Flavortone
Flavortone is a music commentary podcast hosted by Nick Scavo and Alec Sturgis.
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Episode 66: On the Sixth Day, God Made Algorithmic Music
11/19/2025
Episode 66: On the Sixth Day, God Made Algorithmic Music
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? Do algorithms produce form, or does form precede an algorithmic process? Ultimately, the discussion draws latent comparisons to the idea of musical truth and an algorithm itself, and outlines a reversal of algorithm as a set of procedures that would create and bring music into a being, to a process that now entraps and contains it. The episode concludes with a discussion of algorithms that bring us to a contemporary visual culture of music, tying in The Velvet Underground & Warhol, Rosalía, Björk, and more.
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Episode 65: Two Chopped Uncs Discuss TikTok Music
11/03/2025
Episode 65: Two Chopped Uncs Discuss TikTok Music
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 analyzes a dark Dostoevskyian worldview of new commercialized music on smart phones—and how this underpins a capitalized sadness enframing the music’s focus on the daily grind, the hustle, and success. The episode reviews new populisms, cultures of embarrassment and professionalization, Alec’s practice of dredging the depths of Spotify, “out of timeness” and “out of tuneness,” the haunting quality of various sonic spaces on the phone, and a comparison between the social experience of cell phone music and Opera. The episode serves as an initial material and cultural review of algorithms future episodes may expand upon.
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Episode 64: Digital Music & The Solo-Doloistic Turn
10/20/2025
Episode 64: Digital Music & The Solo-Doloistic Turn
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 experience, television, Yasunao Tone, George Lewis’ jazz to computational music arc, sampling, Noise, tech complacency, electronic music sub-genre accession and the creative thresholds of digital workstations and resulting aesthetic commonality across genre.
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Episode 63: Ill-Tempered Clavier [PATREON PREVIEW]
10/06/2025
Episode 63: Ill-Tempered Clavier [PATREON PREVIEW]
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 rebuttal in just intonation, “The Well-Tuned Piano” (1964), the discussion extends the broad history of temperement into the realm contemporary music and inquires into the affect of digital sound production on this discourse. Topics include: Pythagoras, autotune, Vincenzo Galelei, Harry Partch, John Cage’s works for prepared piano, the evolution of the western orchestra, Indian classical music, Noise, and more.
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Episode 62: ABCDEFG Soundsystem
09/29/2025
Episode 62: ABCDEFG Soundsystem
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 acoustic phenomenon, Henry Flynt’s “concept art” notion of constitutive dissociation and personal reflections on the good old days — presenting stereo sound art at the local bar and grill. Ultimately, the discussion asks: in what way does the material dissemination of sound consitute the cultural dimensions of listening?
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Episode 61: Music & The Miraculous [PATREON PREVIEW]
09/22/2025
Episode 61: Music & The Miraculous [PATREON PREVIEW]
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 musical situations that could pull us out of this order? Improvised, determinate, and indeterminate music, Loren Connors, planes of consistency in technology, DJ culture and classical music are discussed.
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Episode 60: On Turning Up [PATREON PREVIEW]
09/15/2025
Episode 60: On Turning Up [PATREON PREVIEW]
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 include MoMA PS1’s Warm Up summer series, turning up in experimental music, and an extended discussion of the tension between aesthetic excitation and the pursuit of truth-value in Callahan and Witscher’s “Think Differently” album and 2024 release show.
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Episode 59: A Special Connection to Classical Music
09/08/2025
Episode 59: A Special Connection to Classical Music
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 Feldman, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and even … Béla Fleck & the Flecktones are all mentioned.
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Episode 58: The Art of the Beef
05/18/2024
Episode 58: The Art of the Beef
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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Episode 57: A Critique of Interpretive Dance
04/12/2024
Episode 57: A Critique of Interpretive Dance
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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Episode 56: Angelheaded Shitposters
03/02/2024
Episode 56: Angelheaded Shitposters
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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Episode 55: The Great Bar Italia Debate
01/28/2024
Episode 55: The Great Bar Italia Debate
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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Episode 54: The Lost Library of Flavorphonia
01/05/2024
Episode 54: The Lost Library of Flavorphonia
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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Episode 53: Tradition, The Future & Music, Please
06/30/2023
Episode 53: Tradition, The Future & Music, Please
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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Episode 52: Musician's Friend, Drum Edition
06/01/2023
Episode 52: Musician's Friend, Drum Edition
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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Episode 51: Cursed Be the One Who Be Listening to Music [PATREON PREVIEW]
05/14/2023
Episode 51: Cursed Be the One Who Be Listening to Music [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 50: Captain's Log, Transcendental [PATREON PREVIEW]
04/21/2023
Episode 50: Captain's Log, Transcendental [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 49: Foibles and The Meaning of Tossed Salad & Scrambled Eggs
03/09/2023
Episode 49: Foibles and The Meaning of Tossed Salad & Scrambled Eggs
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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Episode 48: Fratres In Flight
02/28/2023
Episode 48: Fratres In Flight
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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Episode 47: Thus Shook Zarathustra's Groove Thing (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
02/07/2023
Episode 47: Thus Shook Zarathustra's Groove Thing (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 46: Could Not Music Be Excellent? (Editorials & Opinions) [PATREON PREVIEW]
01/17/2023
Episode 46: Could Not Music Be Excellent? (Editorials & Opinions) [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 45: Acting As If I’m Pinocchio
12/13/2022
Episode 45: Acting As If I’m Pinocchio
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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Episode 44: The Roast of Hans Zimmer
11/12/2022
Episode 44: The Roast of Hans Zimmer
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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Episode 43: Fear and Being Interested in Many Different Things (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
10/31/2022
Episode 43: Fear and Being Interested in Many Different Things (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 42: Phenomenology of Fantasy Football
10/20/2022
Episode 42: Phenomenology of Fantasy Football
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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Episode 41: Come On Feel the Avant-Garde (Editorials & Opinions) [PATREON PREVIEW]
09/28/2022
Episode 41: Come On Feel the Avant-Garde (Editorials & Opinions) [PATREON PREVIEW]
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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Episode 40: Remembrance of Things Craft
09/16/2022
Episode 40: Remembrance of Things Craft
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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Episode 39: Charles Ives, Sunday Composer
07/07/2022
Episode 39: Charles Ives, Sunday Composer
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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Episode 38: Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
06/16/2022
Episode 38: Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
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.
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Episode 37: The Way of Houdini
06/02/2022
Episode 37: The Way of Houdini
Presto! In this episode, Alec & Nick discuss the legendary illusion arts of Harry Houdini as an analogical frame for considering artistic strategies and aesthetics of escape. Discussing the work of Mattin and Pascale Criton in particular, the episode accounts for performance, audience and spectacle as planes of musical consistency in which the illusion of “escape” is realized — as the risk of conceptual or interpretive failure is leveraged towards thrilling feats of musical cogency and enjoyment. Topics include Mattin’s “Social Dissonance,” the conducting of Pierre Boulez, Deleuze & Guattari’s “Lines of Flight,” the solo computer set as spectacle, the athleticism of interpretation and affects of risk in music.
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