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Episode 57: A Critique of Interpretive Dance

2024-04-1201:15:05

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.

Episode 56: Angelheaded Shitposters

2024-03-0201:16:44

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.

Episode 55: The Great Bar Italia Debate

2024-01-2801:07:37

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.

Episode 54: The Lost Library of Flavorphonia

2024-01-0501:00:37

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.

Episode 53: Tradition, The Future & Music, Please

2023-06-3001:16:05

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.

Episode 50: Captain's Log, Transcendental [PATREON PREVIEW]

2023-04-2110:56

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.

Episode 49: Foibles and The Meaning of Tossed Salad & Scrambled Eggs

2023-03-0901:29:27

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.

Episode 48: Fratres In Flight

2023-02-2801:13:02

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.

Episode 47: Thus Shook Zarathustra's Groove Thing (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2023-02-0710:35

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.

Episode 45: Acting As If I’m Pinocchio

2022-12-1301:06:19

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!”

Episode 44: The Roast of Hans Zimmer

2022-11-1201:27:57

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.

Episode 43: Fear and Being Interested in Many Different Things (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2022-10-3108:49

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.”

Episode 38: Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2022-06-1610:25

Alec and Nick discuss the politics and poetry of Jar Jar Binks as a fraught, irredeemable, and complicated figuration of online media culture. Christening summer 2022 as a “Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer,” the duo discuss a “Binksian paradigm” as an imagistic cultural impasse and toxicity meter that encodes a variety of recent contemporary cultural tropes: the re-emergence of everything from caricature and Catholicism to ambiguous political discourse, Nu Metal, rabid fan culture, and aughts humor. The conversation opens up into an examination of the tensions between archetype and stereotype, models of insufficiency and fiction found in the thought of Francois Laruelle, structural racism in America, as well as the development of auto-fiction, AI Image generators, new field recording practices and more as signaling toward a simultaneous ambivalence and obsession toward representation and symbolism in contemporary culture.

Episode 36: Friedrich Nietzsche’s "The Case of Wagner" (Study Group) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2022-05-2912:41

The Flavortone Study Group sub-series continues with Alec & Nick discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s text “The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem,” his last work completed only days before his mental collapse in 1888. The conversation delves into the historical context for both Nietzsche’s thought and Wagner’s music and delves into the text’s themes of decadence, exhaustion, sickness, philosophical affect—analyzing Wagner’s work as a possible litmus test for the role of music in philosophy, and, in broader terms, in ideology.

Episode 32: Why This Experimental Music Festival? (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2022-04-1611:00

Alec and Nick discuss the poetry and politics of the experimental music festival. At first exploring the history and economy of music festivals such as Big Ears, Moogfest, Hopscotch, Red Bull Music Academy, and the European Festival circuit—the conversation then launches into a personal discussion probing Nick’s curatorial role at ISSUE Project Room and Alec’s curatorial role in the Neo-Pastiche: Changes In American Music Festival. Notions of community, consumption, and audience take shape around anecdotes of DIY organizing, non-profit culture, Dick Higgins, Black Mountain College, Alvin Lucier, George Lewis, and more.

Episode 31: Tarnished by the Tweet

2022-03-3101:18:35

Alec & Nick delve into the lore and mechanics of the video game Elden Ring, drawing a layered comparison between “The Tarnished” and our plight as musicians, cultural participants, and social media users. The discussion takes Nick’s recently pseudo-viral tweet proclaiming that “a truly new insane and unforeseen music can and has yet to be made” as a point of departure to discuss anti-communication, Jeff Witscher & Jack Callahan’s recent performance of “Futility 2022” at Union Pool, Morton Subotnick, Godrick The Grafted, decadence, and the dismembered dynamics of media.

Episode 26: Down The Road, Where The Blacktop Ends (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2022-02-0908:05

Alec & Nick inaugurate the new patron-exclusive Politics & Poetry sub-series with a deep dive into the politics, poetry, and music of 17-year-old country music / emo-rap star Kidd G. The discussion touches on trans-american rural aesthetics, reciprocities of youth and aging, binaristic partisan politics, and the postmodern synthesis of “country-rap” as it plays out in Harmony Korine, Ryan Trecartin & contemporary life. The duo also discusses how the politics of populism flow into recent dramas such the Neil Young & Joe Rogan Spotify stand-off, independent music Twitter’s recent meltdown on NFT music “scam” HitPiece, and more.

Episode 25: We Like The Art

2022-02-0201:14:38

Alec and Nick discursively cross the river Styx that is Web3 and NFT culture. Charting a recent history of music’s own volatile and speculative economies, this episode tracks analogical implications within sound and blockchain technologies. The duo borrow the crypto degen epithet “we like the art” and speak about the visualization and tokenization of music as its transpired within the industrial conditions of Web2 as an audible musical imprint. The conversation touches on recent music distribution protocol Nina, the upcoming Tiny Mix Tapes DAO, the rise and fall of SoundCloud, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Simon Reynold’s Conceptronica essay, Reza Negarastani & Generative Aesthetics, Dostoevsky & God, and more.

Episode 23: Musician's Friend 2 (Father & Son Edition)

2022-01-1701:17:49

Alec and Nick continue their “Musician’s Friend” sub-series, dedicating an episode to discuss a selection of father & son musical relationships including: Mark Fell & Rian Treanor, Terry & Gyan Riley, Thom & Noah Yorke, La Monte Young, as wells as The Hank Williams & Bach musical dynasties. The conversation touches on topics such as uncanny music industry alliances, simple family jamming, notions of the original and the copy, Jacques Lacan’s “Nom du Pere,” patriarchal political economies of music, and the fragmentation of American familial structure.

Episode 46: Could Not Music Be Excellent? (Editorials & Opinions) [PATREON PREVIEW]

2023-01-1713:38

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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