Boring Formless Nonsense
Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure
1st Edition
Published on 11. April 2013
336 pages
978-1-4411-4616-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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. * Journal of Popular Music Studies *More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Digital)
Illustrations
20
ISBN-13
978-1-4411-4616-8 (9781441146168)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
03/2013
Bloomsbury Academic USA
€45.00
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
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.
Content
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
(Grupat 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
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
(Grupat 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
