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N a d j a - Les Champs Magn​é​tiques de L​´​Immacul​é​e Conception - {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 01​:​18​:​52]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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N a d j a

Les Champs Magnétiques
de L´Immaculée Conception

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 01:18:52] 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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"Sur le point de m’en aller, je veux lui poser une question qui résume toutes les autres, une question qu’il n’y a que moi pour poser, sans doute: ´Qui êtes-vous?´ Et elle, sans hésiter: ´Je suis l’âme errante.´

This is an interesting definition for the impressions that Melgacian music causes us: we are all wandering souls!

´Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.´

Otacílio Melgaço recontextualises the classic written by André Breton and transforms our relationship with mythological Nadja - placing us as listeners-protagonists - in a hieratic Alliance based on (´the imaginary is what tends to become real´) a surreal, fairy-like, EXTRAordinary loving surrender. And apparently, as it should be - immortalized (unlike the novel). His ´wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.´ No wonder that Immortality and Madness are often intriguing pretenders...

The Odyssey signalized by the Brazilian composer and instrumentalist extrapolates the original script; though, seems to me, remains the scene (Paris) and the atmosphere of highly symbolic nature.
The differences, however, are tremendous! I note that the mind of Melgaço looks like the mind of a chess player. But I refer to the fabulous ancient Arab players who were betting their souls! The range of possibilities and details is immeasurable.

The directrix of Melgaço is much more ethereal. Certainly both personas (´his´ protagonist - no more ´André´ by Breton but each of us - and ´his´ Nadja) roam the stunning streets of timeless French capital, but I do not believe that your feet touch the ground.

´All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.´ Nameless are the four sound passages/landscapes that are the pulp of this work. Melgaço elevates everything we would term as 'CONVULSIVE' and inserts ´LEVITATIVE´ as interesting condition for excessiveness. Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, Blake uttered. Situating the most explicit: the extent of musics makes us lose the sense of proportion of time and space. Their stylistic profiles as well. In present ´Nadja´, there´s the hovering musical temporality as metaphysical extension, contemplation and entrainment. The expanse here is subtle, introspective, abyssal (depth up!) but, concomitantly, extra perceptibly vast, pointing to the immeasurable.

If ´I am the soul in limbo´: the limbo turns, through Otacílio, into a kind of Paradise Regained.

´People despair of love stupidly – I have despaired of it myself — they live in servitude to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them: bygone years, lies about forgetting after twenty years. They can bear to admit – and force themselves to – that love is not for them, with its procession of clarities, with this look it casts upon the world from all the eyes of diviners. They are limping with fallacious memories, for which they even invent the origin of an immemorial fall, so as not to find themselves too guilty. And yet for each, the promise of each coming hour contains life's whole life secret, perhaps about to be revealed one day, possibly in another being.´

A relevant preamble: ´La Profanation de l'Hostie, La Fleur des Amants´, while following the guideline of the conceptual album, is a tribute to compatriot composer Gilberto Mendes too. Probably the idiosyncrasy of Mendesian legacy (especially works for Choir) provides references to the extravagant voices suggested by O.M. in such composition. Another detail that is contained in dedicatory: 'The Desecration of the Host' combines perfectly with the fact of being a communist Gilberto.
Picking up the thread: Another suggested differentiation (see the title of the tracks; again I quote ´La Profanation de l'Hostie, La Fleur des Amants´) is a much more pronounced sexualization. For Melgaço, if more vaporous is his amorous saga, more paradoxically it occurs in undeniable concreteness.

´The sexual eagle exults he will gild the earth once more
his descending wing
his ascending wing sways imperceptibly the sleeves of the peppermint
and all the water's adorable undress
Days are counted so clearly
that the mirror has yielded to a froth of fronds
of the sky i see but one star
now around us there is only the milk describing its dizzy ellipsis
from which sometimes soft intuition with pupils of eyed agate
rises to poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light
then great reaches cast anchor stretch out in the depths of my closed eyes
icebergs radiating the customs of all the worlds yet to come
bron from a fragment of you fragment unkown and iced on the wing
your existence the giant bouquet escaping fr4om my arms
is badly tied it didgs out walls unrolls the stairs of houses
loses its leaves in the show windows of the street
to gether the news i am always leaving to gather the news
the newspaper is glass today and if letters no longer arrive
it's that the train has been consumed
the great incision of the emerald which gaave birth to the foliage
is scarred for always the sawdust of blinding snow
and the quarries of flesh are sounding along on the first shelf
reversed on this shelf
i take the impression of death and life
to the liquid air.´

The music and the potentiated love affair portrayed as a liquid air! Liquid Air is a wonderful metaphor for the Melgacian anointed concreteness. See: ´Eyes exist in the savage state! Love is always before you. Love it.´
For Breton, is not exactly a love relationship that is revealed to us, agree? This possibility soon loses firmness.
For Melgaço, yes. ´Statue-Fétiche, L'Attente - L'Amour´ is an evidence. Love in (more than human) growing. This is another, fundamental discrepancy. And, I think, the denouement proposed by O.M. (a mystical ´Happy End´) is much more surreal than the final sated by André. ´Objet non Identifié, Un Portrait Surréaliste d'Elle et de Moi...´ deliberately shows us an upshot mystique.

