Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and The Aesthetics of Failure

by Eldritch Priest

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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Philosophy

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Pataphysical/affect theory + deleuze and guattarian, particularly 1k plateaus/bataille's non-systematic look at experimental music and the "aesthetics of failure". Priest takes on an explicit Bataillean/pataphysical outlook from the very first words stating that failure is pointless, which would imply the book, if successful, won't be anything except pointless.

Didn't particularly understand a lot of what he was trying to get at, and the chapter "Nonsense" is some bizarre hyperstition, Cycnlopedia-qua-pseudonymity thing going on.

[Ruben Aguirre Barba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far from a smooth and easy read, broken narrative and self-referentiality. Brutally honest in its take of what, in most eyes, seems to be the endemic character of contemporary art. A fascinating account of the work's own demise.