P E T
S H O P
B E U Y S

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 34:29] 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)

+

"- INTRO
or
INFILTRATION HETEROGEN -

´I think the tree is an element of regeneration
which in itself is a concept of time.´ (Joseph Beuys)

P E T
S H O P
B E U Y S
is a record release
- containing, in my sight,
sui generis contemporary music
under the mantle of a Suite -
concomitant to the coming
to the world of
F U R I O U S
S P H I N X
[THE MOST AUDIBLE
TRANSFERAL OF
A DEAFENING
Æ N I G M A]
eBook, free distribution,
available since December 12, 2021.
In this present publication, artists and thinkers reflect on the life & Opera of O.M. (in addition to addressing all its universality that flirts with dance, poetry, philosophy, mythology, visual arts et cætera) and thus, the Brazilian composer / multi-instrumentalist brought mankind a sound work coupled with such an ambitious production, vibrantly celebrating an initiative of this magnitude.

[>> Link code {pre-tested, virus free} from which the electronic book FURIOUS SPHINX (THE MOST AUDIBLE TRANSFERAL OF
A DEAFENING ÆNIGMA) is, at no cost, downloaded:
46c334ea-9eab-4b0b-976e-4188f1c14ee0.usrfiles.com/ugd/46c334_bb3c5548f8594e868fcb099d3e05d728.pdf

To listen - via complimentary streaming - PET SHOP BEUYS, just press Play at the top of this page or, if you benevolently prefer, the discographic album can be digitally purchased.

To panoramically access Melgaço's full-toned creations: melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com <<]

- AFTER
TA(R)TARS
or
VITEX AGNUS CASTUS -

Choose (Joseph) Beuys as a reference is quite accurate, painstaking. In MMXXI, the 100th anniversary of the birth of this hectic Germanic personality is commemorated; relevant free spirit which here, collaterally, is honored by Melgaço. Both in the figure of Beuys and of the coyote (that is stamped before us), we can assume a sphinxethical extension; different embodiments of the same pulp. The Journey proposed by Otacílio through a composition filled with third, nay, fourth dimension [>>Rite of Passage between Sound and Fury, Felts´n´Fats<<] is not only a ceremonial, initiatic, bewitched interpretation of, perhaps, the greatest existential adventure Joseph went through (and, in part, turned into a legend) but also a striking analogy of all the tracks we went through when reading FURIOUS SPHINX [THE MOST AUDIBLE TRANSFERAL OF A DEAFENING ÆNIGMA].

Already crossed the borders of Θῆβαι, Θήβα, Thêbai, Thíva, Thebes: it is impossible not to elevate to Olympus the expertness with which O.M. launches himself towards filigrees of concrete & electronic & ... music. Its auricular landscapes insert us into the dramatic heart of each step, breath, sensation, perception, (imaginable) thought and even hallucination that Melgaço deputies to Joseph!

[And since I mentioned ´auricular landscapes´..., an enlightening and propositional note is worth it.

When we are faced with a music creator who, reaping all the effects of what history has added to this artistic field over the bold and ultra-developmental last century, and also already drawing with his own hands the future that now, diluvian, slides into our present days: all of this it inevitably brings us new openings to the act of apprehending sounds. Sounds and, consequently, compositions, musical instruments (conventional and supposedly unusual), notes, noises, pauses, etc.

Otacílio Melgaço's pulsating Concoctions can often suggest interpenetrations with the cinematographic niche, for instance. We hear coyote howls, flowing waters, gales, rustling tree leaves, planes crash-landing, and so on. Immediately, we tend to relate the tangibility of these sound sources to ... images. And this is one of the splendid possibilities that the vast aesthetic potency of O.M. puts at our disposal.

I call your attention so that you can make use of many other apertures because the one I mentioned is just a portion of a ginormous extensiveness. Something that has been consistently argued by Otacílio himself in other circumstances: he also understands that ´planes in forced landings or rustling tree leaves or gales or flowing waters or howls of coyotes´ are, equally, ´musical instruments´. They can and should be ´instrumentalized´ in this regard. So, in such another state of affairs, there is no difference between a cello and a bird's song; a harpsichord and a working sewing machine; a theremin and heart beats; an oboe and a locomotive; a tympanum and ocean waves.

