Earworm and Event

“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

"Earworm and Event will be a thought-provoking read for sound, music and affect scholars alike." - Malte Kobel, Pulse

"A powerful and poetic reflection on method, form, and theory. Like a dream you can’t shake after you wake up, Earworm + Event gets stuck in your head in a way that would have been impossible for a more conventional text." - Patrick Nickelson, Sound Studies