エピソード
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After witnessing a TikTok “beef” between the “Mozart of Gen Z” Jacob Collier and Rick Rubin, Alec and Nick take up “des arts de boeuf” as a space to discuss the implicitly disagreeable nature of musical aesthetics. The conversation uses these two maestro’s different perspectives to inquire into the role of the audience and its relationship to creativity, musical genius and virtuosity, and the underlying political assumptions evident in their arguments. More, the two discuss the act of a “beef” or disagreement as an illuminating tension that highlights core hypocrisies, embarrassments, and ironies within our aesthetics and politics. Irony is discussed as a dominating “coin of the realm” in which true untruths are exchanged with untrue truths — a continuum that develops into political binaries of liberalism and fascism, and the nature of aesthetic and political revolution. The conversation also uses this as a foil to discuss the recent full course Beef of Drake versus Kendrick Lamar, and questions the musical “avant-garde” as a progressive medium for art or politics.
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In a novel departure from their “special relationship” to classical and experimental music, Alec and Nick take up the topic of Interpretive Dance as a discursive foil to their ongoing inquiries into music. The duo give bewildered accounts of the aesthetic experience of interpretive and experimental dance performances—and ask basic questions: are music and dance the same thing? Sibling rivals? Two towers? Or, why does interpretive dance often evoke laughter, humiliation, or come across as potentially overstated and ridiculous? How would would you choose to express yourself through dance? The conversation also recounts comfortable and joyous experiences of dancing and probes critical assumptions and entrenchments within the music/dance dichotomy. The conversation touches on John Cage and Merce Cunningham, The Club, musical theater, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, ethnomusicological accounts of movement and music, improvised music, ballet and classical music, music and dance’s extensions into visual culture, Kim Gordon’s new album, and more.
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Listen up daddios: in this episode, Alec & Nick take out the bindle-sticks and jugs of wine for a gone reflection on the lingering cultural legacies of bohemianism in the 21st century. Jumping into the Beat generation and mid-20th-century music as a starting point, the discussion focuses on how avant-gardes and countercultures oscillate into and back out of mainstream cultural resonance; and, how the social aesthetics of online media consumption have transformed the dynamic interplay of commerce and liberatory expression. Topics include relational aesthetics, adolescent literary tastes, generational culture wars, Soundcloud’s next gen, Nietzsche, Kerouac’s “On the Road” and autofiction, the hybridity of classical and novel forms in Indie music, the Verismo Opera of Puccini, Julia Holter, Pitchfork’s integration into GQ, participatory art, recent MOMA PS1 presentations of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work, Baudelaire and distinctions between Cyber- vs. Crypto- bohemianism.
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In this special edition, Alec and Nick open the Flavortone vault to present The Great Bar Italia Debate — a lost episode from the summer of 2023, presented here in timely coincidence with the London group’s recent Crack profile. The debate poses questions about musical style, local vs. global cultural and community dynamics and politics of taste along the well-established axis of London and NYC’s cultural exchange. Taking up discussion of “the band” as a conceptual and presentational format, rather than as a presumptive participatory vehicle, the episode examines the alternative forms of consumption, exchange and imaginative role-play, which Bar Italia’s approach invites. Topics include the question: “Do we like this?,” the band’s 2023 quasi-residency of multiple NYC concerts, transatlantic indie rock history, Dean Blunt, and Thomas Turino’s cultural framework for “presentational” (as opposed to “participatory”) music.
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After a long and unanticipated hiatus from podcasting, Alec and Nick return to take a long hard look in the mirror … only to inquire why exactly they possess the impulse to use music as an aesthetic, philosophical, social, cultural, and political measure of the world. The conversation uses the metaphor of the library to chart an interrogation into where music culture, discourse, and practice is at at the dawn of 2024. The episode questions contemporary music culture’s relationship to the history of 20th century experimental music, the legacy of John Cage and Sylvere Lotringer’s view of him as “The American Philosopher,” historically “legitimatizing” the disparate internet music culture of the 2010s, music culture’s production of “reliable disappointments,” year end list-making, holy and sacred music, and more.
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Alec and Nick reconvene to discuss concepts of “tradition” and “futurity” as they relate to music. Picking up on our ceaseless cultural pull toward both the past and future, the conversation focuses on how contemporary’s music’s impulse to represent history and postulate a future for itself has developed its own kind of suspended, tense aesthetic condition. The conversation touches on Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities,” Bang on Can’s Longform Festival, Accelerationism vs. “trad” culture, neorationalist philosophy, ethical and/or relativist music appreciation, Sylvere Lotringer, The Beats, Post-Internet Art, the problems of using collapse as a vision of the future, the dubious quest for authenticity—and music as a special annex for the quandaries of what’s behind us and what’s to come.
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In this episode Alec & Nick revisit the periodic Musician’s Friend series with a Drum Edition. Considering “drum” as an instrumental category that encompasses much of contemporary musical sound, aesthetics and cultural orientation, the episode navigates various histories and practices across a spectrum of percussive sound, recording and musical philosophy and inquires into the meanings of percussion in the 21st century. Topics include global historical reckonings with resonance, Sarah Hennies’ composition and notion of queer percussion, James Tenney’s “klang” concept, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, exoticism in Western art music, the rhythmic properties of harmony, sample packs, electronic drumming workflows and more.
