Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781441122131)

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.

Author: Eldritch Priest
ISBN-10: 1441122133
ISBN-13: 9781441122131
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Language: English
Published: 01/17/2013
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 1.00d