Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability.

Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary cultures themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

“The skilful navigation of modes of failure in composition that is Boring Formless Nonsense achieves a rare balance between theoretical crispness, fascinating detail and the murmurs of an avant-garde comic turn. It's like setting out on a journey over and over again.”

- Paul Hegarty, author of Noise/Music and co-author of Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s

eldritch Priest writes on contemporary experimental music, audio culture, and post-avant-garde aesthetics from a pataphysical perspective. He is a composer and lives in Toronto.

PretextIntroductionOne: BoringIntroductionOn Being BoredA Boring HistoryCage, Fluxus, and InclusionDuration The Aesthetics of Boredom and the Art of WaitingThe Premises/Promises of Aesthetic BoredomA Less Promising BoredomUglier Feelings of the StuplimePost...Death...Afterthought... Two: FormlessPretext(Informe)How to read this chapterStoryBecoming FormlessMusic NoiseRecording Distraction---MultitaskingCapture and EscapeLull ))) ))) )))Listening to SoS#16's Lull )))))(((((Listening Away)))))Muzak's Way of Dreaming Ubiquitously ))))---Notes on Muzak---Quantum ModulationWe don't (((listen))) anymoreThe (((Sound))) of HabitsArtifice and The Artificial))))) Desire and DissatisfactionLast)))))Another AgainThree: Nonsense (Voodoo(Metareferentiality, Metamusic and Hypermusic(Grúpat and Pseudonymity(Symptoms, Syndromes and Hyperfiction (In a Sedimental Mood (Hyperstition, Magick and Nonsense(Becoming Karen et al, a Real-Time Hyperstition as of March 30, 2007 By Karen Eliot(Of Lies(What does music feel like? (or, 'on the refrain of pain and imagining'): Discursive Remainders from glossolalia (stress positions) by Engram Knots(glossolalia (stress positions)(Occult dualism(Illustrative Interlude: Practicing(The sleep side of music and dream-work)))))))))))))Inconclusion/This chapter is false("Disclaimer")AppendixInconclusionThis text is falseBibliography