Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure

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.

CONTENIDO:
Pretext

1. Boring
Introduction
On Being Bored
A Boring History
Cage, Fluxus, and Inclusion
Duration
The Aesthetics of Boredom and the Art of Waiting
The Premises/Promises of Aesthetic Boredom
A Less Promising Boredom
Uglier Feelings of the Stuplime
Post...Death...
Afterthought...

2. Formless
Pretext
(Informe)
How to read this chapter
Story
Becoming Formless
Music Noise
Recording Distraction
---Multitasking
Capture and Escape
Lull )
Listening to SoS 16's Lull )
(Listening Away)
Muzak's Way of Dreaming Ubiquitously )
---Notes on Muzak
---Quantum Modulation
We don't (listen) anymore
The (Sound) of Habits
Artifice and The Artificial
) Desire and Dissatisfaction
Last)
Another Again

3. Nonsense
(Voodoo
(Metareferentiality, Metamusic and Hypermusic
(Grúpat and Pseudonymity
(Symptoms, Syndromes and Hyperfiction
(In a Sedimental Mood
(Hyperstition, Magick and Nonsense
(Becoming Karen et al, a Real-Time Hyperstition as of March 30, 2007 By Karen Eliot
(Of Lies
(What does music feel like? (or, 'on the refrain of pain and imagining'): Discursive Remainders from glossolalia (stress positions) by Engram Knots
(glossolalia (stress positions)
(Occult dualism
(Illustrative Interlude: Practicing
(The sleep side of music and dream-work)

Nonsense II
Inconclusion/This chapter is false

Appendix
Bibliography
Index