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Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure
Author(s): eldritch Priest (Author)
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publication Date: 14 Mar. 2013
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 336 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441124756
- ISBN-13: 9781441124753
Book 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 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.
Editorial Reviews
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’
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.
