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Enxadachins - Trilha a um Ballet Imagin​á​rio - {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 59​:​18]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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about

E n x a d a c h i n s

- T r i l h a
A
U m
B a l l e t
I m a g i n á r i o -

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 59:18] 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 you have form'd a Circle to go into, /
Go into it yourself & see how you would do.' (Blake)

Two Brazilian ´archetypes´ are masterfully metamorphosed here: a radical musical backbone and heroic idiosyncratic characters: the men of the wilderness, the (back)land workers using the hoe - metaphorically and even empirically - as a weapon, a sword as a symbol of brave/courageous survival.

Similarly there are ´road movies´, for me this is a ´road disc´. I understand that Otacílio Melgaço weaves a Mobile Mapping in 'Enxadachins'. Migratory Movability of such mythical Beings, throughout the continental territory of his country - representing an Odyssey both native and (figuratively) universal. As in the words of Tolstoy, a perception that inhabits our ´collective unconscious´: ´If you want to be universal start by painting your own village.´ O.M. insole and wanders (and transcends) from village to village into the womb of his Carrollian ´Wonderland´. ´God and the Devil in the Land of Sun´...

So, sonically, we are faced with numerous facets of peculiar culture (which supports several vertebrae) providing us with the revelation of a Saga - venter of hypnotic tessitura. Intrinsic arabesques between deep-seated percussion and (raised into the air) harmonic layers are mesmerizing. Exotic melodic echoes and a vertiginous three-dimensional spatiality lift our feet off the floor. And also the feet of the ´ballerini´, I suppose.

Some Pieces were based on ancient ethnic ditties, belonging to the public domain and captured - long time ago - by Mário de Andrade. Pearls harvested from a ´Mission of Folkloric Researches´. These vast records have been created with the purpose of serving as a resource for composers who aim to incorporate folklore and popular music of Brazil in their own clefs/pentagrams and give classical connotations to seminal rooted dialects. Melgaço, up to date, fulfills this objective (under the contemporary mantle) and it takes a caliber both as anthropological and ethnographic to his offspring. ´There are certain figures of speech in which we can see the embryo of oral harmony, just as we find the germ of musical harmony in the reading of the ´symphonies of Pythagoras´. Antithesis: genuine dissonance.´ Barbaric canticles and the myrrh of unwitting martyrs, the Enxadachins...

Thereafter the composer and multi-instrumentalist opens and closes a
c y c l e.
But the center of this spellbound
c i r c l e,
never will let us go. Not the same." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"The term is a neologism. Was invented by João Guimarães Rosa. It´s the fusion of two words.

(Portuguese - English)

Enxada - Hoe | Espadachim - Swashbuckler, Swordsman, Fencer

´Enxadachins´ (plural) - something like ´Hoeswashbucklers´

Between this and that,
Soundtrack for an imaginary Ballet.

Excite our imagination. I will address an alternative cover picture which is a bonus item for those who have acquired the disc. Excite imaginatively complementing (colorfully) the original cover you can view above. We see a hoe on the cover, under the artistic perspective of Otacílio. There - it´s vertical. Concomitantly the spade (exist a more suitable term for our context?) could be a half-moon? The wooden handle would be a river - or a path pouring - that flows through the Earth's satellite-in-moiety (halving the half; cutting of greenish the bluish?; separating the bluey waters through the greeny staff?) Moreover, the texture highlighted in pink (no longer talking about a Drakean pink moon) reminds me of (side view) a pristine face, an abyssal mask. (Perhaps the true physiognomy of an ´Enxadachim´.) If is simultaneously a silhouette, take the form of a transverse flute the rod? Straight to the point: There´s an unused/unheard-of atmosphere, almost surrealistic in all the gravitational phonographic work. Nothing prevented O.M. to declare a slight homage to trumpeter Miles Davis recreating - with extreme fidelity - a pulsating cadential cell dotting in ´Bitches Brew´ (tracks 01 and 17); visit Nipponese instances (track 14) or even using typical noises of science fiction (track 06)! Exemplifications abound. Transmigrating for plastic and perceptual perspectives: Exists a real caravan of pathfinders rustic refugees or only slips by our rubbed figment, an inner mounting flame? Was everything a warm/antic hallucination or is de facto a rough/acrid paladin each dancer? Will the audience witness quixotic adventures with medieval aura or is life a dream? ´As dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.´ We´re transported out of our waking state. Like a moony road full of other vicinal routes, either chosen will lead to other overground traverses and so infinitely. Rarely a soundtrack is so metalinguistic! The tracks of the soundtrack bloom, inviting, before our pined feelings... Keep this lexicon: ´feelings´.

