About

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.