Are you able to hear treads taken in the snow and adsorb them (as long as used with sagacity and dexterity) as a structural percussive element of a sound piece and not as a movement of putting one leg in front of the other in walking or running over the atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals lying on the ground as a white layer? Is it noticeable to you the immeasurable gap that exists between one ´phenomenon´ and another? Behind this, what is the Melgacian ´message´, ´call´ for us? Not on purpose, I think there are many.

Immediately I can utter that the creation and the making of sound are defenestrated from ivory towers, are evicted from aseptic studios, from moldy conservatories (many of them still stagnant today, at most, at the gates of the 20th century), from self-masturbatory so-called state-of-the-art institutions fecund in soliloquies, from dewormed technological lairs infested with deified algorithms and a retinue of button pushers, and so forth. Away from such hermetisms full of ´esprit de corps´ but notoriously ´soulless´, O.M. brings creation and sound-making, how can I say?: back to life. PET SHOP BEUYS is prodigious proof of that; in this sense we are {sorry for the unexpected resolute pugilistic jargon but that's the expression!} ´punched in the pit of the stomach´ and possessed and raptured by so much life that throbs and overflows there. Coming back to life. And, at the nucleus of it, there is a postulation that simply {here is the verb!} ´revolutionizes´ perception, activation, understanding of what it is to hear. Of what can it be listening to music.

Historically, extrapolating other figures that preferred to specialize in it and therefore becoming more confined in such ´laboratoriality
& carpentry´, entrancing personae like Satie and Cage {both are some of Melgaço's fetishes} have already done it too, but, ditto, I don't think they were proposals that became ´popular´ while spreading widely the more developmental legacies of their works. Not that they bothered specifically with this ... still my argument turns to how significant seeds remain or not in an unfortunately very restricted planting territory. We hope that there are broader harvests because from that there would be an expressive qualitative jump / spring, either from novel composers or from fresh listeners. Erik, John, ... they did not penetrate common sense (compared to ´pop´ stars like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Verdi ...), remaining lamentably restricted, when within reach, to a considerably small number of a global audience (in the orbit of classical / ´erudite´ music in general). And yet, what I'm saying is that the best known silhouettes of their Satiesque & Cagean pearls are others, not the most propellant (in accordance with the ethos of my explanation). Aside from
´the initiates´, respectively: how many people surrender to the witching Gymnopédie No.1 howbeit how many of them have acquaintance with the ´bande sonore´ for the ballet Parade (and assimilated it, deciphered it)? Undisputedly even less, how many have ´heard´ (or know of the existence) of 4'33'' nevertheless really incorporated what is proposed there?

Despite all this, particularly and in all honesty: I do not believe that whereas they are more (supposedly) iconoclastic, this is a crucial factor for them to be less ´digested´. Despite being closer to modernity / contemporaneity than the others mentioned (which could be synonymous with greater hearing demand), I imagine the hiatus has multiple sources. If we consider a more massive / proselytizing spectrum (focus on the mainstream), one of them would be the issue that many conductors, orchestras, instrumentalists, concert performers ... prefer to bet on what is status quo (in its typical self-feedback) and thus take no chances; they opt for the taxidermy shortcut. This logic is also valid for countless intermediaries linked to the press, critics ... that would be fertilely introductory bridges although choose a ´safer´ and more reactionary / conservative one-way path. Most likely to keep their spectators / consumers properly crystallized (or fermenting even if around the same epicenter) and thus manage to sustain themselves. The very vicious circle turns to so many music professionals, (unimaginatives, cowards or smartass?) composers included. Another origin would be the public that lives inside a bubble, in a comfort zone. Or, like maharajas & pashas, passively waiting for whatever will come to them on a silver platter (de facto, their dish made from an addictive covertly toxic cultural industry) else, cosmopolitans in simulacrum, ephemerally curious, storing thousands and thousands of information, data (and sound files!) in spite of, as a matter of fact, dealing with everything from the most pandemic superficiality, fugacity. Anyway ... The entirety I declare in this paragraph is not reduced to mere caricatures. They are herds and herds of exponential visages of a precise barefaced anatomy of stated Mondo Cane and which, willy-nilly, causes us, with good reason, a little unease (´unbehagen´). That is why such rumination cannot be muzzled. I might add that it's a relief to know that we are not doomed to this. There are other constructive cases that point to a far more laudable north. Apropos, that's why we are - you and I and the Melgacian setting-up - here.

