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 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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Philosophy

327 pages, ebook

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.