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 culture's 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.

Table of Contents:
Pretext Introduction One: Boring Introduction On Being Bored A Boring History Cage, Fluxus, and Inclusion Duration The Aesthetics of Boredom and the Art of Waiting The Premises/Promises of Aesthetic Boredom A Less Promising Boredom Uglier Feelings of the Stuplime Post...Death... Afterthought... Two: Formless Pretext (Informe) How to read this chapter Story Becoming Formless Music Noise Recording Distraction ---Multitasking Capture and Escape Lull ))) ))) ))) Listening to SoS#16's Lull ))))) (((((Listening Away))))) Muzak's Way of Dreaming Ubiquitously )))) ---Notes on Muzak ---Quantum Modulation We don't (((listen))) anymore The (((Sound))) of Habits Artifice and The Artificial ))))) Desire and Dissatisfaction Last))))) Another Again Three: 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") Appendix Inconclusion This text is false Bibliography

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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 In the decade since, a stunning range of new offerings from a variety of publishers has become readily available, and sound studies is a far more expansive discipline. This fact is nowhere more evident than in Bloomsbury Academic's excellent sound studies catalog ... the scholarship here shows how adept the cultural study of sound can be at unearthing the thorny political and social tensions that define contemporary culture.