rite´ that takes place, from head to tail/coda;

Et cetera.

We are faced with an intriguing composition, one that allows itself to be rooted in Africanity and Brazilianness (between them), but not without, before, a captivating rereading of certain (very tactile) Haitian ´mysteries´. In addition to its radixes, the cosmopolitanism of O.M. opens the way to such prisms. So I´m also called to name Greece. Pythia was the priestess presiding over the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Circa 440 BC the Oracle is also said to have said that there was no one wiser than Socrates, to which Socrates said that either all were equally ignorant, or that he was wiser in that he alone was aware of his own ignorance (´what I do not know I do not think I
know´). This claim is related to one of the most famous mottos of Delphi, which Socrates said he learned there, Gnothi Seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν): ´K n o w T h y s e l f !´

In the end, this is what Melgaço (by means of his stunning creations) and I (through my present interpretations) are messaging about. Getting to know ourselves is a manner of oracularizing us, who knows?" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"As Mr. Paz so well exposes above,

´A j i u o´ is the mirror image of ´O u i j a´.

But it´s not a spiritualistic focus that Otacílio Melgaço here establishes. Not from direct decoding. Before our deepening, a retrospect:

One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song Dynasty. The method was known as fuji (扶乩), ´planchette writing´. The use of planchette writing as an ostensible means of necromancy and communion with the spirit-world continued, and, albeit under special rituals and supervisions, was a central practice of the Quanzhen School, until it was forbidden by the Qing Dynasty. Several entire scriptures of the Daozang are supposedly works of automatic planchette writing. According to one author, similar methods of mediumistic spirit writing have been practiced in ancient India, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.

G. K. Chesterton used a Ouija board in his teenage years. Around 1893 he had gone through a crisis of scepticism and depression, and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with the occult. Much of William Butler Yeats's later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board. Yeats himself did not use it, but his wife did.

Mr. Melgaço is more interested in the mechanism that makes possible a supposedly ´transcommunicational´ approach. Not so much caring for the (esoteric) origin of the movement that leads to the formation of words (or dates or ...) but for the-movement-itself. The ideomotor effect!

Another (artistical) interest, of course, is the role of the Unconscious in this process.

Thus, Otacílio idealizes a composition (the structure he designed), as well as visceral performances ... involved in the following context: from such signs and symbols (letters, numbers &) to rhythms, musical notes and noises. Transposing to the sonic universe, from his outlook and proposition, the oracularity (in the first instance: in its human dimension) that, through ´Ajiuo´, would be manifested in the all-embracing relationship between musician and instrument.

Why then the name reversed? Exactly for that reason. Being an indicator of this sense of ´transubstantiation´. For those who believe and for us who observe the phenomenological symbology under our glasses, what it was - in principle - etheric and that materializes in palpable messages, now has as starting point the artist that emanates intangible sounds. Thom Yorke, English musician best known as the singer and principal songwriter of the alternative rock band Radiohead, once declared: ´What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something ´stays´ with you. (...) It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand.´ O.M. is in this situation as much as Thom but goes beyond: he - as well - releases his / our hands. So that they perchance can write & play / grope & touch a more Orphic work. In fact, ´Ajiuo´ doesn't let me have any doubts about that." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - The ouija (wee-jah, or wee-jee), also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words "yes", "no", "hello" (occasionally), and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic called a planchette. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words. "Ouija" is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc., but is often used generically to refer to any talking board. Spiritualists believed that the dead were able to contact the living and reportedly used a talking board very similar to a modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio in 1886 to ostensibly enable faster communication with spirits;

II - The Ouija phenomenon is considered by the scientific community to be the result of the ideomotor response. Michael Faraday first described this effect in 1853, while investigating table-turning.

Various studies have been produced, recreating the effects of the Ouija board in the lab and showing that, under laboratory conditions, the subjects were moving the planchette involuntarily. A 2012 study found that when answering yes or no questions, ouija use was significantly more accurate than guesswork, suggesting that it might draw on the unconscious mind. Skeptics have described Ouija board users as 'operators'. Some critics noted that the messages ostensibly spelled out by spirits were similar to whatever was going through the minds of the subjects. According to Professor of neurology Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003):

The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object (table or planchette) is moving under its own control is often extremely powerful and sufficient to convince many people that spirits are truly at work... The unconscious muscle movements responsible for the moving tables and Ouija board phenomena seen at seances are examples of a class of phenomena due to what psychologists call a dissociative state. A dissociative state is one in which consciousness is somehow divided or cut off from some aspects of the individual's normal cognitive, motor, or sensory functions.

In the 1970s Ouija board users were also described as "cult members" by sociologists, though this was severely scrutinised in the field.

Ouija boards have been criticized in the press since their inception, having been variously described as "'vestigial remains' of primitive belief-systems" and a con to part fools from their money. Some journalists have described reports of Ouija board findings as 'half truths' and have suggested that their inclusion in national newspapers lowers the national discourse overall;

III - Louisiana Voodoo, also known as New Orleans Voodoo, describes a set of spiritual folkways developed from the traditions of the African diaspora. It is a cultural form of the Afro-American religions developed by enslaved West and Central Africans populations of the U.S. state of Louisiana. Voodoo is one of many incarnations of African-based spiritual folkways rooted in West African Dahomeyan Vodun. Its liturgical language is Louisiana Creole French, the language of the Louisiana Creole people.

Voodoo became syncretized with the Catholic and Francophone culture of south Louisiana as a result of the African cultural oppression in the region resulting from the Atlantic slave trade. Louisiana Voodoo is often confused with—but is not completely separable from—Haitian Vodou and southern American Hoodoo. It differs from Vodou in its emphasis upon gris-gris, Voodoo queens, use of Hoodoo paraphernalia, and Li Grand Zombi. It was through Louisiana Voodoo that such terms as gris-gris (a Wolof term) and "Voodoo dolls"' were introduced into the American lexicon;

IV - African American Hoodoo (also known as "conjure", "rootworking", "root doctoring", or "working the root") is a traditional African American folk spirituality that developed from a number of West African spiritual traditions and beliefs. Hoodoo shows evident links to the practices and beliefs of Fon and Ewe spiritual folkways. The folkway of Vodun is a more standardized and widely dispersed spiritual practice than hoodoo. Vodun's modern form is practiced across West Africa in the nations of Benin, Togo, and Burkina Faso, among others. In the Americas, the worship of the Vodoun loa is syncretized with Roman Catholic saints. The Vodou of Haiti, Voodoo of Louisiana, and Vudú of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Dominican Republic are related more to Vodun than to Hoodoo. Many blues musicians have referred to hoodoo in their songs.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.