L ' A u t r e C ô t é D u V e n t
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 51:42] 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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"´In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.´ (Leonardo da Vinci)
´In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.´ (George Crumb)
´The Melgacian Anemoi.
Watch closely what happens in the first and third movements. Behind the ´fog sound´ (in its effect 'subtle gale'), there´s the presence of a string quartet. Otacílio makes us take our hearing to extremes, to the ultimate consequences (thinking in dimensions of compositional spatiality) so that the strings are rescued, redeemed from their limbo or maybe yes he makes us go beyond the sonic curtain and therefore we allow ourselves to get carried away ...
Unlike so many ephemera or cheap tricks that today we hear (around all artistic universe), steps like these are, antithetical to any sophistry, an upward trend in Music History. Such a reseeding. ´Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the w-i-n-d, shimmering in the sunlight.´ We are ´always puzzling over how to draw such things.´ This is what Mr. Melgaço does in L'Autre Côté Du Vent!´ (Caio Campbell)
L'Autre Côté Du Vent.
Or, in English, The Other Side of the Wind.
Through his gusts of timbristic reflexes; harmonic layers as folding screens; suggestions of melodic fragments as pieces of a puzzle; unexpected ritualistic rhythmicities; arrangements inserting instruments into a maze or challenging audible hiding; odysseys in oneirism - sometimes comforting, in other times disquieting; ... Otacílio Melgaço urges us to realize how many sides the wind can have. Although he makes use of idiosyncratic compositional skills to actually recreate musically the enigmatic auricular fragrance of the multilateral wind (and what I describe includes the sensitivity of interpretation that may take the performers - so also the very O.M. - and we - the listeners - into a trance): it´s, no doubt, a metaphor.
Picasso once said ´The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face´. Melgaço, in his own way, invites and excites us to be more ´experienced´ (or able to, instead of us older, transcending time) when he strengthens the wind and makes us discover what our true face." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
"George Orson Welles could be a reference. And he is, and very welcome but now I'll bring up to us other citizen: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
´Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There´ is a novel by Lewis Carroll, the sequel to ´Alice's Adventures in Wonderland´.
Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls ´Snowdrop´) and a black kitten (whom she calls ´Kitty´)—the offspring of Dinah, Alice's cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror's reflection. Climbing up on the fireplace mantel, she pokes at the wall-hung mirror behind the fireplace and discovers, to her surprise, that she is able to step through it to an alternative world.
I ponder what the world is like on the other side of the wind. Because the wind can be, in my view, a kind of vaporous/kinetic/sonorous mirror and an always surprising alternative Melgacian sonic world to live in it." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
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I - In 1970, Orson Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind. The film relates the efforts of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture and is largely set at a lavish party. By 1972 the filming was reported by Welles as being "96% complete", though it is likely that Welles had only edited about 40 minutes of the film by 1979. In that year, legal complications over the ownership of the film forced the negative into a Paris vault. In 2004 director Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in the film, announced his intention to complete the production. As of 2009, legal complications over the Welles estate had kept the film from being finished or released.
On October 28, 2014, the Los Angeles-based production company Royal Road Entertainment announced that it had negotiated an agreement, with the assistance of producer Frank Marshall, and would purchase the rights to complete and release The Other Side of the Wind. Bogdanovich and Marshall will complete Welles's nearly finished film in Los Angeles, aiming to have it ready for screening May 6, 2015 — the 100th anniversary of Welles's birth. Royal Road Entertainment and German producer Jens Koethner Kaul acquired the rights held by Les Films de l'Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri. They reached an agreement with Oja Kodar, who inherited Welles's ownership of the film, and Beatrice Welles, manager of the Welles estate; but at the end of 2015, efforts to complete the film were at an impasse;
II - Some footage is included in the documentaries Working with Orson Welles (1993) and Orson Welles: One Man Band (1995).
...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.