By the way, ´Objet non Identifié...´ just because 'nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject´. Another parallel reading can offer us the following connotation: as in ufology, love lived alongside Nadja is 'otherworldly'.

´I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.´

We hear the mysterious transparency originating from each of the four creatures while the creator works as a goldsmith. Merging the high caliber of ´Les Champs Magnétiques de L´Immaculée Conception´ and adamantine metamorphosis which passed while we are listening singular and hopeful epiphany.

´The greatest hope, I say, is the one in which all the others are met, is that it is exists for everyone and that for everyone it lasts. That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural hanging bridge cast across life itself.´" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

''´The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.' (A.B.)

Crystalline would be appropriate way to give denotation to ´Nadja - Les Champs Magnétiques de L´Immaculée Conception´. ´A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents, such as atoms, molecules or ions, are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions´.

The Magnetic Fields of The Immaculate Conception!

´The Immaculate Conception, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, was the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in her mother's womb free from original sin.´ For me, there's all surreal context indicated by Otacílio Melgaço. From Mary to Nadja. Try - ladies and gentlemen - draw a parallel and everyone will realize the figurative complexity present here. And the ´magnetic fields´ are also surreally mathematical and poetic forms to define his multidimensional sonic treatments, I dare say.

I would like to cite an sound example properly.
´Sphinx, Qui suis-Je? Qui sommes-Nous??´
It´s dedicated to Nadja own - in person (Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt) and to her Melgaço makes two questions. First he calls Nadja: ´Sphinx´. Thereafter, O.M. asks: ´Who am I? Who are we?´ This Sphinx must solve the reverse enigma!
Apart from concrete elements, much of the track is based on a female speech slowly being formatted melodically. Generally, the process is reversed. Starting from an existing melody line, the voice will be inserted. Of course, I am not referring to a random or improvised music.
There is a fellow Brazilian musician working with this perspective. Hermeto Pascoal. He calls this approach 'the sound of aura'. For him, ´is the sound vibration of the soul of each one, reflected by his speech, which makes the connection between mind and body.´ We can, grounded in this panorama, capture and translate musically sounds of people, animals, objects, etc. Through the description of Hermeto himself, perhaps 'sound of the soul' was more consistent. Even by some esoteric tone.
The Aura of Voice seems to be more appropriate for what Melgaço experienced in ´Sphinx´. Yes, it is a figurative language. An aura would be ´a field of subtle, luminous radiation surrounding a person or object (like the halo or aureola in religious art). Various writers associate various personality traits with the colors of different layers of the aura. It has also been described as a map of the thoughts and feelings surrounding a person.´ Becomes exciting and revealing hear this stupendous Piece considering such references and constructive nature of analogies. In fact, a nominal baptism is irrelevant. What should be taken into account: The result is terrific! I don´t remember any other composer who has locomoted this ´technique´ to such deep and high niches. Here seems to me to be a reverberation of another Melgacian work:

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/doktor-faustus-oder-adrian-leverk-hn-weheklag-erz-hlt-von-mephistopheles-apocalipsis-operette-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-12-15

Propositional reverberations and that presents us with possibilities beyond the previously imaginable. ´'There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.´ And nothing could be more welcome.

´Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.' Could be a motto to delirious couple in love in Paris? Neo conceptually perhaps... Sonically, certainly. Otacílio Melgaço, he does not follow rules. There are those that follow, there are those that do not. 'No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.' Therefore, it´s proportional the nonexistence of rules to him and the existence of his art. The way that his timbre advances are multicolored; his rhythmicity is suggested and generated ´in the minds of listeners´; his melodies are in unpredictable orbit inside Melgacian harmonic wombs; his harmonies are convulsive as we call them an unquestionably electro-physiological phenomenon and more...

I propose a light-footed game, from both ´Nadja´. I'll put side by side the characteristics of Breton (novel) and Melgaço (phonograph album):

A.B. - Nadja. ´She is so named because in Russian it's the beginning of the word Hope, and because it's only the beginning, but her name might also evoke the Spanish ´Nadie´, which means ´No one.´
O.M. - Spanish addendum is canceled.

A.B. - ´The narrator becomes obsessed with this woman.´
O.M. - Idem.

A.B. - ´He becomes reliant on daily rendezvous.´
O.M. - The days are meaningless and unimportant; eternity becomes ubiquitous.

A.B. - ´It is later discovered that she is mad and belongs in a sanitarium.´
O.M. - Madness is inexorable part of her charm and superior clarity.

A.B. - ´After Nadja reveals too many details of her past life, she in a sense becomes demystified, and the narrator realizes that he cannot continue their relationship.´
O.M. - She reaches the maximum mystification. This only reinforces their alliance.