I emphasize that I am not talking here about stylistic or aesthetic innovations solely, but on a proclamation that renews our manner of listening (including music). Are we still in a Quixotic field? Who knows? Be that as it may, crossing his arms seems to me something that would not even be considered on the part of Melgaço. What Otacílio defends is not the ´popularization´ but the ´democratization of´. In this regard, light-years from Sisyphus: withal creating soundtracks for dance, cinema, theater ... as well as being a ...

playwright

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacoteatro

photographer

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacofotografia

- seasonal - filmmaker

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacocinema

sculptor

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacoescultura

visual artist

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/artesvisuais

video artist

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacovideoarte

plus what he calls not choreographer but 'cordiographer'

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/melgacodance

& the renaissance scroll goes on: its unbounded discography, through cutting edge (whilst, here, not dehumanizing) technology and the potential of an era of planetary ultra-propagation, are ´hundreds of keys that O.M. has been playing´ throughout his ´walk of life´. Organum Universalis! Back to (a new) life! It is notorious that Melgaço does not bring its inspired progeny to the Earth, whether for his ´Brazilian compatriots´ or for ´foreigners´ / for ´Westerners´ or ´Easterners´ / for ´dilettantes in general´ or ´experts´ / for the ´juvenile´ or ´longevous´ audiences ... No, none of that. It is the own Human Being who is in front of its compass rose!

Contrary to what the nexus of my corollary may instantly denote, ´back to a new life´ does not mean - exclusively - breaking the (ready listed) ´four walls´ (whether introjected or empirical) and so, allow me a parabolical figure of speech: Otacílio, like a hikerian pedagogue, holds the hands of this conjured´n´conjurer bairn that is Music, intertwines the fingers, and takes Her, affectionately and provocatively, to ´vital environments´. That happens. Still and all, Melgaço, deeper, he trails the reverse: brings life to the womb, the uteros, the matrix of (a riped) Music; it is life that impregnates Music with more life! At the medulla of it, it´s important to accentuate again: there is a postulation that simply {yes, that's the verb!} ´revolutionizes´ perception, activation, understanding of what it is to hear. Of what can it be listening to the '(Art) of the Muses', Mousiké (´μουσική´). Insomuch, in such another state of affairs, there is no difference between a cello and a bird's song; a harpsichord and a working sewing machine; a theremin and heart beats; an oboe and a locomotive; a tympanum and ocean waves. Whether in any palpability but also in abstraction, indescribability, incomparability, dereferentiality, subtlety, ethereality, sublimation, sublimity.

I know that for most of us, due to our habits / customs / tendencies / conditioning, managing to detach this enormous expansion from an ´imagery parity´ is a Herculean task. However, it is a pace forward, which cultural breeders like O.M. put before us for the reason that this is part of the athirst progress of the soundartistical firmament. Which is in uninterrupted ebullient movement. The issue, then, is not ´one route that excludes another´, but rather having the ability to perceive every eventualities and absorb them all. So we will have, at each renewed context, the sensitivity and wisdom of how we are going to ´instrumentalize´ that too.

It is important to be able to let go of the limits of what would be a kind of voguish ´Visualiza(c)tion Dictatorship´, and go beyond the usage of such an (occasionally) ´crutch´. Music is a fabulous medium for that. Whenever we want, when we find it interesting and even necessary, or to the extent that a certain opus itself reveals this meta-orifice, a point of mutation in an effort to taking that leap. But actually it is much more than that. Probably since this is at the heart of the Music itself*. Such non-submission to the collaterality or ´safeguard´ or ´parasitism´ of what is turned to the (real or imaginary) ´Optical´. I'm just referring to when it assuredly happens, not by choice but by becoming involuntary. Patently under our trigger, either passively or making us ´eye automatons´. Howsoever, I have no doubt that this turning point (or, verily, resumption of what is quintessentially sonorous) has, since always, a positively (r)evolutionary connotation - be it in the scope of our human contingencies, be it in the full monty that inhabits in depth (and stratosphericity) what we call ... Art -.