Chiefly penetrating the deepest bowels of his nation traits, through the immeasurable and choreographic phantasy of Melgaço - Sound´n´Dance denote a mysterious and fascinating and vivid and untranslatable eclipse. To understand what I am saying, a testimony of Pina Bausch: ´To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life. Everything must come from the heart, must be lived. When I first began choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography but as expressing feelings. Though every piece is different, they are all trying to get at certain things that are difficult to put into words. In the work, everything belongs to everything else - the music, the set, the movement and whatever is said.´

The music, the movement. The life, the heart.
The movement of music. The heart of the movement.
The movement of heart. The heart of life.
The music of life. Feelings...

´Enxadachins´, expressive and expressed LIFEELINGS..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Swashbuckler (a.k.a. swasher) is a term that emerged in the 16th century and has been used as a term for pirates and swordsmen ever since. A possible explanation for this term is that it derives from a fighting style using a side-sword with a buckler in the off-hand, which was applied with much ´swashing and making a noise on the buckler´. Later the name "swashbuckler" (like gunslinger) became common for an archetype and the accordant special film genre.

The word swashbuckler generally describes a protagonist who is heroic and idealistic to the bone and who rescues damsels in distress. His opponent is typically characterised as the dastardly villain. There is a long list of swashbucklers who combine outstanding courage, swordfighting skill, resourcefulness, chivalry and a distinctive sense of honor and justice, as for example Cyrano de Bergerac, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Robin Hood and Zorro;

II - A Hoe is an ancient and versatile agricultural tool used to move small amounts of soil. Common goals include weed control by agitating the surface of the soil around plants, piling soil around the base of plants (hilling), creating narrow furrows (drills) and shallow trenches for planting seeds and bulbs, to chop weeds, roots and crop residues, and even to dig or move soil, such as when harvesting root crops like potatoes.

Hoes are an ancient technology, predating the plough and perhaps preceded only by the digging stick. In Sumerian mythology, the invention of the hoe was credited to Enlil, the chief of the council of gods. The hand-plough (mr) was depicted in predynastic Egyptian art, and hoes are also mentioned in ancient documents like the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 18th century BC) and the Book of Isaiah (c. 8th century BC).

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, hoes have become increasingly popular tools for professional archaeologists. While not as accurate as the traditional trowel, the hoe is an ideal tool for cleaning relatively large open areas of archaeological interest. It is faster to use than a trowel, and produces a much cleaner surface than an excavator bucket or shovel-scrape, and consequently on many open-area excavations the once-common line of kneeling archaeologists trowelling backwards has been replaced with a line of stooping archaeologists with hoes;

III - Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (1893 – 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.

Andrade was the central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism, and became Brazil's national polymath. His photography and essays on a wide variety of subjects, from history to literature and music, were widely published. He was the driving force behind the Week of Modern Art, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil, and a member of the avant-garde "Group of Five." The ideas behind the Week were further explored in the preface to his poetry collection Pauliceia Desvairada, and in the poems themselves.

After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. Work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other concerns followed unevenly, often interrupted by Andrade's shifting relationship with the Brazilian government. At the end of his life, he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing a role he had long held as the catalyst of the city's—and the nation's—entry into artistic modernity.

...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.

credits

released February 2, 2015

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco

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O t a c í l i o
M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design | production | direction}

Special Guests: Nausícaaa Ensemble | Zycluz Quartett

Estúdio Yoknapotawpha/BR + Unidade Euromobile

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Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
Instrumentalist
from
Minas Gerais,
Brazil.
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Official (English) Site
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"Music is like a bewitched Mistress." (Paul Klee)
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