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P R O C H A I N E
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O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 59:59] 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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"Such title, ´La Prochaine Peau´, is a strange-sounding construction in French. [On the contrary, in this case, in Portuguese (the mother tongue of Melgaço, which is Brazilian) or English: ´A Próxima Pele´ (´The Next Skin´)]. Options like 'Peau d'après' would have more francophone approval. However, O.M. decided for the extreme literalness, not incurring in a mistake but in an eccentric boldness. The skin is the largest organ of the human body. Through it we make the most direct, straight, through, immediate and palpable, tangible, touchable, tactile contact with life.

Taking it a step further.

Faced with the expectation of a skin change, almost instantly come to mind a snake, a crab or a cicada. But other species and families also go through this process at some time in their existences. Taking birds as an instance - which come from dinosaurs - the molt happens when they alternate their plumage according to the season. Humans also shed their skin. Only gradually. Approximately every month, it is renewed. There are more drastic cases. Ecdysis can be defined as a process of exchanging the exoskeleton of animals to ensure their growth. Occurs in arthropods. It is important for the renewal of their epidermis, as well as for their increase, as it is not elastic. So, if there was no ecdysis, there would be no development.

These perspectives and others more related to a fascinating biological phenomenon are some of the metaphors Melgaço used when naming such an instigating Daedalian Opus. Imagining the concept of ´The Next Skin´ takes us to a sense of the Renaissance that, in addition to metamorphosing us (in all its subtlety but no less depth if humanly), has the potency to do the same with otherness since we are inexorably speaking, just as life is, in interrelationships. Countless are the niches in which this prism (here so loudly emphasized) is valuable and required and the current world is proof of how such need remains ´à fleur de peau´. At that exact moment, just like a half-human and half-goat mythological creature, Otacílio Melgaço, paraphrasing a certain Gaulish poet, reveals to us: ´I'm in love, and I open my body to the true constellation of (renewed) skins!´

If ´ecdysis can be defined as a process of exchanging the exoskeleton of animals to ensure their growth´, this is presumably the epicentric figure of speech of ´La Prochaine Peau´. Perchance as an antidote to entropies (reflecting on the now) and utopias or dystopias (about becoming). Ergo, how musically O.M., pore by pore, makes emerge a new corpo-reality to it? The following words are from Debussy: ´Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.´ At my point of view (or of audition), Claude recites the water as a liquid skin, and the sound effects over it are truly mesmerizing. That goes for this one and, Melgacianly (as a clairvoyance), even more for the Next..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"´It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.´ (Étienne Mallarmé)

>>F a u n s I n F u r s:

i - L'Après-midi d'un Faune (or ´The Afternoon of a Faun´) is a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. It describes the sensual experiences of a faun who has just woken up from his afternoon sleep and discusses his encounters with several nymphs during the morning in a dreamlike monologue. It is Mallarmé's best-known work and a hallmark in the history of symbolism in ´parleyvoo´. Paul Valéry considered it to be the greatest poem in French literature;

ii - Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune (L. 86), known in English as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed in Paris on 22 December 1894, conducted by Gustave Doret. The flute solo was played by Georges Barrère. The composition was inspired by the poem by Mallarmé. It is one of Debussy's most famous works and is considered a turning point in the history of Western art music. Pierre Boulez considered the score to be the beginning of modern music, observing that ´the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music.´ Debussy's work later provided the basis for the ballet Afternoon of a Faun choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and a later version by Jerome Robbins;

iii - The ballet, The Afternoon of a Faun (L'Après-midi d'un Faune), was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes, and was first performed in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 29 May 1912. Nijinsky danced the main part himself. The costumes, sets and programme illustrations were designed by the painter Léon Bakst.

