tonight i went to see eldritch priest's "the brown study," a two hour nonrepeating melody
piece with 8 performers. sounded interesting.


allow me to paraphrase the writeup, handed out before the performance:

"...this work more (semi)orchestrates what Michael Parsons termed "hidden resources," the histories
and habits that compose the diverse capacities (which subsist spontaneously within a group of individuals.
Thus, the austerity of material, a single nonreapeating melodic line, proposes that each performer approach the
melodic Idea as a moment of creative dissention to be worked out during the performance of the piece. That is, though
the brown study is in some sense a simple melodic congress, the din of voices that gather around its name make
sense of the work as a kind of expressive nonsense, a musical portmanteau that blends the sound of being singular plural.
the brown study is therefor the same "gloomy contemplation" whose clamorous surface weirdness becomes the
sense of nonsense.
So, the brown study is not about anything insofar as "about" means that it is meant to mean something. Instead, it
may be that what the brown study is "about" is difference. It does not mean "difference" but rather it lingers
"about" - lingers around or in difference. The work then is "on about" what it does, and what it does, while it dallies in
difference, is "tune" difference. Heidegger introduced the term Befindlechkeit to describe the experience in which
one is said to find their "self" participating in the world; in other words, to have awareness of being situated and contextualized"

and on, and on, and on, and on ad infinitum.


i went expecting some glenn branca inspired genious and all i got was some pseudo intellectual playing hopscotch on the fretboard
of his headless guitar for two hours solid.


the eldritch priest is apparently doing his dissertation on nonsense. go figure.