m a x i m i n i m a l i s t i c

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 55:06] 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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"I do not care if we can find traces of minimalism or postminimalism here (yes, is the most minimalistic melgacian offspring). What is relevant is that Otacílio Melgaço really search the essence of the Music and the quintessence of his own compositions in this work. I argue: for me, ´minimal´ is ´substancial´. 1 - Absolutely necessary; indispensable (nonessential will be waived); 2 - Being such by its very nature or in the highest sense; natural; spontaneous; 3 - Inherent; 4 - Completely realized; absolute; 5 - Logic (of a property) guaranteed by the identity of the subject.

m a x i m i n i m a l i s t i c - the core, the marrow.

M-a-x-i. First - things more underground. Quoting David A. Jaffe, I see glimpses of maximalism in the focused work as each composition ´embraces heterogeneity in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material´. And I emphasize that this element contributes greatly to avoid obviousness and predictability inherent to many minimalist proposals. Only this topic would be enough; would justify a spotlight to highlight this current disc.

M-i-n-i. ´I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other´, once said Steve Reich. Interesting but we must go further. A feature of utmost importance: it seems to me that, beyond rationalistic load that is used on a large scale under the cloak of such style/language/method, Otacílio dives in the deep waters (or is catapulted to high air?) of intuition; he includes insights that reveal magmatic sound pieces. The magma is ejaculated from what is most nuclear. I believe - his (O.M.) contribution is, among others, the act of inserting unusual dimensions to cyclical spasms that occur in each track. Rarely present cerebralism in a minimal structure allows this. O.M. pierces the arbitrary moving layers and introduces us to an amazing kind of kinetic cumulative ´levitation´. As, according to some, a sui generis mantric effect. Levit-A(c)tion - or ´Aktion´, invoking Beuys. Rise, be suspended, defy gravity. Musically through a mutant repeatability (another excitant paradox), we tend sensorially to penetrate growing niches of abstraction. We freed ourselves of the more concrete aspects of music glossary and allow our minds become prone to elate star-gazing. ´Detachment´, ´extrication´ would be my synonyms for ´levitation´.

Still about ´rise into the air´, I should paraphrase Charles Ives and thus affirm: In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a ´maximinimalism´ with wings on it in back of my mind! However today I will exhume Plato. Plato warns us that essentially ´music (...) gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.´ Therefore, the melgacian pluricompass postminimalistic (?) reminds us that there´re powerful wings in our imaginations. Our imaginations are juicy targets to the sharp/keen focus of this stupendous album. And listening with attention and distraction twinned (how should we view each masterpiece), his creator might make another proposition: There are powerful wings at our backs, too. I hope that metaphor prevails. Now depends on you, listeners." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"Observing the Zeppelin, heaviness and lightness. Maximum weight, minimum lightness. Maximum lightness, minimum weight.
Transitions, conductions and consistencies ... levitating.

The title,
m a x i m i n i m a l i s t i c,
opens several connotations. Even the most paradoxical, as is typical of the composer and instrumentalist O.M.

´A steady pulse, usually continuing throughout a work or movement; general evenness of dynamics, without strong climaxes or nuanced emotionalism; an avoidance of obvious or linear formal design.´
Okay.

The unexpected. There dalliances with the silence that lead us to crests and valleys of auditory acuity. Here, for Melgaço - I think, silence is like a varnish on the notes. Leveling intensities, directing our audition for new trans-spatial perspectives.

For keener observers. From time to time, maximalist outbursts (´complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions´) - but always contained in the subtle womb of (some) compositions. Acupuncture needles. Threats of vulcanity. In Praise of strategic Restraint, Condensation - as it happens in poetry.

Returning to the title, I reflect on the melgacian polysemy.
He intends to raise ´his´ minimalism to a ridge?
It would be a way to make amalgamated as possible ´his´ maximalism - perverting it, negating it, or better, turning it into another face, the reverse?
There would be a search for a paradoxical indecipherable union (making explicit the minimum | making implicit the maximum) perhaps in proposing an alternative denomination for this hybrid?
Probably all-and-none of the hypotheses above!

´The real art of conducting consists in transitions.´ (Gustav Mahler)
I think ´maximinimalistic´ is fundamentally about transitions. An ascensional phonograph record about transitions, conductions and consistencies." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

Also listen:

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/metaborizumu-pieces-for-vibraphone-voices-and-broken-glass-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-51-21

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I - In the visual arts and music, minimalism is a style that uses pared-down design elements.

Minimalism in the arts began in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It derives from the reductive aspects of Modernism and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices.

Minimalism in music features repetition and iteration such as those of the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist compositions are sometimes known as systems music. The term "minimalist" often colloquially refers to anything that is spare or stripped to its essentials.

II - Postminimalism is an art term coined (as "post-minimalism") by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism. The expression is used specifically in relation to music and the visual arts, but can refer to any field using minimalism as a critical reference point. In music, postminimalism refers to music following minimal music.

III - In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an esthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be summarized as “more is more” contrasted with minimalist motto "less is more".

In music, Richard Taruskin uses the term "maximalism" to describe the modernism of the period from 1890 to 1914, especially in German-speaking regions, defining it as "a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends." This view has been challenged, however, on grounds that Taruskin uses the term merely as an "empty signifier" filled with "a range of musical features—big orchestration, motivic and harmonic complexity, and so on—that he takes to be typical of modernism". Taruskin, in any case, did not originate this sense of the term, which had been used by the mid-1960s with reference to Russian composers of the same period, of whom Sergei Prokofiev was "the last".
Contemporary maximalist music, (...) examples include the music of Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and Frank Zappa. In a different sense, Milton Babbitt has been described as a 'professed maximalist': his goal being, "to make music as much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with." Richard Toop, on the other hand, considers that musical maximalism "is to be understood at least partly as 'antiminimalism'".

...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.