The style of the 12-minute ballet, in which a young faun meets several nymphs and proceeds to flirt with and chase them, was deliberately archaic. In the original scenography designed by Léon Bakst, the dancers were presented as part of a large tableau, a staging reminiscent of an ancient Greek vase painting. They often moved across the stage in profile as if on a bas relief. The ballet was presented in bare feet and rejected classical formalism. The work had an overtly erotic subtext beneath its façade of Greek antiquity and ended with a scene of graphic sexual desire. This led to a controversial reception from both audience and critics, and the quality of the ballet was debated widely through multiple news reviews. The piece also led to the dissolution of a partnership between Nijinsky and Michel Fokine, another prominent choreographer for the Ballets Russes, due to the extensive amount of time required to train the dancers in what was then an unconventional style of dance.

L'Après-midi d'un Faune is considered one of the first modern ballets and proved to be as controversial as Nijinsky's Jeux (1913) and Le Sacre du printemps (1913).

>>L e t’ s R i s e A g a i n

This royal lineage is one of the most significant in the entire history of Art; Mallarmé-Debussy-Nijinsky.

In a single contemporary creation, Melgaço joins them, sometimes directly through incidental quotes and even in the vocalization of the entire poem, sometimes subjectively when he proposes (unofficially) the approximation of the Piece to the universe of dance (as if it were a soundtrack that goes ahead of time and becomes the fountain of future choreography - certainly in the same spirit-of-topicality - & beyond -).

In reality, La Prochaine Peau is an Œuvre full of mysteries. 'Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain', once uttered Carl Gustav Jung. Nonetheless, after all, what would ´Mystery´ be? I turn now to Magritte: ´Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.´ Against that, ´the intellect has struggled with in vain´. Probably because it is not through the brainbox but the inventive movements of our hands (that make René's words enough for us). Otacílio performs at least two feats in this Orphic composition: with his own hands, Melgaço authentically sews three epidermal strata from the past, looking at each of the sources (this irresistible triumvirate M-D-N) face to face to face to face and, ceremonially, dressing himself as if with such immanent fur cloak. A posteriori, also pointing to a present (and future) that strip himself of the same mantle, suggesting or projecting or inaugurating a new - transfigurative, humanistic, inclusive, ecstatic, transubstantiative - nudity (to / from a novel Faun?) that could only exist if it had previously fulfilled this substancial, imperative, ´stratum basale´ Rite. Subsequently, the original dermis now unveils itself as another. The Next one.

'I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast. I am an animal with reason. I have flesh, I *am* flesh, I am not descended from flesh. Flesh is created by God. I am God. I am God. I am God'; here is a page from Vaslav Nijinsky's diaries. At that time of existence, already considered a madman by the men of science; already with the gaze of someone who, still alive, belonged to another world. Otacílio Melgaço seems to spell sonically: 'We are not descendants of the flesh, we do not have flesh, we are flesh, we are not flesh, we are skin, the skin is created by God, God is created by us, we created the skin of God, God is skin, God was skin, we are skin and the-next-skin is each one of us even more divine since more animal and fleshy. The Next Skin is each of us turning over (therefore reborning) the skin from the inside out...'." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - <<Le Faune:

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.

Si clair,
Leur incarnat léger, qu'il voltige dans l'air
Assoupi de sommeils touffus.

Aimai-je un rêve?
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s'achève
En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais
Bois même, prouve, hélas! que bien seul je m'offrais
Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses.

Réfléchissons...

ou si les femmes dont tu gloses
Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux!
Faune, l'illusion s'échappe des yeux bleus
Et froids, comme une source en pleurs, de la plus chaste:
Mais, l'autre tout soupirs, dis-tu qu'elle contraste
Comme brise du jour chaude dans ta toison?
Que non! par l'immobile et lasse pâmoison
Suffoquant de chaleurs le matin frais s'il lutte,
Ne murmure point d'eau que ne verse ma flûte
Au bosquet arrosé d'accords; et le seul vent
Hors des deux tuyaux prompt à s'exhaler avant
Qu'il disperse le son dans une pluie aride,
C'est, à l'horizon pas remué d'une ride
Le visible et serein souffle artificiel
De l'inspiration, qui regagne le ciel.

