Dormitive Virtue Album Release

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 | 8:00 PM
8EAST – 8 E. Pender St., Vancouver

With Eldritch Preist (Guitar), James Meger (Bass), and Brady Cranfield (Electronic & Acoustic Drums). Plus a set by Matthew Ariaratnam (Guitar) and other TBA players.

Dormitive Virtue (Halocline Trance) 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 2013's Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (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. – Nick Storring

Presented by 8East.