Libsyn Directory

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

Release Date: 01/17/2023

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?...

Episode 56: Angelheaded Shitposters

Flavortone

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,...

Episode 55: The Great Bar Italia Debate

Flavortone

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...

Episode 54: The Lost Library of Flavorphonia

Flavortone

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...

Episode 53: Tradition, The Future & Music, Please

Flavortone

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,...

Episode 52: Musician's Friend, Drum Edition

Flavortone

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,...

Episode 51: Cursed Be the One Who Be Listening to Music [PATREON PREVIEW]

Flavortone

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...

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

Flavortone

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...

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

Flavortone

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...

More Episodes

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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