Libsyn Directory

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

Release Date: 10/31/2022

Episode 66: On the Sixth Day, God Made Algorithmic Music

Flavortone

Alec and Nick discuss the algorithm as a mysterious force within the production and consumption of music. Despite being used daily in our various contendings with digital platforms and culture, the term is often misunderstood. The conversation loosely defines the term as "some kind of procedure," embarking on a survey of chance (Cage), serialism (Schoenberg), Bach & Hindustani classical music, scales and modes, The League of Automatic Music Composers, Laurie Spiegel, newer electronic music, and more—as well as philosophical debates between form and process. Is an algorithm a dialectic?...

Episode 65: Two Chopped Uncs Discuss TikTok Music

Flavortone

Alec and Nick finally discuss the processes of music consumption and distribution through smart phones, and the means of production of “sounds” on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other video sharing social media platforms. Picking up a quandary from past episodes about digital music, the duo ask if TikTok sounds are, in fact, music—and conduct an inquiry into the form and processes that TikTok sound sharing has redefined in our musical lives and experiences. Spanning Phonk music, millennial woop glockenspiel music, Gen Z bed room folk, 80s Muzak commercial music, and more, the conversation...

Episode 64: Digital Music & The Solo-Doloistic Turn

Flavortone

Alec and Nick examine the emergence and proliferation of digital music technology in the 1980’s as it maps onto a “solo-doloistic” turn in our increasingly individualistic music listening and production habits. First discussing this transition through the lense of conceptual innovations by Robert Ashley and other Sonic Arts Union composers, the episode charts commercial and cultural implications for digital media distribution on CD, .MP3 and so on, and constructs a historical arc for the relationship of experimentalists to this technological paradigm. Topics include: personalized media...

Episode 63: Ill-Tempered Clavier [PATREON PREVIEW]

Flavortone

Alec and Nick complete a series of discussions on foundational music discourses — classical music, sound systems, and in this episode: musical temperment. Defining temperement as the organization of the acoustic harmonic series, applied in performance, engineering and musical epistemology, the conversation expands on historical nuances in the aesthetic, technological and cultural implications of this evolving theoretical construction over time. Anchored with a comparison of J.S. Bach’s equal tempered proof-of-concept — “Well-Tempered Clavier” (1722) — and LaMonte Young’s 1964...

Episode 62: ABCDEFG Soundsystem

Flavortone

Alec and Nick take up sound systems as a point of entry into the discussion of technological and cultural evolutions of listening. The episode explores a range of material, social and philosphical contexts for musical mediatization including Dub sound systems, the contemporary DJ, musique concrete and multichannel acousmonia, and the production of a pure abstract music via word scores and other speculative music forms. The conversation touches on the concept of shizophony, similarities between audiophile and classical music paradigms, the social contract of witnessing sound dissemination as an...

Episode 61: Music & The Miraculous [PATREON PREVIEW]

Flavortone

Alec and Nick pull another unreleased conversation from the archive, recorded one year ago, discussing the “the miraculous” as a concept within music. The episode traces an idea of the miraculous as an occurrence in time that pulls you outside of an expected context, going beyond the perimeter of what is anticipated or even possible in that given moment. Questions around unrepeatable music, the unexplainable nature of the world, computation, chance and musical time, and more are discussed. What are the musical boundaries that define the orderliness of our experience of music? What are...

Episode 60: On Turning Up [PATREON PREVIEW]

Flavortone

Alec and Nick revisit an unreleased podcast from the archive, recorded one year ago, discussing the concept and experience of Turning Up. The episode reprises the idea of the Dionysian in terms of consumption of music, ideas, substances and social activity as these mingle within the interior life and institutional forms of attending, listening, partying, producing and performing. The conversation asks questions about the utility of lit music events, fleeting public sounds, the script of turning up, uncoordinated and novel excitements, and the Apollonian state of Turning Down. Topics...

Episode 59: A Special Connection to Classical Music

Flavortone

Alec and Nick return to podcasting to discuss their special respective connections to classical music. The conversation employs a back-to-basics overview of the form: what is classical music? What is NOT classical music? What was and is it? Taking a zoomed-out approach, the episode spans the culture, mechanics, operations, and evolution of classical music: arriving at an assessment of the “audacity of its form” in relationship to the dysfunction and cosmopolitanism of contemporary society. Johann Sebastian Bach, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, John Cage, Morton...

Episode 58: The Art of the Beef

Flavortone

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,...

Episode 57: A Critique of Interpretive Dance

Flavortone

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?...

More Episodes

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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