O bords siciliens d'un calme marécage
Qu'à l'envi de soleils ma vanité saccage
Tacite sous les fleurs d'étincelles, CONTEZ
« Que je coupais ici les creux roseaux domptés
» Par le talent; quand, sur l'or glauque de lointaines
» Verdures dédiant leur vigne à des fontaines,
» Ondoie une blancheur animale au repos:
» Et qu'au prélude lent où naissent les pipeaux
» Ce vol de cygnes, non! de naïades se sauve
» Ou plonge...

Inerte, tout brûle dans l'heure fauve
Sans marquer par quel art ensemble détala
Trop d'hymen souhaité de qui cherche le la:
Alors m'éveillerai-je à la ferveur première,
Droit et seul, sous un flot antique de lumière,
Lys! et l'un de vous tous pour l'ingénuité.

Autre que ce doux rien par leur lèvre ébruité,
Le baiser, qui tout bas des perfides assure,
Mon sein, vierge de preuve, atteste une morsure
Mystérieuse, due à quelque auguste dent;
Mais, bast! arcane tel élut pour confident
Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous l'azur on joue:
Qui, détournant à soi le trouble de la joue,
Rêve, dans un solo long, que nous amusions
La beauté d'alentour par des confusions
Fausses entre elle-même et notre chant crédule;
Et de faire aussi haut que l'amour se module
Évanouir du songe ordinaire de dos
Ou de flanc pur suivis avec mes regards clos,
Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne.

Tâche donc, instrument des fuites, ô maligne
Syrinx, de refleurir aux lacs où tu m'attends!
Moi, de ma rumeur fier, je vais parler longtemps
Des déesses; et par d'idolâtres peintures
À leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures:
Ainsi, quand des raisins j'ai sucé la clarté,
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte écarté,
Rieur, j'élève au ciel d'été la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
D'ivresse, jusqu'au soir je regarde au travers.

O nymphes, regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers.
« Mon œil, trouant le joncs, dardait chaque encolure
» Immortelle, qui noie en l'onde sa brûlure
» Avec un cri de rage au ciel de la forêt;
» Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparaît
» Dans les clartés et les frissons, ô pierreries!
» J'accours; quand, à mes pieds, s'entrejoignent (meurtries
» De la langueur goûtée à ce mal d'être deux)
» Des dormeuses parmi leurs seuls bras hasardeux;
» Je les ravis, sans les désenlacer, et vole
» À ce massif, haï par l'ombrage frivole,
» De roses tarissant tout parfum au soleil,
» Où notre ébat au jour consumé soit pareil.
Je t'adore, courroux des vierges, ô délice
Farouche du sacré fardeau nu qui se glisse
Pour fuir ma lèvre en feu buvant, comme un éclair
Tressaille! la frayeur secrète de la chair:
Des pieds de l'inhumaine au cœur de la timide
Qui délaisse à la fois une innocence, humide
De larmes folles ou de moins tristes vapeurs.
« Mon crime, c'est d'avoir, gai de vaincre ces peurs
» Traîtresses, divisé la touffe échevelée
» De baisers que les dieux gardaient si bien mêlée:
» Car, à peine j'allais cacher un rire ardent
» Sous les replis heureux d'une seule (gardant
» Par un doigt simple, afin que sa candeur de plume
» Se teignît à l'émoi de sa sœur qui s'allume,
» La petite, naïve et ne rougissant pas: )
» Que de mes bras, défaits par de vagues trépas,
» Cette proie, à jamais ingrate se délivre
» Sans pitié du sanglot dont j'étais encore ivre.

