L u s c o - F u s c o

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 32:48] 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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"´Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.´ (Shakespeare)

´Lusco-Fusco´. Original expression in Portuguese. Derives from two Latin adjectives: ´Luscus´ = you see only with one eye, squint, who sees with difficulty & ´Fuscus´ = matte, dark, brown, smoky color of cattle.

´Lusco-Fusco´ means ´Twilight´.

There´s a Melgacian polissemic character in plethora here.
Several possible interpretations and I´ll try to decipher some of them.

Are five tracks, I´ll highlight five decodes:

1 - Ultraquatic vertigo that penetrates the legendary world of Mermaids, opening and closing a cycle that must be reopened and so perennially;

2 - Involvement in the Time womb, a tightrope between a ceaseless count, obsessive and a growing movement of rupture and release, liberation (I presume, through Art);

[Proof as 1 and 2 are a perfect intersection when Otacílio interpenetrates Jacques Cousteau (oceanographic icon) and Cocteau Twins (seamaiden sounds) in a clever game of words.]

3 - In eternal lines to time thou grow'st...

´Lusco-Fusco´ signals to be likewise a proof of love (tempting enchantment, tempting admiration, tempting respect, tempting care, tempting affection, tempting veneration...) to the Muliebrity.

A siren may be understood as a tempting woman yet. Notice the wonderful album cover, as both suggest be a representation of a mermaid and simultaneously this engaging and irresistible female. Namely, there´s the mythological field and another, linked to the properly human feminine imagery. And appropriate interrelationships and derivations (loving, e.g.);

[´Como hei de comparar-te a um dia de verão? És muito mais amável e mais amena: Os ventos sopram os doces botões de maio, E o verão finda antes que possamos começá-lo: Por vezes, o sol lança seus cálidos raios, Ou esconde o rosto dourado sob a névoa; E tudo que é belo um dia acaba, Seja pelo acaso ou por sua natureza; Mas teu eterno verão jamais se extingue, Nem perde o frescor que só tu possuis; Nem a Morte virá arrastar-te sob a sombra, Quando os versos te elevarem à eternidade: Enquanto a humanidade puder respirar e ver, Viverá meu canto, e ele te fará viver.´ (Translation: Thereza Christina Roque da Motta)

Historically there´s near unanimity that the Shakespearean sonetes were made for a man. But it´s perceived by the transferal above that the eighteenth assumes the possibility of being dedicated to a woman. And that's exactly how corroborates 3.

The poem starts with a flattering question to the beloved—Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? The beloved is both More lovely and more temperate than a summer's day. The speaker lists some negative things about summer: it is short—Summer's lease hath all too short a date—and sometimes the sun is too hot—Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines. However, the beloved has beauty that will last forever, unlike the fleeting beauty of a summer's day. By putting his love's beauty into the form of poetry, the poet is preserving it forever. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. The lover's beauty will live on, through the poem which will last as long as it can be read.

Some details:

Complexion in line six, can have two meanings: 1) The outward appearance of the face as compared with the sun (the eye of heaven) in the previous line, or 2) the older sense of the word in relation to The four humours. In the time of Shakespeare, Complexion carried both outward and inward meanings, as did the word Temperate (externally, a weather condition; internally, a balance of humours). The second meaning of Complexion would communicate that the beloved's inner, cheerful, and temperate disposition is sometimes blotted out like the sun on a cloudy day. The first meaning is more obvious, meaning of a negative change in his outward appearance.

The word, Untrimmed in line eight, can be taken two ways: First, in the sense of loss of decoration and frills, and second, in the sense of untrimmed sails on a ship. In the first interpretation, the poem reads that beautiful things naturally lose their fanciness over time. In the second, it reads that nature is a ship with sails not adjusted to wind changes in order to correct course. This, in combination with the words Nature's changing course, creates an oxymoron: the unchanging change of nature, or the fact that the only thing that does not change is change. This line in the poem creates a shift from the mutability of the first eight lines, into the eternity of the last six. Both change and eternity are then acknowledged and challenged by the final line.

Ow'st in line ten can also carry two meanings equally common at the time: Ownest and Owest. Many readers interpret it as Ownest, as do many Shakespearean glosses (Owe in Shakespeare's day, was sometimes used as a synonym for Own). However, Owest delivers an interesting view on the text. It conveys the idea that beauty is something borrowed from nature—that it must be paid back as time progresses. In this interpretation, Fair can be a pun on Fare, or the fare required by nature for life's journey. Other scholars have pointed out that this borrowing and lending theme within the poem is true of both nature and humanity. Summer, for example, is said to have a Lease with All too short a date. This monetary theme is common in many of Shakespeare's sonnets, as it was an everyday theme in his budding capitalistic society.]