This is one of the core of O.M.'s career, bringing to light uncountable and measureless steering wheels (in short, PET SHOP BEUYS is both - yea - an otic Projection of a terrific biographical excerpt and a sound Piece plainly in all its authenticity / autarchy peculiar to the orb of sonorities...; here I quote only two among several ballasts) and it is up to us to embrace one by one, as .. as we cannot separate the transubstantiality and polydimensionality of what is audible to us from the condition of expanding (in acuity and amplitude) our way of listening. Increasingly, it is the same thing.]

Taking up the thread of the skein; if, in summary, Beuys elects the Tree as ´Regeneration & Time´, Otacílio proposes a whole Genealogy that encompasses such concepts. In its roots and stems and trunks and branches and leaves and fruits: are we! And here we are, Ladies and Gentlemen, intertwined in the most photosynthetic ultra artistic clairvoyant sonicAscension." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"P-h-o-n-o-synthetic.

Natheless, from the beginning. Joseph Heinrich Beuys (May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, social philosophy, and anthroposophy. He is a founder of the provocative art movement known as Fluxus, and was a key figure in the development of Happenings. Beuys is known for his ´extended definition of art´ in which the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape society and politics. He frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural issues.

I'm going to highlight a part of his biography that most especially interests us now:

>>In 1941, Joseph volunteered for the Luftwaffe. He began training as an aircraft radio operator in 1941, under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Posen (now Poznań). They both attended lectures in Biology and Zoology at the University of Posen, at that time a Germanized University. It is also during this time that he began to seriously consider a career as an artist.

In 1942, Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in the Ju 87 ´Stuka´ dive-bomber, initially stationed in Königgrätz, later in the eastern Adriatic region. Drawings and sketches from that time have been preserved and already show his characteristic style. On 16 March 1944, Beuys's plane crashed on the Crimean Front close to Znamianka, then Freiberg Krasnohvardiiske Raion. From this incident, Beuys fashioned the myth that he was rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health:

Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man's land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. 'Du nix njemcky' they would say, 'du Tartar,' and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet, it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts… My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That's how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying 'Voda' (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.´ Records state that Beuys was conscious, recovered by a German search commando, and there were no Tatars in the village at that time. Beuys was brought to a military hospital where he stayed for three weeks from 17 March to 7 April. It is consistent with Beuys's work that his biography would have been subject to his own reinterpretation; this particular story has served as a powerful myth of origins for Beuys's artistic identity, as well as providing an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials, amongst which felt and fat were central. [Beuys in Caroline Tisdall: Joseph Beuys (Guggenheim, 1979), pp. 16–17.]

Despite prior injuries, he was deployed to the Western Front in August 1944, into a poorly equipped and trained paratrooper unit. He received the German Wound Badge in gold for being wounded in action more than five times. On the day after the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, Beuys was taken prisoner in Cuxhaven and brought to a British internment camp from which he was released 5 August of that year. He returned to his parents who had moved to a suburb of Kleve.<<

For it is exactly this Homeric passage from Beuys' life that Otacílio Melgaço portrayed in terms of sound. The aircraft crash. The real facts that followed (at least the most presumably credible) and, likewise, those certainly fantasized by Joseph under an artistic, shamanic, mythomaniac perspective. For this introspective yet no less visceral Odyssey, Melgaço invites us to embark and take off again, but already on the plane of imagination, delirium, supreme invention and transcendence.

I cannot fail to mention a very ingenious reference (and parallelism) engendered by Otacílio. The title of his resonant spawn and the image that is present on the cover of the album that contains such breathtaking reverberating petard.

Before, a brief landing in United States of North America.

>>I Like America and America Likes Me

Art historian Uwe Schneede [de] considers this performance pivotal for the reception of German avant-garde art in the United States since it paved the way for the recognition of not only Beuys's own work but also that of contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz, Kiefer, Lüpertz, and many others in the 1980s. In May 1974, Beuys flew to New York and was taken by ambulance to the site of the performance, a room in the René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway. Beuys lay on the ambulance stretcher swathed in felt. He shared this room with a coyote for eight hours over three days. At times he stood, wrapped in a thick, grey blanket of felt, leaning on a large shepherd's staff. At times he lay on the straw, at times he watched the coyote as the coyote watched him and cautiously circled the man or shredded the blanket to pieces, and at times he engaged in symbolic gestures, such as striking a large triangle or tossing his leather gloves to the animal; the performance continuously shifted between elements that were required by the realities of the situation and elements that had a purely symbolic character. At the end of the three days, Beuys hugged the coyote that had grown quite tolerant of him and was taken to the airport. Again he rode in a veiled ambulance, leaving America without having set foot on its ground. As Beuys later explained: 'I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.'

