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Six Degrees of Separation {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 01​:​23​:​05]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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S i x D e g r e e s O f S e p a r a t i o n

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 01:23:05] 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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"Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of ´a friend of a friend´ statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized by a 1990 play written by John Guare.

There´s much controversy surrounding it and what matters is the metaphor that O.M. cleverly evokes. Of course, this was his focus of interest. His sextuple ´cat leap´. Bind six degrees; six steps; thus six chains; six musical creations forming a planetary rhizome, ´embracing´ the Earth. ´Re´ (´again´) + ´ligare´ (´to connect´): ´to reconnect´. And again and again and again and again and over again. An interesting denomination, if sixfoldly punctuated, would be - verbatim - ´world wide web´; have you heard about it?

Yet about the theory, out of curiosity: several studies, such as Milgram's small world experiment, have been conducted to empirically measure this connectedness. The phrase ´six degrees of separation´ is often used as a synonym for the idea of the ´small world´ phenomenon. However, detractors argue that Milgram's experiment did not demonstrate such a link, and the ´six degrees´ claim has been decried as an ´academic urban myth´. Also, the existence of isolated groups of humans, for example the Korubo and other native Brazilian populations, would tend to invalidate the strictest interpretation of the hypothesis. (I can clearly understand, while I absorb this album, such appendices are also implicit in conceptional spectra proposed by Mr. Melgaço. Polemics only make this issue less petrified and I think that's a good sign).

Six sound Pieces representing - increasingly interlaced/entangled, above all, by technologies - a possible (therefore, nowadays, more and more provable and proven) ´Global Village´. Without a value judgment (it could be done) but to direct a spotlight to a panorama of cultural interpenetrations. This is the concept of the recording both cosmopolitan as rooted in distinct ethnicities, with notable profiles.

As James Joyce wrote: ´urban and orbal; the urb, it orbs´.

[Without a value judgment? Could not go unnoticed the strategic (perhaps ´ironical´?) quote - which can be heard on one of the album tracks - about Esperanto (a constructed auxiliary artificial language devised in 1887 as an international medium of communication), apropos. A key caveat: I take into account the power purely symbolic involved in this and I say: as a simulacrum of a web (under the complexion of a vernacular ubiquitous organism), it's amazing. Aesthetically also is irresistible the result.

Nevertheless, alongside the consecrated observation above: ´ironical´? Right here I believe Melgaço throws a hint of sarcasm (impregnating everything, consequently, with more polysemy - as is his tendency) and so O.M. makes a poignant retelling of a certain illustrious Canadian. Never too late to renew memories dedicated to Marshall McLuhan. By the way, the equally or more sardonic ´touché´: ´Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity´, has the own Marshall as source. And it´s worth noting that one of the topics of Otacílio in this wide-ranging work, I presume, is inevitably ´Identity´. How to live the globalization (choose this terminology or any other) without the sense of identity becoming a ruin or mere crumbs meaningless. But at the same time, do not allow yourself to be mummified under the cloak of a pariah - antithetical to a planetary citizenship.

Resuming my line of reasoning: McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. He argued that the global village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The global village is far more diverse. After the publication of Understanding Media, the professor of English, philosopher of communication theory and public intellectual starts using the term ´global theater´ to emphasise the changeover from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement, from job holding to role playing, stressing that there is no more community to clothe the naked specialist.]

Here I make the perfect junction amid a synonym for ´village´ and the drama of the old bard English: among the hamlet and theatricality, between this and that, ART - like never before - could and should be an extension of (a universal) consciousness in a ´shrinking´ world. World in which everything is getting closer. If we do not forget the following condition: each individual, every single person having, as much as possible, full and autarchical consciousness of it. And so, as far as possible, deciding: what will be his next step (next DEGREE), even if inevitably immersed in this unavoidable flow.