4 - ´Twilight´ takes us to various connotations. Six of them:
4.1 - Penumbra;
4.2 - A period or state of ... obscurity,
4.3 - ... ambiguity,
4.4 - ... gradual decline;
4.5 - Everything is metaphorical for O.M. A twilight that should interest us - in one of the Melgacian contexts - is the nautical.
During nautical twilight, sailors can take reliable star sightings of well-known stars, using a visible horizon for reference. The end of this period in the evening, or its beginning in the morning, is also the time at which traces of illumination near the sunset or sunrise point of the horizon are very difficult, if not impossible, to discern (this often being referred to as "first light" before civil dawn and "nightfall" after civil dusk). At the beginning of nautical twilight in the morning (nautical dawn), or at the end of nautical twilight in the evening (nautical dusk), and under good atmospheric conditions with the absence of other illumination, general outlines of ground objects may be distinguishable; but detailed outdoor operations are not possible, and the horizon is indistinct;
4.6 - Twilight is defined according to the solar elevation angle θs, which is the position of the geometric center of the sun relative to the horizon. There are three established and widely accepted subcategories of twilight: just as there´s the nautical, the civil twilight (brightest) and astronomical twilight (darkest). Then the chance of this contrast (sometimes antipode, sometimes conciliatory) in the present work;

5 - Which bodily organ appears on the cover? Red color does not seem to be a flow (sanguineous?) that empties the eye until finally rescues an auricular ubiquity? Lately almost all people look too much (talk too much) and lose the ability to hear the other. Perhaps the most lethal current pandemic is an inhuman deafness. ´Close your eyes to see better´, inexorably: to hear better! Listening the other (much more than knowing look) is the gateway to empathy, solidarity, communion and real (not despotically, coldly, selfishly virtual) reconnection. I believe Otacílio Melgaço invites us to close our eyes as we expand our listening. The difficulty seeing because of twilight does not cease to be the explicit mechanism of the invitation. In a period in which the vision has become the most supreme of the senses and that almost all allow themselves to be slaves-of-the-eyes, claim a new era-of-ears is, in my opinion, an act of courage, evolution, and inevitable emancipation. We need to write a new and definitive essay on blindness, a compliment to. Melgaço writes an essay on the hearing, bringing the human senses to a higher refinement, expansive, stimulating and - I consecrate the compliance -

H a p p y N e w E a r !

In short, keeping the trope, maybe ´Lusco-Fusco´ indeed safeguard sonorous creatures with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Christopher Columbus reported seeing mermaids while exploring the Caribbean, and supposed sightings have been reported in the 20th and 21st centuries in Canada, Israel, and Zimbabwe.
Undoubtedly in such discographic record inhabit five Pieces that - challenging, exciting - provide ´danger´ to us as well as they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans. With me, with you... For me, both situations intertwine. To our pleasure and rise, certainly - if I allow myself definitely dive in ´Lusco-Fusco´. And I can assure you that the singing of t-h-e-s-e sirens is balsamic, brilliant, bounden!
Dive to ascend..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"This mysteriously crepuscular work of Otacílio Melgaço is like a Matryoshka doll; fascinating correlations of proportions and a perfect schema of the same euphonious & imagetic essence." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - Twilight is the illumination of the Earth's lower atmosphere when the Sun itself is not directly visible because it is below the horizon. Twilight is produced by sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere, illuminating the lower atmosphere so that the surface of the Earth is neither completely lit nor completely dark. The word "twilight" is also used to denote the periods of time when this illumination occurs.

The further the Sun is below the horizon, the dimmer the twilight (other things such as atmospheric conditions being equal). When the Sun reaches 18 degrees below the horizon, the twilight's brightness is nearly zero, and evening twilight becomes nighttime. When the Sun again reaches 18 degrees below the horizon, nighttime becomes morning twilight. Owing to its distinctive quality, primarily the absence of shadows and the appearance of objects silhouetted against the bright sky, twilight has long been popular with photographers, who refer to it as 'sweet light', and painters, who refer to it as the blue hour, after the French expression l'heure bleue.

Twilight should not be confused with auroras, which can have a similar appearance in the night sky at high latitudes.

By analogy with evening twilight, the word "twilight" is also sometimes used metaphorically, to imply that something is losing strength and approaching its end. For example, a very old man may be said to be in the twilight of his life. The collateral adjective for twilight is crepuscular; it is most frequently encountered when applied to certain insects, fishes and mammals that are most active during that time;

II - The twilight is so dangerous for drivers because it can cause a momentary blindness;

III - Jacques-Yves Cousteau AC (commonly known in English as Jacques Cousteau; 1910 – 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-Lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française;

IV - Cocteau Twins were a Scottish rock band active from 1979 to 1997, known for innovative instrumentation and atmospheric, non-lyrical vocals. The original members were Elizabeth Fraser (vocals), Robin Guthrie (guitar, drum machine) and Will Heggie (bass guitar), who was replaced by multi-instrumentalist Simon Raymonde early in the band's career.

While the entire band earned much critical praise, Elizabeth Fraser's distinctive soprano vocals received the most attention. At times barely decipherable, Fraser seemed to veer into glossolalia and mouth music.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
Wikipedia was the main 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.