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Alec and Nick bust out the evil eye amulets to discuss varieties of “cursed music” and what constitutes music feeling or being “cursed.” Following a line of thought from the archetypal Faustian bargain, malediction, ritual and sacrifice, the sacred and profane, and other concepts of curses, the discussion explores music’s relationship to shit talking, punk ideology, Althusser’s interpellation, Torn Hawk’s performance of “Trustfall” at Emily Harvey Foundation,” experiences with live ambient and drone music, Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher’s new “Music Songs,” Cornelius Cardew’s political-aesthetic agony, the gospel-like quality of metal and noise communities, presumptuous futuristic music, music’s “beauty-industrial complex,” the mundanity of the curse, new music’s cursed individualism, and more.
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In this 50th episode of Flavortone, Alec and Nick settle deep in cups of “earl grey, hot” from the replicator for an entry into the Star Ship Flavorphonia Captain’s Log. Citing Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the duo take this ancient maritime convention of record keeping at sea to trace various other epistemic fault-lines in the practice and theory of notation. The duo consider the “log” as a mundane account which transcends its quantitative form in generating unanticipated moral and aesthetic inventories. Branching from this analysis, the broader discussion includes consideration of a tweet by Holly Herndon on the stakes of creative work alongside AI, Deleuze & Guattari’s emphasis on expression dictating methods, the holodeck and other utopian imaginaries in Star Trek, the notation practice of Pascale Criton, the Ryan Trecartin film “center jenny” (2013), Anthony Braxton, the daily-life “logging” involved in gardening, cooking, home-improvement, and more.
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Alec and Nick pull back the Flavortone curtain and take up influential sitcom Frasier to discuss the decorum of Foibles as a primary engine of music. Known as a minor weakness or eccentricity in one’s character, or the weaker part of a sword blade—the conversation uses the Foible to explore wide-ranging commentary on Christianity, the trial of Socrates, sites of contested authorship in American minimalism, Rip Van Winkle sleeping through the Revolutionary War, comedy, Fluxus, the work of Torn Hawk, and more. Ultimately, the duo asks: is the foible of a blade actually the avant-garde? Are the aesthetics of experimental music actually defined and determined by the foible? And, is the foible a primary site for our social life and shared narratives of music? The discussion ends with Alec and Nick sharing anecdotes of their own personal foibles in the realm of music: including getting embarrassingly wasted at Cecil Taylor’s birthday party, abandoning one’s post as a handbell choir director in Ohio, and the foible masterclass of co-running a DIY music space in the early 2010s.
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Alec & Nick take to the proverbial skies with this discussion around the dreaming and engineering feats which make possible the various metaphorical and real forms of Flight. Diverting from some of FT’s established conversations dealing with cultural and musical wreckage, this episode looks into moments of lift and inspiration, as supported by efforts of imagination, study and experimentation. The discussion ranges from a consideration of passive and active flight, the commercial airline experience, musical tuning systems and just intonation, the tensions inherent in human progress, the journals of Leonardo DaVinci, synthesis and synthesizers as instruments of belief and knowledge, Buckminster Fuller’s “Great Pirate” paradigm, Evagrius Ponticus’ “Demon Pilot,” and more.
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Following on from Flavortone’s previous episode exploring Excellence, Alec and Nick pick up Charles Keil & Steven Feld’s “Music Grooves” to discuss “the Groove” as a political concept that illustrates musical discrepancy and assembly. The episode continues a “back to basics” and “first principles” line of inquiry, approaching essential ethnomusicological ideas such as “Participatory Discrepancy” that describe how a simultaneity of difference can give music its power and meaning. The conversation also discusses riffs and phrases, contrasts the Groove to Attali and Nieztche’s ideas of carnival and the Dionysian, creates a comparison between “literary” and “linguistic” musical orientations, re-discusses “Agave Expressionism,” and ultimately describes how the Groove offers an alternate perspective of sound beyond the universalism of western art music and institutional major histories.
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Alec and Nick kick off the new year of podcasts with a discussion of Excellence. Taking on critical histories of the composer as fodder, the episode surveys musical success paradigms and the narcissisms of small difference which feed debates over musical interpretation. Topics include Alec and Nick’s recent performances as participants in Random Gear Festival, a recent viewing of Tár, the parasite as a metaphor for interpretation, old-school classicism, Harold C. Shonberg’s book, “The Lives of the Great Composers,” musical idealism vs. counterculture, music as text, and more.
