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 shoulders 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 debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a highly dubious concept. The book frames recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art whose affective and formal elements reflect on current issues in contemporary culture, and offers analyses of musical works and performance practices that are rarely heard, let alone considered as significant cultural phenomena - showing the role that obscurity and the esoteric have in articulating current cultural realities. 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 is a composer, writer and co-artistic director of the experimental music collective Neither/Nor. He completed his PhD at the Institute for Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University where he pursued research in the fields of the avant-garde, phenomenology, and philosophies of experience. eldritch was also a visiting researcher at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities where he studied with senior scholar in residence, Brian Massumi.eldritch's essays on musical aesthetics and avant-garde poetics have appeared in various academic journals including Postmodern Culture, Radical Musicology and Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature. In addition to his academic work, eldritch is active as acomposer whose works have been performed across North America and Europe.

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