L e S e x e D e D a d a

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 21:43] all rights reserved

#

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)

+

"´Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them - with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul - pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colours, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.´(in 'Dada Manifesto' / 1918)

Some names of artists related to Dadaism (in its erotic facet) are outstandingly linked to numbers (performances ...) that belonged to the movement programs. Paul Dermée was one of them. Philippe Soupault was another. However, among these, stands out: Tristan Tzara. In 1926 Tzara advertised a ´Dada Sex Show´ at the Salle Gavreu. What the crowd got for their money was a large wooden phallus balanced on balloons. ´Le Sexe de Dada´.

Otacílio Melgaço conceives a soundtrack for what would be a contemporary Spectacle inspired by such ´parameters´ and so he, assuredly, proves how much - these same frantic ´parameters´ - can still be, now and in essence, flowing & running & fluent as the very LIFE is." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"Who has a vast discography, have the right to exercise metalanguages. For a great artist, do a re-reading of his creations and propose interferences, other angles, parallel universes, ... it´s a way of expanding perspectives before the time and give to his audience a mosaic of revivified perceptions, in fact, as the Impressionists did focusing on - over and over again - the same landscape or architecture. In part it´s what happens here. New prisms from existing Melgacian sonic fragments plus, hitherto, not recorded passages. The result is a luxuriant odyssey of just over twenty-one minutes, full of references (crisscrossed families of instruments, sound poetry, rhythmic sequencing), that do justice to the historical source (the Dada) and also reverberates, freshly/within today, as vanguard.

Melgaço in favor of Dada.

As vanguard. As much as the ´avant-garde´ term seems to have lost its currently meaning and use, particularly I think it´s a mistake. Because we have to separate the wheat from the chaff when we look at art made today. There´s what is done only as an empty souless commercialism (and all endorsed by managers, merchants, producers, businessmen ... who, with their pervasive influences - ´legally´ through crushing power, big money, or athwart more unorthodox forms as monopolies, corruption etc. -, make it possible to impose - the maximum that can - what should or should not be the status quo. Obviously, many ´artists´ will be, aware of this, puppets: their careers will gain spotlight, they will get rich, they will have all the conditions to manipulate their public as well as puppets. The slot machine will works accurately and well-oiled, you - ladies and gentlemen - still have doubt about that?); there´s sufficient quackery inserted into the following vacuum: any bait is art since, if ´everything is´, supposedly we would have to accept, in this sense, any imposed ´expression´ - even the most inconsistent or witless over the verbiage of concepts that often are not convincing (for more good will we have); there´s a pack of puny emulators propagating an unbearable perpetual truism; there´s the pressure of some media (that certainly takes advantage of it) always trying to determine (for the same cliques) ´convenient´ trends as if they were the only existing paths or options or possibilities, and quite frankly, we must put an end to brainwashing or aesthetic and mercantilist dictatorships. That´s enough. I think that a cultural cutting edge (authentic; not forged, prefabricated, fake) is an antidote to all this. A shock treatment. So it will always be valid and necessary through diachronic cycles. ´Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions´, said Richard Huelsenbeck.

Samuel Rosenstock concludes: ´Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real dadas are against Dada.´

´Le Sexe de Dada´.

Melgaço against Dada.

Except or above all: sonically!" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

&

I - Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. Dada in Zürich, Switzerland, began in 1916 at Cabaret Voltaire, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades. Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois;

II - Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Key figures in the movement included Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Richter, and Max Ernst, among others. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, pop art and Fluxus;

III - www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.V-374nLq7xA

IV - "Probably forms a diptych with

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/ch-teau-de-lacoste-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-14-14

´Château de Lacoste´." (P.S.P. note)

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

\|/

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.