Tant pis! vers le bonheur d'autres m'entraîneront
Par leur tresse nouée aux cornes de mon front:
Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et déjà mûre,
Chaque grenade éclate et d'abeilles murmure;
Et notre sang, épris de qui le va saisir,
Coule pour tout l'essaim éternel du désir.
À l'heure où ce bois d'or et de cendres se teinte
Une fête s'exalte en la feuillée éteinte:
Etna! c'est parmi toi visité de Vénus
Sur ta lave posant tes talons ingénus,
Quand tonne une somme triste ou s'épuise la flamme.
Je tiens la reine!

O sûr châtiment...

Non, mais l'âme
De paroles vacante et ce corps alourdi
Tard succombent au fier silence de midi:
Sans plus il faut dormir en l'oubli du blasphème,
Sur le sable altéré gisant et comme j'aime
Ouvrir ma bouche à l'astre efficace des vins!

Couple, adieu; je vais voir l'ombre que tu devins.>>

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<<The Faun:

These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.
So bright
Their crimson flesh that hovers there, light
In the air drowsy with dense slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends extreme
In many a subtle branch, that remaining the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I too
Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the false ideal of roses.

Let’s see….
or if those women you note
Reflect your fabulous senses’ desire!
Faun, illusion escapes from the blue eye,
Cold, like a fount of tears, of the most chaste:
But the other, she, all sighs, contrasts you say
Like a breeze of day warm on your fleece?
No! Through the swoon, heavy and motionless
Stifling with heat the cool morning’s struggles
No water, but that which my flute pours, murmurs
To the grove sprinkled with melodies: and the sole breeze
Out of the twin pipes, quick to breathe
Before it scatters the sound in an arid rain,
Is unstirred by any wrinkle of the horizon,
The visible breath, artificial and serene,
Of inspiration returning to heights unseen.

O Sicilian shores of a marshy calm
My vanity plunders vying with the sun,
Silent beneath scintillating flowers, RELATE
‘That I was cutting hollow reeds here tamed
By talent: when, on the green gold of distant
Verdure offering its vine to the fountains,
An animal whiteness undulates to rest:
And as a slow prelude in which the pipes exist
This flight of swans, no, of Naiads cower
Or plunge…’
Inert, all things burn in the tawny hour
Not seeing by what art there fled away together
Too much of hymen desired by one who seeks there
The natural A: then I’ll wake to the primal fever
Erect, alone, beneath the ancient flood, light’s power,
Lily! And the one among you all for artlessness.

Other than this sweet nothing shown by their lip, the kiss
That softly gives assurance of treachery,
My breast, virgin of proof, reveals the mystery
Of the bite from some illustrious tooth planted;
Let that go! Such the arcane chose for confidant,
The great twin reed we play under the azure ceiling,
That turning towards itself the cheek’s quivering,
Dreams, in a long solo, so we might amuse
The beauties round about by false notes that confuse
Between itself and our credulous singing;
And create as far as love can, modulating,
The vanishing, from the common dream of pure flank
Or back followed by my shuttered glances,
Of a sonorous, empty and monotonous line.

Try then, instrument of flights, O malign
Syrinx by the lake where you await me, to flower again!
I, proud of my murmur, intend to speak at length
Of goddesses: and with idolatrous paintings
Remove again from shadow their waists’ bindings:
So that when I’ve sucked the grapes’ brightness
To banish a regret done away with by my pretence,
Laughing, I raise the emptied stem to the summer’s sky
And breathing into those luminous skins, then I,
Desiring drunkenness, gaze through them till evening.

O nymphs, let’s rise again with many memories.
‘My eye, piercing the reeds, speared each immortal
Neck that drowns its burning in the water
With a cry of rage towards the forest sky;
And the splendid bath of hair slipped by
In brightness and shuddering, O jewels!
I rush there: when, at my feet, entwine (bruised
By the languor tasted in their being-two’s evil)
Girls sleeping in each other’s arms’ sole peril:
I seize them without untangling them and run
To this bank of roses wasting in the sun
All perfume, hated by the frivolous shade
Where our frolic should be like a vanished day.’

