Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains

Product Description In Earworm and Event Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it can produce to outline how music is something that is felt as thought rather than listened to. Priest presents Earworm and Event as a tête-bêche—two books bound together with each end meeting in the middle. Where Earworm theorizes the entanglement of thought and feeling, Event performs it. Throughout, Priest conceptualizes the earworm as an event that offers insight into not only the way human brains process musical experiences, but how abstractions and the imagination play key roles in the composition and expression of our contemporary social environments and more-than-human milieus. Unconventional and ambitious, Earworm and Event offers new ways to interrogate the convergence of thought, sound, and affect. Review “It may seem unlikely that the cheesy pop song that has been looping around your head for the past three weeks has anything else to say—beyond the preference for piña coladas in the rain. On the contrary, Eldritch Priest’s new book, Earworm and Event, explores with great rigor, insight, and imagination the ways in which such innocuous looped sonic refrains tell us a great deal about our own sense of self, the technical environments which we are obliged to navigate, and the sociopolitical impasses in which we find ourselves.”―Dominic Pettman, author of, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World)“In this provocative and creatively written book Eldritch Priest argues that listening practices in the contemporary moment of accelerated capitalism are less about aesthetic pleasure and more about forms of power. Earworm and Event brings the study of sound, listening, and affect into new realms of imagination.”―Deborah A. Kapchan, editor of, Theorizing Sound Writing"Earworm And Event positions music and pataphysical speculations about its conditions as uneven parts of a structure that, like the worm, loops inconclusively around itself. The book's structure, with two halves bound back to back and upside down with respect to each other, makes this quite literal. . . . Priest admirably refuses any claim to political- aesthetic radicalism for the earworm or experimental music that might absorb it."―Dan Barrow, The Wire About the Author Eldritch Priest is Assistant Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, author of Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure, and coauthor of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture.