Too, So Like Nothing: an interview with composer Eldritch Priest
Searching. Wandering. A masterful use of palate-cleansing blocks of silence. Eldritch Priest’s music lives in the space between serious and trivial—a place that he states is often associated with play. He prefers not to direct how people listen to his music, trusting us to find our own way through the “field of details” he sets up. Most of all, he strives to create laid back music by not being precious about the material with which he crafts his compositions.
All the pieces featured on Too, So Like Nothing reflect Priest’s lack of preciousness. Masterfully performed by pianist Roger Admiral, these pieces invite us to play in the space between sound and silence, and to slide in and out of tonality. There’s an invitation to deep listening—something that pulls us out of expectations and just asks for our attention. The pieces are presented, listener expectation is suspended, and in that space he trusts his listeners to provide structure within their own experiences.
Priest is a polymath who, in addition to his career as a composer, is also a jazz guitarist, improviser, university professor, theorist, and published author. When I asked him about his multi-faceted career, he replied,
“To me, I just have interests that bring me to explore the creative potential of a form, be that composing, writing, or performing. It’s a very libidinal experience, to be so expressively promiscuous. To my students I say: ‘Enjoy your seductions’.”
It’s an honor to feature Eldritch Priest and Too, So Like Nothing on No Dead Guys.
When did you begin your musical studies and what first drew you to the guitar, your primary instrument?
My studies began when I was fifteen. Late by some standards, maybe, but when my interest in music took hold, it was with a firm grip. I credit this late start with me taking music seriously. And what drew me to the guitar? Well, that’s all a bit murky now, but I think there was something about the mystique of virtuosity that lured me to the instrument. I’m still fascinated by the allure of virtuosity, but more in the way a player skews the conventions of what counts as such. Bill Frisell’s (early) playing is paradigmatic in this regard in that it defines a form of mastery by introducing an expressive weirdness into the practice rather than by making a spectacle of it.
I read that you were first attracted to improvisation through metal music and eventually jazz. When did you start composing?
Strictly speaking, I was composing from the beginning—prog rock stuff and jazz tunes at first. But it was when I was studying jazz in university that I began to be drawn more decidedly into composition. I love improvisation and jazz; however, there was something I was after in my music that neither of those satisfied. As my jazz tunes became increasingly complex I started to look for other compositional models whose harmonic language, orchestration, and formal conceits were more congruent with what I was getting up to. At first, I was led to the usual suspects—Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and especially Bartok. Jazz musicians seem to gravitate towards these early twentieth-century composers because, I suspect, there’s something familiar about the rhythms and harmonies. That said, I grew to want something more and was fortunate to have a great professor (who studied with Morton Feldman) introduce me during my undergraduate to a much more contemporary world of composition. Jo Kondo, Louis Andriessen, Galina Ustvolskaya, György Kurtag, and, of course, Feldman and friends, became new favourites. I suppose it was around this time that I started composing “new music.”
After graduating, I moved to Toronto in the late nineties, where I studied composition with Linda Catlin Smith for a spell and found myself part of a rather peculiar composition scene that included the likes of Allison Cameron, Martin Arnold, and Mart Sabat. After several years of working in bookstores and scraping by on the occasional arts grant, I moved to Victoria (British Columbia) and earned a master’s degree in composition. While I was there, I worked with Christopher Butterfield and got to know Rudolf Komorous. (Rudolf was a major influence on many composers who studied with him such that people talk about a veritable “Victoria School.”) Ironically, it was during this period of my life that I started not exactly to drift away from composing, but rather to be drawn towards other interests. I’d studied philosophy and linguistics during my undergrad, so I was primed to be bitten by the “Theory” bug during my graduate studies. Derrida, Deleuze, and Baudrillard became my new “favourites,” which, ultimately, led me to pursue a doctorate not in music but cultural theory.
In addition to your career as a composer, jazz guitarist, university professor, and improviser, you’re also a published author. When did you decide to pursue these creative paths as your career and how challenging is it to keep all of them going?
As I noted, it was during my master’s that I began taking more seriously my long-standing interest in the “life of the mind.” I never really thought much about making a career out of thinking and writing, but as I was completing my PhD I found I loved the work (the play) and, gradually, came to see academia as a viable “plan B.” To make a living as a musician, writing and playing the kind of music I wanted to be doing, was never really going to be an option. That academe has been an option, I have to say, is a great (if surprising) delight. And to answer the other part of your question… To be honest, it’s very challenging to keep all these plates spinning. I tend to cycle through these parts of my practice and scholarship because each demands my full attention. But it seems to work for me. The past few years, I’ve be focused largely on composing and performing, but I can feel things starting to change as I begin to think more about my next book.
I’m fascinated by your books, which explore such things as “the aesthetics of failure” and earworms, music, and daydreams. What interests you about these things and how are your literary interests reflected in your compositional style?
These topics interest me because they’re at once both banal and mysterious. Failure is nothing special, but in art it has peculiar effects (and affects) that I lead me to think about aesthetics differently. The same goes for earworms and daydreams. They’re supermundane phenomena, but under scrutiny they become strange ways of thinking about mind and experience.
I’m frequently asked the question about how these “literary” (or philosophical) enthusiasms find their way into my creative work. The honest reply is that I really don’t know. There’s no intention on my part to explore themes of “failure” or the “philosophy of mind” in my compositions. Not that you’re suggesting there is. If there’s any kind of reflection, it’s likely a distorted one, one so warped that I don’t even recognize it as reflection. In many ways I feel divided. My creative and theoretical work, while obviously friendly to one other, tend to keep to themselves.
As part of your work as a theorist, you write about the “philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective’.” What is a pataphysical perspective and how does this work find a voice in your music?
Yes, well, pataphysics… It’s a proto-surrealist farce, really. The French poet and playwright, Alfred Jarry, made it up in the early twentieth century as a kind of mockery of the pretenses of metaphysics. But that said, it’s also a very serious way of viewing the world as an absurdity, as something defined as much by exceptions as the rule. The way I look at it, pataphysics pitches a take on things that is concerned less with their “truth” and more with what fun might be had with them. If this finds a voice in my music, I suppose it’s in the way my work quietly declines to be about anything or go anywhere and instead luxuriates in the vagaries of its exceptions.
Congratulations on the dual album release of Too, So Like Nothing, featuring three piano solos played by concert pianist Roger Admiral, and No One Asked Us Yet which features your jazz trio Raymond Russell, with you on guitar. Why did you choose to release these albums together and in what way do they complement each other?
Yeah, thanks for listening. I’m quite pleased with both albums. They’re very different projects and expressive of my multiple artistic personalities. The trio album is a mix of improvised music and composed tunes while the piano album is fully composed material. Why I released them together has more to do with circumstances and a good relationship with David Psutka at Halocline Trance. I first approached David about the trio album and happened to mention in one of our conversations that I also had an album of piano works in the can. It was David who suggested that Halocline Trance release both albums as a way to present the diversity of my practice.
Given that you’re a guitarist, what was the most challenging thing about writing solo piano music and what was the most rewarding?
Well, I don’t play piano per se, but I can get around on it. What’s most challenging about writing for this instrument (for me) is not being seduced by its history. The piano has so much “baggage,” so many allusions to the past, that it’s difficult to hear anything played on it without perceiving this kind of referential patina. My response to this challenge, however, isn’t to reject it but rather to put it into play in a way that skews how these references are heard. For example, the first track, nape…wrinkle…linger, sounds like—kind of—something Bill Evans could or would have played, but it never quite satisfies those expectations that come along with hearing this reference. Ideally, what happens in this situation is the listener develops expectations that while indebted to a (jazz) tradition, for example, become particular to the piece.
The three pieces featured on Too, So Like Nothing were written at different points in your career and for different pianists. What unique elements does Roger Admiral bring to this music and why did you feel he was the best artist to record these works?
Roger has been playing my music since 2003. I first met him in Edmonton after I gave a talk at the University of Alberta, and he asked for a copy of nape…wrinkle…linger. A few years after that he premiered …soot?aporia, and it was nearly twenty years later that I asked if he’d like to premiere too, so like nothing. In some ways, it’s Roger who started this relationship, and I couldn’t be happier. Roger is an excellent interpreter of new music (repertoire, too), and he has a knack for bringing out dimensions of a work that often go under considered. With my music, for instance, he always finds something in the pacing and slackness of it all that makes it move in unpredictable ways. But he also has a focused touch that helps articulate all the local details that give my works their definition. This is all to say that Roger has been for many years the best artist to record these pieces.
You’ve said in the past that experimentation and play occurs in both your improvisation and compositions. What can you tell me about how these manifest in your piano pieces?
Largely, experimentation and play define my approach to all my practices. In my writing it often comes out as something that straddles the line between legit scholarship and fiction. In my music, I lean into these elements in a way that lets me focus on moment-to-moment details, details that, ironically, give the work a kind of formal purchase at much larger scales. I guess there’s also something about my music that hovers between the serious and the trivial, which is a state often associated with play. Chiefly, this means not being precious about material as I explore what can be done with it.
One of the things I admire about the pieces on Too, So Like Nothing is the sense of searching and your masterful use of silences. What would you be willing to share about the use of blocks of silence in this music?
As you suggest, there is, indeed, a kind of “searching” that characterizes my work. This is partly what gives its gestures and flourishes a sense of hovering between statements rather than declaiming them. But it’s also the way silence can be treated as a type of “relief,” in the sense that sculpture uses the term to describe how content is “lifted” from a background. I’m not, however, methodical about it. There’s no systematic technique I use to create this relief. It’s a very intuitive thing. I probably developed my sensitivity to silence from listening to so much jazz, where it does nearly as much work as the notes do.
Your piano solos place great trust in your listeners by pulling us out our expectations and asking for our attention and curiosity. I understand that your intent with this cycle was to explore how music can be thought of as “laid back.” In what way?
Laid back is how I describe most of my music. I’m not particularly interested in directing how one listens as much as I am in letting listeners find their own way through the field of details that I set up. I also use “laid back” as a performance instruction. I find this helps realize the meandering character of my music as a deliberate aesthetic conceit that puts it into conversation with those jazz traditions that inform so much of my musical taste.
What current or future plans are you most excited about?
Hmmm… not certain about this one…
What do you tell your students about how to create a polymath career?
A polymath career…I’ve never thought of what I do in that way. To me, I just have interests that bring me to explore the creative potential of a form, be that composing, writing, or performing. It’s a very libidinal experience, to be so expressively promiscuous. To my students I say: “Enjoy your seductions.”
Owing to their depth of engagement with the grey areas of artistic practice and the fine attention to the subtle crevices through which intensely concatenated meaning can be glimpsed, Priest’s musical works are exemplary models of artistic investigation. In his work, Priest jumps selflessly into the problematic, setting up aesthetic conjunctions which cannot be absorbed into reductive categories, but which resolutely unlock the floodgates of a critical listening ethic. It is via the listener, in his/her capacity as co-creator, wherein eldritch’s progressive ethics can be gleaned: art as open dialogue, as subversion, as nonhierarchical—a means of returning the listener’s sense of the world to one imbued with wonder and amazement. His eccentrically inventive forms and reconfigurations of idioms are but two acute indicators of an unerring ability to trouble the waters of easy semantic sailing. (Marc Couroux)
***
For the past twenty-five years Priest has been working as a composer and improvisor. His compositions, which include chamber as well as solo works, and have been performed in North American and Europe by interpreters such as the Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Philip Thomas, Continuum, and Arraymusic, are characterized by their ob/excessive approach to melody, not in a systematic or meaningful sense, but in the sense that they don’t stop and tend towards the absurd. His improvisational work is like this too, but improvised. Along with John Mark Sherlock, he co-founded the Toronto-based experimental music collective Neither/Nor, which in the early oughts (2000s) commissioned and performed works by an international array of musician-composers.
Priest is also an active member of Vancouver’s improvisation and experimental jazz community. Currently, he is one half of Alfred Jarry, a duo that takes its name from the inventor of ’pataphysics—“the science of imaginary solutions that symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.” Based in Vancouver, the duo performs its chimerical species of jazz by taking its cues as much from the electronic sound design of Autechre and Pan Sonic as the idiosyncratic stylings of Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus.
In 2021, Priest released Many Traceries on Eric Chenaux’s and Martin Arnold’s Rat-Drifting label, a label that “documents a dynamic cross-section of iconoclastic Toronto experimental music projects.” Priest’s latest release, Omphaloskepsis (Halocline Trance), is a work for solo guitar described as “a glittering and meandering sci-fi soundtrack that falls between new music suspension and prog rock structures.”
***
Alongside his musical practice, Priest has pursued a career in academia as a cultural theorist, where he writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. His writing has appeared in several journals and books including Theory, Culture and Society, Postmodern Culture, and AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies. Additionally, Priest has published two manuscripts—Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury 2013), and Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press 2022). With members of the experimental theory group The Occculture, he co-wrote Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.