Daring, imaginative and compelling hardly begin to describe the experimental jazz guitar compositions of Vancouver composer/performer Eldritch Priest.
Thanks to Riparian Media
Dormitive Virtue is not the album that one likely would’ve expected from Eldritch Priest next. For the past 20-odd years, the Vancouver-based composer, writer, and academic has been building a reputation through mind-bending books about music such as Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure(2013, Bloomsbury) and 2022’s Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press) and disorienting chamber and electroacoustic works whose sprawling melodies and elusive forms destabilize one’s sense of memory and time.
Dormitive Virtue doesn’t so much abandon these sensibilities as it does adapt them into the context of a concise, solo, and mostly improvised, guitar record. Where his compositions (much like his writing) employ carefully sculpted meandering to achieve their distinctive feel, on this album, Priest’s playing draws instinctively on this gestural vocabulary but also from elsewhere. “I began my training as a jazz guitarist, but very quickly moved away from trying to play idiomatically,” he reveals “That is, I was very interested in improvisation, yet I never really wanted to play bebop or (as great as he was) sound like Jim Hall.” And indeed, while the imprint of his jazz background is audible, his sound is decidedly his own, with chromatic lines slinking across opaque, tapered chords, and through surrealistic applications of effects.
During his doctorate (in cultural theory , not music) and subsequently after securing a job in academia, composing for chamber forces started to move to the background. At this time, the guitar became a key musical outlet for him again, and increasingly, he found his way into free improv settings. Around this time he also composed works such as Autonomic Pulchritude (2011) which employed a pitch tracking software that crudely paralleled his guitar lines with MIDI sounds rife with errors and digital artifacts. He later refined this approach for the piece Omphaloskepsis, which was released as a double LP on Halocline Trance in 2022.
Forming the duo Alfred Jarry, alongside drummer Brady Cranfield in 2018 was another pivotal move for him in terms of reckoning with his earlier instrumental training. According to Priest, the two of them play jazz standards in a suitably (given their namesake) ‘pataphysical manner, allowing him to revisit his former practice albeit, as he puts it, through the filter of “nearly thirty years of trying to move away from being a jazz guitarist.”
His 2022-3 sabbatical cemented his newfound relationship with the instrument; he cultivated a daily practice regimen that was as investigative as it was disciplined.
This period of intensive exploration of the guitar culminated in a solo show—his first ever in the thirty-five years that he had been playing the instrument. Said event took place in April 2023 at 8East, a performance venue in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Its program featured two of his own compositions for solo guitar (“A Problem with the Stars” and “Dormitive Virtue”), alongside an ethereal, crackling take on the late Wayne Shorter’s “Iris”, plus five improvisations.
Before playing it, Priest hadn’t envisioned the show as being anything more than just a one-off event, however, he left the venue satisfied with the performance, and the resultant recording only confirmed this impression. Eventually, a friend cajoled him into releasing the live recording as an album—the present one.
Dormitive Virtue not only presents Eldritch Priest’s most beguilingly accessible music to date, it offers a subdued yet captivating document of one of Canada’s most intriguing improvisers.
In addition to his recorded forays, Priest’s music has also been performed by top-tier interpreters such as the Arditti Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Apartment House, (as well as members Philip Thomas, Anton Lukoszevieze individually), and Continuum. While living in Toronto he co-founded the collective neither/nor with John Mark Sherlock, which featured a cross section of musician-composers playing each other’s work including Eric Chenaux, Doug Tielli, Eric KM Clark, Heather Roche, and Rob Clutton.
In 2021, when Eric Chenaux and Martin Arnold re-launched their neither/nor-adjacent Rat-drifting imprint, an album by Priest, Many Traceries, was among its first new batch. Priest was a student of the University of Victoria, a school that’s come to be known for fostering such staunch individualists as Arnold, Linda Catlin Smith, Allison Cameron, and Anna Höstman.
As a scholar, Priest writes from a ‘pataphysical perspective and deals with topics such as sonic culture, experimental aesthetics and the philosophy of experience. Priest brings these interests to his job as Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, interests that also inform his work as a member of the experimental theory group The Occulture.
The release event for Dormitive Virtue will take place at the Tranzac (292 Brunswick Ave. Toronto) at 9:30PM on November 28, 2024 as part of Karen Ng‘s monthly series, Karen Ng Presents.