A.B. - ´In the remaining quarter of the text, André - the narrator - distances himself from her corporeal form and descends into a meandering rumination on her absence, so much so that one wonders if her absence offers him greater inspiration than does her presence. It is, after all, the reification and materialization of Nadja as an ordinary person that André ultimately despises and cannot tolerate to the point of inducing tears.´
O.M. - More spiritual relationship of both, it becomes more concrete. The power of this affective fusion occurs exactly when resolves the paradox. That's what O.M. aspired to do (in his particular and fabulous synoptic reinterpretation and) musically. Nadja such an extraordinary persona and well beyond the limits of a trivial existential connection. Then a supernatural factor is present in this loving union. Madness is probably part of it. Why not?

A.B. - ´There is something about the closeness once felt between the narrator and Nadja that indicated a depth beyond the limits of conscious rationality, waking logic, and sane operations of the everyday. There is something essentially ´mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering´ about her; this reinforces the notion that their propinquity serves only to remind André of Nadja's impenetrability.´
O.M. - Everything is aligned here. The exception is: Proximity, to Melgaço, becomes an element of eclipse between them; not an inexpugnable mystery but the consummation of the Mystery being lived.

A.B. - ´Her eventual recession into absence is the fundamental concern of this text, an absence that permits Nadja to live freely in André's conscious and unconscious, seemingly unbridled, maintaining her paradoxical role as both present and absent. With Nadja's past fixed within his own memory and consciousness, the narrator is awakened to the impenetrability of reality and perceives a particularly ghostly residue peeking from under its thin veil.´
O.M. - Absence and presence are equally palpable and confirm the completeness of the transcendent junction. ´Possession´ and freedom, in the same way. Again the paradox is broken because now everything is emphatic ubiquity. Reality and unreality are penetrable and lead us to the same destination. There are no differences between one and another, no more. The veil falls. There´s the consecration of ἱερὸς γάμος, ἱερογαμία, Hieros gamos.

A.B. - ´Thus, he might better put into practice his theory of Surrealism, predicated on the dreaminess of the experience of reality within reality itself.´
O.M. - Buried is a daydream. Everything is indeed experienced, everything becomes real. The Supremacy of Reality that O.M. calls Surreality - here. Everything is so Real that it´s above the real. Ascending. Breaking boundaries, borders, conventions, the tedious and metastatic preestablished... Between the narrator (Otacílio in starring role) and Nadja or each listener (each of us as protagonist) and Nadja - because it´s a double -, the Love is stronger than Lunacy; stronger than Reality (in its ordinary meaning); stronger than Death... Take this perspective - is not naïve, unless we are incarcerated in an insensitive everydayness. This prism can only be discerned by those who aspire to a high level of personal maturity and that nourish noble expectations for all existence itself. That goes for the bright inner life and also for a fraternity, solidarity, humanism towards other living beings.

Yes, we will be stronger if throw in the direction of Magnetic Fields!

Yes, we´ll be stronger because we are indelible part of this Immaculate Conception!

Yes, we have become stronger mesmerized by renewed ´Nadja´ - now perennially unmatched.

Congratulations to Melgaço-Pygmalion!
P y g m a l i O. M." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - One of the iconic works of the French surrealist movement, Nadja (1928) is the second novel published by André Breton. It begins with the question, "Who am I?"

It is based on Breton's actual interactions with a young woman (Nadja - actually Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt 1902-1941) over the course of ten days, and is presumed to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a mad patient of Pierre Janet. The book's non-linear structure is grounded in reality by references to other Paris surrealists such as Louis Aragon and by 44 somewhat banal photographs.

The last sentence of the book ("Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all") provided the title for Pierre Boulez's flute concerto ...explosante-fixe....

II - André Breton (1896 – 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".

III - Gilberto Mendes (1922) is a Brazilian composer. Mendes was born in Santos/SP. He attended the Santos Conservatory from 1941 to 1949, and studied composition under Cláudio Santoro in 1954 and under George Olivier Toni from 1958-1960. In the 1960s he studied in Darmstadt under Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Mendes's compositions include cantatas, motets, orchestral music, incidental music, solo and chamber pieces, and some avant-garde works. Most of them are published by Alain Van Kerckhoven Editeur. In 1965, he founded the Santos New Music Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas, then was professor of music in São Paulo.

IV - Hermeto Pascoal (1936) is a Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist. He was born in Lagoa da Canoa, Alagoas. Pascoal is a greatly beloved musical figure in the history of Brazilian music, known for his abilities at orchestration and improvisation, as well as being a record producer and contributor to many other Brazilian and international albums.

...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.

credits

released January 1, 2015

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco

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O t a c í l i o
M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design [O.M., after Atget] | production | direction}

Special Guests: Nausícaaa Ensemble | Zycluz Quartett

Estúdio Yoknapotawpha/BR + Unidade Euromobile

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Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
Instrumentalist
from
Minas Gerais,
Brazil.
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"Music is like a bewitched Mistress." (Paul Klee)
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