For those unaware, 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.

1. Grave Needs, Rainbow (4:48)
2. Supposition Engine (3:48)
3. A Problem with the Stars (4:10)
4. Outlaw (2:51)
5. Iris (6:00)
6. The Ghastly (3:13)
7. A Gilded Madman (2:54)
8. Dormitive Virtue (4:44)

Composed, performed and recorded by Eldritch Priest, mastered by Murat Colak, and recorded live at 8East, Vancouver, 26 April 2023, this sparkling new recording opens on the discordant guitar work that drives Grave Needs, Rainbow and then brings us the sublime Supposition Engine, the shuttering magnificence of A Problem with the Stars and then we get the veritably etheral Outlaw brought forth.

Along next is the transformative fluctuations within the Wayne Shorter-written Iris, which is in turn backed seamlessly by the strident guitar work The Ghastly, the album rounding out on the fluttering A Gilded Madman, coming to a close on the sheer elegance displayed within the titular Dormitive Virtue.

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 an 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.

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