T a b o o & T o t e m

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 30:30] 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 believe there is an interesting identification between the album ´Galápagos´

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/gal-pagos-a-mellotronic-suite-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-31-12

and this stunning work.

Respectively, we find the mention of Charles Darwin and now Sigmund Freud. And here the Brazilian evokes the German that evokes the English.

In ´The Return of Totemism in Childhood´, Freud combines one of Charles Darwin's more speculative theories about the arrangements of early human societies (a single alpha-male surrounded by a harem of females, similar to the arrangement of gorilla groupings) with the theory of the sacrifice ritual taken from William Robertson Smith to conclude that the origins of totemism lie in a singular event, when a band of prehistoric brothers expelled from the alpha-male group returned to kill their father, whom they both feared and respected. In this respect, Freud located the beginnings of the Oedipus complex at the origins of human society, and postulated that all religion was in effect an extended and collective form of guilt and ambivalence to cope with the killing of the father figure (which he saw as the true original sin).

Another valid analogy: although not in an official way,
´Taboo & Totem´ is also a Suite. And for that, all plurality is embraced: harp, sitar, mellotron (or would be birotron?), drums, saxophone, trumpet, double bass, piano, noises, voices ...
The progressiveness of tones, timbres, atmospheres, dynamic, overlays, dialects, stylistics ... all predicates confirm the inexhaustible inventiveness of the composer and multi-instrumentalist Melgaço. His cinematic power is amazing!

I also guess an intersection between the proposal of this disc with the Surrealism. Not a deliberate manner but flirting with spectra.

During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Salvador Dalí later proclaimed, ´There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.´ Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that ´one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects.´

Surrealist music is music which uses unexpected juxtapositions and other techniques under the cover of such cultural movement including collages and sui generis improvisation. To yield up new meanings within a new aesthetic unity.

I emphasize a triad mentioned above: free association, dream analysis, and the unconscious. I´m absolutely sure they are accoutrements constantly scrutinized by Melgaço (not only in this record but throughout his prolific offspring). Without any hesitation, we can seal how there´s a filtering of these perspectives, which are appropriately/peculiarly absorbed/regurgitated in the form of music. And art, culture. And beyond.

Bringing up ´Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World´ (Michael Richardson): ´Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe.´

In the present context - just like words, sounds. In fact, more than words.

´The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.´ As well ´Tabu und Totem´, ladies and gentlemen." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"I call your attention to one of the essays in the Freudian work that probably inspired O.M.:

In ´Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought´, Freud examines the animism and narcissistic phase associated with a primitive understanding of the universe and early libidinal development. A belief in magic and sorcery derives from an overvaluation of psychical acts whereby the structural conditions of mind are transposed onto the world: this overvaluation survives in both primitive men and neurotics. The animistic mode of thinking is governed by an "omnipotence of thoughts", a projection of inner mental life onto the external world. This imaginary construction of reality is also discernible in obsessive thinking, delusional disorders and phobias. Freud comments that the omnipotence of thoughts has been retained in the magical realm of art.

The magical realm of art.

Based on this assumption, a key point - in my view:
´Taboo and Totem´ is the
s-o-u-n-d
r-e-p-r-e-s-e-n-t-a-t-i-o-n
o-f
a
d-r-e-a-m.
And nothing more fundamental to Sigmund than dreams. And its analysis.

Commit ourselves to the fascination of this sonic Piece is the same that allow us to experience an oneiric Odyssey - proposed by
Mr. Melgaço; perhaps a detail further corroborates this: album name and track name. The first in English, the second - in the original German. A metaphor to a dip in both 1) - a source that requires more complex translation capacity as 2) - the original radicalism (towards etymological) of things. Plus - The order of words in the primary title (´Totem and Taboo´) has also been changed, another clue. Plus - The cover image. Plus - Over the first bars, listen to the clockwise's ticking while a multitude of germanic voices corroborate all a hypnotic scene and invites us to (the transition from wakefulness to) sleep, to dream. And at the end, in the last seconds, what we hear is the sound of an alarm clock? There are no limits to the polymorphic parallels made by Otacílio.

A slight anamnesis:

1 - The Omnipotence of Thoughts;
2 - The Exegesis of Dreams;
3 - The Magical Realm of Art.

Dreaming the Melgacian dream, we´ll move between such three vertices. Sind Sie bereit?" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (German: Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker) is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud. It is a collection of four essays first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood". In these essays, Freud applies psychoanalysis to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. Though Totem and Taboo has been seen as one of the classics of anthropology, comparable to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), the work is now almost universally regarded as discredited by anthropologists;

II - Psychoanalyst and anthropologist Géza Róheim considered Totem and Taboo one of the great landmarks in the history of anthropology, comparable only to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890);

III - The early works of musique concrète by Pierre Schaeffer have a surrealist character owing to the unexpected juxtaposition of sound objects, such as the sounds of Balinese priests chanting, a barge on the River Seine, and rattling saucepans in Etude aux casseroles (1948). The composer Olivier Messiaen referred to the "surrealist anxiety" of Schaeffer's early work in contrast to the "asceticism" of the later Etude aux allures of 1958 (Messiaen 1959, 5–6). After the first concert of musique concrète (Concert de bruits, October 5, 1948) Schaeffer received a letter from one member of the audience (identified only as M. C.) describing it as "the music heard, by themselves alone, by Poe and Lautréamont, and Raymond Roussel. The concert of noises represents not only the first concert of surrealist music, but also contains, in my view, a musical revolution" (Schaeffer 1952, 30–3). Schaeffer himself argued that musique concrète, in its initial phase, tended either towards atonality or surrealism, or both, rather than, as it subsequently became, the starting point of a more general musical procedure (Schaeffer 1957, 19–20).

...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.