B A T A I L L E M A C H I N E

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 21:11] 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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"´If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance.´
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

´Histoire de l'œil L'Anus solaire Sacrifices Le Bleu du ciel L'Alleluiah L'Archangélique La Scissiparité La Maison brûlée La Tombe de Divinus Deus Mémorandum Histoire de rats Le Coupable L'Impossible L'être indifférencié n'est rien Annexes La Somme athéologique L'Expérience intérieure Méthode de méditation Ébauches La littérature et le mal La Haine de la Poésie L'économie à la mesure de l'univers La notion de dépense La limite de l'utile La Part maudite L’érotisme L'Histoire de l'érotisme Les larmes d’Eros Le paradoxe de l'érotisme Le surréalisme au jour le jour La Souveraineté Une liberté souveraine La naissance de l’Art´. It is with this exuberant poem composed by Otacílio Melgaço based on the titles of Georges' writings and with the ´superbe´ interpretation of - the special guest - Laetitia Reboul (´artiste chorégraphique et pédagogue par le mouvement´), that BATAILLEMACHINE presents us, I believe, an allegorical Genesis (of Art itself! - by means of the idiosyncratic imaginary of O.M. -) to the ´small (or enormous) death´, or rather, an apotheotic apocalyptic state of transmetahumanistic Possession, ´Jouissance´ (in the holy claws of the erotic, mystical, surrealist saps, ... all of them irresistibly transgressive).

Abusive in decibels (as required here), amidst ancestral sonorities & urban cultural interventions / technological nuances & medieval percussions (elevated to the cube in massive corpulence) / soundscapes & noise design / unheard-of harmonies & ethereal improvisations & Promethean breaths, or orgasmic spasms &...: we are facing a diabolical Suite, which, through metaphorical fluidity, is both realizing a free adaptation of a possible Odyssey drawn from the provocative work of Georges Bataille as well as, ´Urbi et Orbi´, can be considered a sonic Saga that mirrors an intriguing earth-born-historical Trajectory [worth reiterating, inspired by the (outré?) Bataillean perspective; the inhuman, the excess, the ear, the sun, the testicle, the earth, the egg, the human, the eye, the art .!.] under the aegis of a truly impressive reverberant (Melgacian) contemporaneity - in inventiveness, density, narrative force, eruptive condensation, vertiginous simultaneity, vulcanity, rapture, ecstasy in trance!" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French philosopher and intellectual working also in literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. Its writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.

Of all the attempts to bring Bataille (under any conformation) and Music (idem) together, nothing that I'm aware of has gone beyond tickling me if I now compare, in violence and representation, with such Melgacian ´pétard´! In fact, way ahead of that. An Art, an ARTefact/act of maximum explosiveness and, paradoxically, hyperpulverizing sowing!

But, after all, what is BATAILLEMACHINE? How should I nominate, denominate, designate undesignatable X-rated´Oeuvre? I think that, with the electrifying consent of Melgaço, I could answer like this: Negation of consciousness under the radiance of an eschatological phallicaudible lightphonohouse that transcends the limits of music and the self. Lose and reinvent the self, between anagrammatic
´s-a-c-r-e-d o-f-f-i-c-e´
and
heretical ´s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e´!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - On Bataille's Themes. At the crossroads of knowledge and the great ideological, philosophical and anthropological debates of his time, his work is both literary and philosophical, multiple, heterogeneous, marginal and escapes labelling: "the traditional categories, the delimitations they establish, prove inappropriate or cumbersome when one wants to account for the whole of his writings". All the more so since he went out of his way to blur the lines, as he himself declared in his last interview with Madeleine Chapsal in March 1961: "I would willingly say that what I am most proud of is having blurred the lines [...], that is to say, having associated the most turbulent and shocking way of laughing, the most scandalous, with the deepest religious spirit ". This "scrambling" is all the more evident because of the multiple versions, manuscripts and typescripts of his texts, and also because he often used pseudonyms to sign certain writings (such as erotic stories): Troppmann, Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Louis Trente and Dianus;

II - "In the domain of our life excess manifests in itself in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ration with productive efficiency. It demands rational behaviour where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome them a reward late on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment. From the earliest times work has produced a relaxation of tension thanks to which men cease to respond to the immediate urge impelled by the violence of desire. No doubt it is arbitrary always to construct the detachment fundamental to work with tumultuous urges whose necessity is not constant. Once began, however, work does make it impossible to respond to these immediate solicitations which could make us indifferent to the promised desirable results. Most of the time, work is the concern of men acting collectively and during the time reserved for work the collective has to oppose those contagious impulses to excess in which nothing is left but the immediate surrender to excess, to violence, that is. Hence the human collective, partly dedicated to work, is defined by taboos without which it would not have become the world of work that it essentially is."
― Eroticism

III - “Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).”
― Van Gogh As Prometheus

IV - “Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”
― Story of the Eye

...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.