Boring Formless Nonsense Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure [Paperback]

Boring Formless Nonsenseintervenes 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 Nonsensewill challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

PretextIntroductionOne: BoringIntroductionOn Being BoredA Boring HistoryCage, Fluxus, and InclusionDuration The Aesthetics of Boredom and the Art of WaitingThe Premises/Promises of Aesthetic BoredomA Less Promising BoredomUglier Feelings of the StuplimePost...Death...Afterthought... Two: FormlessPretext(Informe)How to read this chapterStoryBecoming FormlessMusic NoiseRecording Distraction---MultitaskingCapture and EscapeLull ))) ))) )))Listening to SoS#16's Lull )))))(((((Listening Away)))))Muzak's Way of Dreaming Ubiquitously ))))---Notes on Muzak---Quantum ModulationWe don't (((listen))) anymoreThe (((Sound)lS-