´Small world´, immeasurable & fluxuous Melgacian Music!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"India (as a tip of the eastern iceberg), Africa, Brazil, USA, Europe ... present not only in dynamic sonic expressions as duly transmuted characteristics of their cultures by advanced perspective of an eclectic artist like Otacílio Melgaço. The constancy rhythmic is able to make us stand in a trance; the level of suggested interaction is visceral; the harmonic interventions have a stamp, I would say, metaphysical; the interface among the representative prisms is permanently seductive. Mirroring my words, there´s a range of percussivities (tabla, congas, drums, gongs, kuweeca, tambourine, marimba ...), apotheotic strings plus guitar, organ, flute, voices, noises, ..., and to me, the essence of ´Six Degrees of Separation´ will be found in the tubular bells.

Tubular bells (also known as chimes) are musical instruments in the (already highlighted) percussion family. Their sound resembles that of church bells; the original tubular bells were made to duplicate the sound of church bells within an ensemble. Each bell is a metal tube. It rarely plays melody, instead being used most often as a color to add to the ensemble sound. It does have solos occasionally, often depicting church bells. A valuable summary: Melgaço and the liturgical sense of ´religare´ added to a preponderantly colorist perspective, ie, melodic spasms or signs of emerging solos are immediately absorbed by a harmonic epicenter - in a magnificent balance between what is fragment and what is wholeness. [It´s not unexpected that the figure printed on the cover of the album is the DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule que carries most of the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, reproduction and functioning of all known living organisms.] And which one is the intertwining that supports all this? The Eurythmy. I believe, after all, the preponderance of cadenced beats in many of the Pieces alludes to the element that´s the most primal in the sound universe. Ultimately are these pulses that reverberate the sap, the nectar that serves as fixative fluid to a project so stuffed of horizons like this. By means of conceptual vertex, of sensory too.

More than that, there´s a tempting & inviting Thread; we´re Theseus and the name behind the audible degrees is Ariadne or Minotaur, probably both (simultaneously) and finally, Dionysius, giving concreteness to the latent love that always dwelt the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë as well as (who knows?) through this surprising alliance (plus everything that previously happened to generate this course of history), symbolically redeeming the offspring (which has the same Minos as prefix to its epithet) of a non-natural pregnancy (between a woman, the same Pasiphaë, and a bull) in the form of already ethereally rescued Asterion, freed from his tragic condition - while alive. (Are my conjectures, forgive me any delirium).

Theoretically the composer/multi-instrumentalist uses the term ´Separation´ in the title of his superb ´hexagonal´ work, in fact he refers all the time to ´Approaches, Dialogues, Links,
Reconnections´." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - The Oscar-winning film Babel is based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. The lives of all of the characters were intimately intertwined, although they did not know each other and lived thousands of miles from each other. The television program Lost also explores the idea of six degrees of separation, as almost all the characters have randomly met each other before the crash or someone the other characters know;

II - Mathematicians use an analogous notion of collaboration distance: two persons are linked if they are coauthors of an article. The collaboration distance with mathematician Paul Erdős is called the Erdős number. Erdős-Bacon numbers and Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath (EBS) numbers are further extensions of the same thinking.

Watts and Strogatz showed that the average path length between two nodes in a random network is equal to ln N / ln K, where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node. Thus if N = 300,000,000 (90% of the US population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 19.5 / 3.4 = 5.7 and if N = 6,000,000,000 (90% of the World population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6. (Assume 10% of population is too young to participate);

III - Three Degrees of Influence is a theory in the realm of social networks, proposed by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler in 2007. Christakis and Fowler found that social networks have great influence on individuals' behavior. But social influence does not end with the people to whom a person is directly tied. We influence our friends, who in their turn influence their friends, meaning that our actions can influence people we have never met. They posit that "everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees). Our influence gradually dissipates and ceases to have a noticeable effect on people beyond the social frontier that lies at three degrees of separation".

This argument is basically that peer effects need not stop at one degree, and that, if we can affect our friends, then we can (in many cases) affect our friends' friends, and so on. However, across a broad set of empirical settings, the effect seems to no longer be meaningful at a social horizon of three degrees. Christakis and Fowler examined phenomena from various domains, such as obesity, happiness, cooperation, and politics; investigations by other groups have explored many other phenomena in this way.

...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 May 5, 2016

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 | 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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Official (English) Site
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"Music is like a bewitched Mistress." (Paul Klee)
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