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In this year end reflection, Alec and Nick discuss the folkloric figure of Pinocchio—a “constantly lying wooden marionette,” whose dual consciousness (as both an abject dummy and an aspiring human) suggests a parable for understanding musical problems of “liveness” and “deadness” and the puppetry of musical commodification. Taking up Carlo Collodi’s late 19th century series “The Adventures of Pinocchio” as a text that precodes social and political movements in the 20th century—including local and global perspectives of artisan class-politics, Marxism, Italian unification, and fascism—the conversation follows into an analysis of the puppet-like dramaturgy of musical political economies. Matters at hand include civic responsibility, deception, education, fatalism, and the recent factions within consumer-level breakthroughs in AI technology as a tool in Gepetto’s impoverished workshop, or, as a set of masks in the commedia dell’arte of digital production. In the end, the duo prescribe the entirety of musical commodification as a Pinocchio Story that proclaims “how funny I was when I was a puppet! And how happy I am now to have become a nice-a boy!”
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Alec and Nick continue their occasional roast series with a roast of German film score composer Hans Zimmer. The conversation surveys and critiques his work across the new wave and new age soundtrack exotica of the 80s and 90s (Rain Man, Gladiator, The Lion King), to the cinematic revelry of his Christopher Nolan-directed epochs (Inception, Dunkirk, Batman) to recent scores such as Boss Baby. The roast also probes his methods of budget-savvy musical fabrication, his management of authenticity and appropriation, and the current ubiquity of his overall sound. The episode then makes broad comparisons between Zimmer, globalist/neoliberal ideology, and the dark humanism of James Ferraro’s work—as well as Zimmer’s over-moisturized Tommy Bahama-like sensuality and uncanny resemblance to “Beans” from Evans Stevens.
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For a Halloween special, Alec and Nick take up Søren Kierkegaard’s frightening text “Fear and Trembling” as a starting point to discuss fear as it relates to philosophy, music, film, and life. Discussing the chilling crisis of faith during Abraham’s binding of Isaac and the subsequent “Teleological suspension of the ethical”—the conversation evolves into a broader exploration of universal vs. situational fear, affects of fear vs. the motivations of fear, and the administration and control of fear in everything from the music of Scott Walker, Kubrick’s The Shining, Krzysztof Penderecki, climate protesters actions toward paintings, alien surveillance, Sasquatches on the beach, and more. Ultimately, the discussion arrives at tautologies or “degree zeros” of existential fear—from John Cage confronting his own circulatory system in an anechoic chamber, to capitalism and environmental collapse in Lars “TCF” Holdus’ new blogpost “Undoing nihilism.”
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Blue, 42. Hut. In this 42nd episode of Flavortone, Alec and Nick delve into the analytic imaginaries of Fantasy Football. Having recently joined a friendly fantasy league, they reflect on recent W’s and L’s and the characteristic fantasy sport experience of a speculative, detemporized form of spectatorship. The discussion revives a favorite Flavortone question — “How are sports NOT like music?” — in considering the role of chance, ephemerality and stochastic models of probability in the aesthetic experience and in the forms of sport and avant-garde music. Discussion includes gestalt psychology, James Tenney’s “Meta+Hodos,” the stochastic compositions of Iannis Xenakis, the debate between Cage and Feldman over indeterminacy vs. ephemerality, narrative contingency in Dungeons and Dragons, Jacques Attali’s notion of Ritual, the new Alex G record and more.
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Alec and Nick discuss the implications of American and European musical avant-gardes as participating in militaristic and nationalist rhetorics that precode our contemporary “culture war” discourse. The conversation explores how aesthetic “war-games” — in their varyingly diplomatic and contentious outcomes — are imbricated in the broader colonial trajectory of 20th and 21st century institutions. Topics include the correspondences of Cage and Boulez, Julius Eastman’s controversial performance of Cage, Alvin Lucier, the American hotdog, Charles Ives, Hamilton, anti-Italian Twitter, the US Open, John Adams’ “Nixon in China,” the Cold War-era military funding for abstract expressionism, Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad’s anti-Stockhausen demonstration and more.
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Alec and Nick discuss the concept of craft and craftsmanship as a paradigm that dictates behavior in cultural production and art. The conversation explores differences between the utility of craft and the performativity or representation of craft as an aesthetic repertoire. Topics include regionality and nostalgia in everything from indie rock and country music to experimental music that references 20th century composition, as well as recording techniques, artisanal food culture, Aristotle’s “Nichomachean Ethics” which distinguishes between “Episteme” and “Techne,” Plato’s Republic, refinement culture, reissue culture, gentrification, and the industrial and material conditions that surround craftsmanship. Ultimately, a continuum between abstraction and interpretation and practice is set up, provoking further discussion about objects, an analysis of craft in a digital context, Instagram’s merchant culture, and the new highfalutin antique store “Tihngs” on Catalpa Avenue.
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Alec & Nick engage the music of American iconoclast and life-long amateur composer, Charles Ives (1874-1954). The episode traces Ives' experimental aesthetics in relation to his transcendentalist-inspired notion that music is comprised of Substance and Manner (described in his “Essays Before a Sonata”). The discussion situates Ives’ compositional techniques, historical positionality and unique perspective around popular and folk song in American culture to pursue questions within the geneology of experimental music in the U.S. Topics include John Cage, Henry Cowell, the musical quotation vs. the sample, Emerson, Thoreau, American pragmatism, European and American nationalisms and the role of musical practice in regards to notions of democracy.
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