I adore you, wrath of virgins, O shy
Delight of the nude sacred burden that glides
Away to flee my fiery lip, drinking
The secret terrors of the flesh like quivering
Lightning: from the feet of the heartless one
To the heart of the timid, in a moment abandoned
By innocence wet with wild tears or less sad vapours.
‘Happy at conquering these treacherous fears
My crime’s to have parted the dishevelled tangle
Of kisses that the gods kept so well mingled:
For I’d scarcely begun to hide an ardent laugh
In one girl’s happy depths (holding back
With only a finger, so that her feathery candour
Might be tinted by the passion of her burning sister,
The little one, naïve and not even blushing)
Than from my arms, undone by vague dying,
This prey, forever ungrateful, frees itself and is gone,
Not pitying the sob with which I was still drunk.’

No matter! Others will lead me towards happiness
By the horns on my brow knotted with many a tress:
You know, my passion, how ripe and purple already
Every pomegranate bursts, murmuring with the bees:
And our blood, enamoured of what will seize it,
Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire yet.
At the hour when this wood with gold and ashes heaves
A feast’s excited among the extinguished leaves:
Etna! It’s on your slopes, visited by Venus
Setting in your lava her heels so artless,
When a sad slumber thunders where the flame burns low.

I hold the queen!
O certain punishment…
No, but the soul
Void of words, and this heavy body,
Succumb to noon’s proud silence slowly:
With no more ado, forgetting blasphemy, I
Must sleep, lying on the thirsty sand, and as I
Love, open my mouth to wine’s true constellation!

Farewell to you, both: I go to see the shadow you have become.>>

II - Initial versions of the poem by Mallarmé, originally titled Le Faune, intermède héroique were written between 1865 (the first mention of the poem is found in a letter he wrote to Henri Cazalis in June 1865) and 1867. Stéphane submitted the first text to the Théâtre-Français in 1867, only to be rejected. Ten years later, under the title Improvisation d’un Faune the work was rejected again, this time by publisher Alphonse Lemerre, who had previously published Mallarmé's work in Parnasse contemporain. Stéphane left Lemerre and found Alphonse Derenne, an editor, publisher, and bookseller of primarily medical books who sought to expand his business. The final text was published in 1876 (see 1876 in poetry) by Derenne under the present title L'après-midi d'un faune. For the publication, Mallarmé's long-time friend, Édouard Manet, created four wood-engraved embellishments which were printed in black, and hand-tinted in pink by Manet himself in order to save money;

III - Other composers who drew subject matter and inspiration from Mallarmé’s poetry include Maurice Ravel in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913), Darius Milhaud with Chansons bas de Stéphane Mallarmé (1917), and Pierre Boulez, with his hour-long solo soprano and orchestra piece Pli selon pli (1957–62). The poem also served basis for the ballets Afternoon of a Faun by Vaslav Nijinsky (1912), Jerome Robbins (1953) and Tim Rushton (2006). Debussy's orchestral work and Nijinsky's ballet would be of great significance in the development of modernism in the arts;

IV - Post Scriptum by Pablo S. Paz:
´Still under the French aura that runs through the entire album, it was Melgaço's orientation that the Mallarméian recital should approach another unavoidable figure that was Artaud. Vocally and in such a simulation, not in his more inflammatory performative sense but under a version, even with one or another peak, more condensed and therefore quintessentially poetic of Antoine Marie Joseph, or, simply, Antonin´;

V - La Propera Pell / La Próxima Piel is also the title of a film (2016) directed by Isa Campo and Isaki Lacuesta.

"A teenager who went missing and was presumed dead returns home after eight years to find a family deeply affected by his disappearance. Gradually, doubts arise about whether he really is the missing boy or an impostor."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHn0kKl1jvA&t=4s

VI - If we look at the proximity of the releases and the album covers themselves, it can be seen that this sound work openly dialogues, in countless senses, with

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/pavane-pour-une-infante-d-funte-melgacian-variations-on-a-theme-of-ravel-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-23-58

...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.