E l e k t r i c M a r i e n b a d
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 02:14:45] 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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"´It was as if she had not heard me (...) rather it seemed that her ears were not used for hearing´, excerpt from the most famous work of Adolfo Bioy Casares - ´La invención de Morel´. In Melgaço´s sonic Inventions, the ears are claimed to go beyond hearing. In fact, we´re invited to reinvent them all the time.
New incursion made by Otacílio Melgaço along a Noise perspective. With grandiloquence, daring and magnetism.
Inter alia, I usually say that in terms of this musical language, there is no middle ground. Or 1- we are facing something unpalatable, uncreative and boring or 2- we can observe how a creator is indeed ingenious, challenging, propositional, Daedalian. In this case, widely applies the second prism.
The use of distorted guitar (as a leonine, potent, unconquerable ´pathfinder´) is slashing and the supplementary arrangements (by other instrumentalists interventions) make ´Elektric Marienbad´ most aesthetically enigmatic and even dissonantly epic!" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
"L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
If
deciphered
a
bit
the
intricacies
of
this
film,
we
will
find
precious
parallels
with
the
Melgacian
work.
Last Year at Marienbad is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The film's dreamlike nature has both fascinated and baffled viewers; many have hailed the work as a masterpiece, while others consider it incomprehensible.
The film continually creates an ambiguity in the spatial and temporal aspects of what it shows, and creates uncertainty in the mind of the spectator about the causal relationships between events. This may be achieved through the editing, giving apparently incompatible information in consecutive shots, or within a shot which seems to show impossible juxtapositions, or by means of repetitions of events in different settings and décor. These ambiguities are matched by contradictions in the narrator's voiceover commentary. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows (which were painted on the ground), the trees in the garden do not (not real trees but constructions).
The manner in which the film is edited challenged the established classical style of narrative construction. It allowed the themes of time and the mind and the interaction of past and present to be explored in an original way. As spatial and temporal continuity is destroyed by its methods of filming and editing, the film offers instead a ´mental continuity´, a continuity of thought.
As
in
the
moving
picture(s),
the
Melgacian
notes
and
noises!
P o s t S c r i p t u m
(From the original screenplay)
´Once again everything was deserted in the immense hotel. Empty salons, corridors, doors, ... empty chairs, deep armchairs ... stairs, steps, steps one after another ... glass objects, empty glasses ...
[And You and I in all that garden ...]
You never seem to be waiting for Me, but We kept meeting at every turn of the paths. Behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only You and I in all that garden.
I have never stayed so long anywhere.´" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
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I - The writer Enrique Vila-Matas has recently released in Spain a new book, Electric Marienbad, after its previous release in France and Latin America (Argentina and Mexico). Future releases in Portugal and Germany are scheduled during the present year.
Electric Marienbad evolved from the conversations and collaborations the Spanish writer has maintained through the last 8 years with French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. “An unusual novel”, in Vila-Matas’ words, in the border between contemporary art and literature, “is also an installation, a text from a catalogue, an essay or it can even be read as a poem”.
The book is also a chronicle of the friendship between the two artists, of their exchange of ideas and mutual aesthetic stimulation, from their very first meetings at the Bonaparte Café, in Paris, to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibitions at the Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid, at the Tate, in London, and her most recent major retrospective, at the Centre Pompidou, in the French capital.
With constant references to Rimbaud, Sebald, Bolaño or Beckett, and in Duchamp’s shadow, an artist they both admire, Electric Marienbad gains its title from Alain Resnais’ film, Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, loosely adapting Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel. “The central thesis of the book is that art is a faith. I believe in the passion for art as the centre of existence”, says Vila-Matas, talking about Electric Marienbad. (LEFFEST);
II - The Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist already has an album entirely dedicated to the piano (& Erik Satie) whose name is "Marienbad" (see the artist's page on SoundCloud).
...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.
