T o w e r O f S i l e n c e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 01:11:11] 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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"Zoroastrian tradition considers a dead body (in addition to cut hair and nail parings) to be nasu, unclean, i.e. potential pollutants. Specifically, the corpse demon (Avestan: nasu.daeva) was believed to rush into the body and contaminate everything it came into contact with, hence the Vendidad (an ecclesiastical code ´given against the demons´) has rules for disposing of the dead as ´safely´ as possible.

To preclude the pollution of earth or fire, the bodies of the dead are placed atop a tower and so exposed to the sun and to scavenging birds. Thus, ´putrefaction with all its concomitant evils... is most effectually prevented´.

Zoroastrian ritual exposure of the dead is first known of from the writings of the mid-5th-century BCE Herodotus, who observed the custom amongst Iranian expatriates in Asia Minor. In Herodotus' account (Histories i.140), the rites are said to have been ´secret´, but were first performed after the body had been dragged around by a bird or dog. The corpse was then embalmed with wax and laid in a trench.

While the discovery of ossuaries in both eastern and western Iran dating to the 5th and 4th centuries BCE indicates that bones were isolated, that this separation occurred through ritual exposure cannot be assumed: burial mounds, where the bodies were wrapped in wax, have also been discovered. The tombs of the Achaemenid emperors at Naqsh-e Rustam and Pasargadae likewise suggest non-exposure, at least until the bones could be collected. According to legend (incorporated by Ferdowsi into his Shahnameh), Zoroaster is himself interred in a tomb at Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan).

Towers are a much later invention, and are first documented in the early 9th century. The ritual customs surrounding that practice appear to date to the Sassanid era (3rd – 7th century CE). They are known in detail from the supplement to the Sayest ne Sayest, the two Rivayat collections, and the two Saddars.

´Tower of Silence´, the gloomy/shadowy discographic album, seems to stimulate our perceptions as well as the aforementioned impressive ritual: are we led to the highest airs/skies/heavens (as by somber Fire Birds) and also to the fluxuous waters (as by a transmuter Poseidon or Neptune ... with Vedic and Avestan theonyms ´Apam Napat´, ´Apam Napá´ - Sanskrit ´Nábhah´ - and Old Irish ´Nechtan´).

´Tower of Silence´, the clear/clairvoyant discographic album, is a contemporaneous Melgacian wondrously invention, and now here resoundingly documented! Just like in the ´Gathas´: ´Hearken with your ears...´" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"´Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können. / I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.´ - Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Friedrich Nietzsche)

O.M. revives roundly the microtonality and in its most sweeping way: (paradoxically under the cover of a Zoroastrian kind of Requiem) bringing to light - of a transubstantiator and audible Sun - the rituality which in essence purifies, transcends.

And just transcending the touching original meaning of this puzzling recording, I think about the creator Melgaço and his habitat today.
I feel Mr. Melgaço inhabits a silent Tower. A silent Tower of Silence.
Between Bacon and Marceau, ´Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom´. Or, wide awake, ´Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music´.

Music. I emphasize, among many other intricacies, the subtlety of timbres brilliantly exploited by Otacílio even as the way he deals masterfully with the prospect of a kinetic sound spatiality!

Silence. An almost Barenboimian aphorism: ´In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here´. True, the Sound and the Silence now inhabit a Tower too. The same in which lives O.M.: The Tallest." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - A Tower of Silence is a circular, raised structure used by Zoroastrians for exposure of the dead, particularly to scavenging birds for the purposes of excarnation.

Zoroastrian exposure of the dead is first attested in the mid-5th-century BCE Histories of Herodotus, but the use of towers is first documented in early 9th century. The doctrinal rationale for exposure is to avoid contact with earth or fire, both of which are considered sacred.

One of the earliest literary descriptions of such a building appears in the late 9th-century Epistles of Manushchihr, where the technical term is astodan, ´ossuary´. Another technical term that appears in the 9th/10th-century texts of Zoroastrian tradition (the so-called Pahlavi books) is dakhmag, for any place for the dead. This Zoroastrian Middle Persian term is a borrowing from Avestan dakhma, of uncertain meaning but related to interment and commonly translated as ´grave´. In the Avesta, the term is pejorative and does not signify a construction of any kind. In the Iranian provinces of Yazd and Kerman, dakhma continues as deme or dema. Yet another term that appears in the 9th/10th-century texts is dagdah ´prescribed place´. The word also appears in later Zoroastrian texts of both India and Iran, but in 20th-century India came to signify the lowest grade of temple fire. In India, the term doongerwadi came into use after a tower of silence was constructed on a hill of that name;

II - The English language term ´Tower of Silence´ is a neologism attributed to Robert Murphy, an early 19th-century translator of the British colonial government in India.

...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.