In 2013, Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked I Like America and America Likes Me the second greatest work of performance art ever.<<

Having now either a recollection of such an event or even the unprecedented science of, relating the wild dog (that resembles the wolf, native to North America) that stares at us through Otacílio Melgaço's puzzling gaze and the ironically philoprogenitive ´Pet Shop Beuys´ pun [´Boys´ / ´Beuys´ are pronounced identically. I suppose many of you have heard of the Pet Shop Boys, an English synth-pop duo formed in London in 1981]: here's how this sonic Oeuvre reveals itself yet more fascinating, challenging and, why not?, seriously (satirically, sarcastically?) bouffe.

´I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context´, vocalized Herr Beuys. Ultimately, I believe this statement can be a roaring mirror of what Mr. Melgaço so substantially reflected through idiosyncratic ultra vivid (and voraciously audible) Offspring." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

&

I - *Addendum by P.S.P.;

Still about vision and hearing.

The fetus only sees figures (shadows) inside the uterus. Around the 30th week of pregnancy, he can distinguish clarity from dark and even following a light source. This is because part of the ambient light penetrates the pregnant woman's belly, and can be seen by the foetus – whose eyes start to function between the 20th and 30th week of child-bearing. But scientists don't recommend trying to visually stimulate babies before birth. It's that the brain forms in a specific order, and speeding up the development of vision can harm other senses.

What about listening? The ultrasound imaging technique allowed us to know a little bit about the interaction of intrauterine babies with the outside world, but this was not the only technology to help us in this task. The advent of the hydrophone, a small microphone capable of capturing sound in an aqueous medium, revealed to us a sound environment never imagined before in the womb.

We then found that "the foetus's playlist" is made up of the sound of the mother's heartbeat, blood flow, peristaltic movements, and breathing. More than that: he is also able to hear sounds from the outside world, including the voice of the mother, father and other people, ambient noises, the mum's gait and, ... m-u-s-i-c!

Sound transmission can occur through touch, via bone conduction, and through hearing, via the airway. Of course, external sound is not perceived by the fetus in the same way that it is perceived by us, as it has to cross several physical barriers in its path. It is estimated that these barriers acoustically damage noise and distort, for example, the sound of consonants. The vowels, speech tone and musical melodies seem to be well recognized from the 6th month onwards, although some researchers believe that this only occurs around the 32nd week. The fact is that, from the 6th month of life, you can and should talk to your baby, put on music for him to hear, in addition to stimulating him by touching and caressing the tummy. When touching or massaging the belly, the vibrations caused by the fluid inside the uterus provide the fetus with a tactile experience as well.

Anyway, it seems to me more than obvious how much, before birth, there is a stark difference between what is visible and what is audible and how much there is interaction with the foetus respectively. It's unchallengeable. I cannot help noticing this topic as a polysemic valuable metaphor as well. That's why I brought such an approach; I should add that many of Otacílio Melgaço's Opuses give us insight into what these ´auditions´ would be like. By means of a physical applicability of what, scientifically, we are already aware of ... and ... by theoretical - & aesthetic (aesthetical too?) - reflections (to enrich our assumptions, conjectures, hypotheses, intuitions ...) on how they could be assimilated and computed by the foetus;

II - Out of curiosity ...

In a recent interview, Otacílio Melgaço commented that PSB has a certain "family relationship" with another recent work of his, the Brumarian Symphony (Sinfonia Brumariana). As it is a sonic creation that does not appear in Bandcamp, here are both links that lead us, respectively, to the site that was built especially to contextualize it and also so that it can be heard:

otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/sinfoniabrumariana

soundcloud.com/user-251525764/sinfonia-brumariana-brumarian-symphony

III - Beuys had adopted shamanism not only as the presentation mode of his art but also in his own life. Although the artist as a shaman has been a trend in modern art (Picasso, Gauguin), Beuys is unusual in that respect as he integrated "his art and his life into the shaman role." Beuys believed that humanity, with its turn on rationality, was trying to eliminate "emotions" and thus eliminate a major source of energy and creativity in every individual. In his first lecture tour in America he was telling the audience that humanity was in an evolving state and that as "spiritual" beings we ought to draw on both our emotions and our thinking as they represent the total energy and creativity for every individual. Beuys described how we must seek out and energize our spirituality and link it to our thinking powers so that "our vision of the world must be extended to encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact."

In Beuys's own words: "So when I appear as a kind of shamanistic figure, or allude to it, I do it to stress my belief in other priorities and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances. For instance, in places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear."

Beuys, as he often explained in his interviews, saw and used his performative art as shamanistic and psychoanalytic techniques to both educate and heal the general public.

"It was thus a strategic stage to use the shaman's character but, subsequently, I gave scientific lectures. Also, at times, on one hand, I was a kind of modern scientific analyst, on the other hand, in the actions, I had a synthetic existence as shaman. This strategy aimed at creating in people an agitation for instigating questions rather than for conveying a complete and perfect structure. It was a kind of psychoanalysis with all the problems of energy and culture."

In that respect his art was educative as well as therapeutic – "his intention was to use these two forms of discourse and styles of knowledge as pedagogues."He used shamanistic and psychoanalytic techniques to "manipulate symbols" and affect his audience. In his personal life, Beuys had adopted the felt hat, the felt suit, the cane and the vest as his standard look. The imagined story of him being rescued by Tartar herdsmen maybe has an explanation in that Beuys wanted to "create" a ritualistic aspect to his look and to his adoption of materials like felt and fat. Beuys experienced a severe depression between 1955 and 1957. After he recovered, Beuys observed at the time that "his personal crisis" caused him to question everything in life and he called the incident "a shamanistic initiation." Shamanism is related to death and the shaman is the mediator between this world and the "Otherworld". He saw Death not only in the inevitability of death for people but also death in the environment and he became, through his art and his political activism, a strong critic of the environmental destruction. He said at the time,

"I don't use shamanism to refer to death, but vice versa – through shamanism, I refer to the fatal character of the times we live in. But at the same time I also point out that the fatal character of the present can be overcome in the future";

IV - The concept of "Social Sculpture"

It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. These ideas were founded in the body of social ideas of Rudolf Steiner known as Social Threefolding, of which he was a vigorous and original proponent. This translated into Beuys's formulation of the concept of social sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively (perhaps Beuys's most famous phrase, borrowed from Novalis, is "Everyone is an artist"). In the video "Willoughby SHARP, Joseph Beuys, Public Dialogues (1974/120 min)", a record of Beuy's first major public discussion in the U.S., Beuys elaborates three principles: Freedom, Democracy, and Socialism, saying that each of them depends on the other two in order to be meaningful. In 1973, Beuys wrote:

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER."

In 1982 he was invited to create a work for documenta 7. He delivered a large pile of basalt stones. From above one could see that the pile of stones was a large arrow pointing to a single oak tree that he had planted. He announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in the new location of the stone. 7,000 oak trees were then planted in Kassel, Germany. This project exemplified the idea that a social sculpture was defined as interdisciplinary and participatory. Beuys's wanted to effect environmental and social change through this project. The Dia Art Foundation continues his project still and has planted more trees and paired them with basalt stones too.

Beuys said that:

"My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same";

V - Pet Shop Boys

Consisting of primary vocalist Neil Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe, they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, and were listed as the most successful duo in UK music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records.

Three-time Brit Award winners and six-time Grammy nominees, since 1984 they have achieved 42 Top 30 singles, 22 of these were Top 10 hits in the UK Singles Chart, including four UK number ones: "West End Girls" (also number one on the US Billboard Hot 100), "It's a Sin", a synth-pop version of "Always on My Mind", and "Heart". Other hit songs include a cover of "Go West", and their own "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)", and "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" in a duet with Dusty Springfield. With five US top ten singles in the 1980s, they are associated with the Second British Invasion.

At the 2009 Brit Awards in London, Pet Shop Boys received an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2016, Billboard magazine named Pet Shop Boys the number one dance duo/group over the 40 years since the chart's inception in 1976. In 2017, the duo received NME's Godlike Genius Award.

...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.