Flavortone

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. situ...

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?" —...

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. T...

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 reference...

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 per...

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 caricatu...

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 conc...

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...

Alec & Nick conduct a first meeting of the "Neo-Feudalist Captive Music Society," an invented club that takes shape around how contemporary musicians are obliged to live on   borrowed land and provide homage, labor, and shares of their "produce." The discussion describes how local music networks often exist outside the castle walls of the various abstract systems they operate within. Attempting to...

Teasing their forthcoming music writing website (TBA), Alec and Nick delve the epistemic guts of music and the written word. The episode traces broad historical discussions of music criticism in relation to current trends in publication and music production. Topics include Substack, The Village Voice, the "critic-as-artist" the Schumann-founded journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, genre discourse,...

Alec and Nick consider the music and cultural impact of Frank Sinatra through a discussion of his album, "Sinatra At The Sands" — recorded in 1966 at the famous Las Vegas hotel and casino. Drawing from observations about Sinatra's iconicity as a stylist of American popular song, a persisting contemporary signifier of celebration and kitchen-sink comfort and a high water mark of traditional masculi...

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...

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...

In this 30th episode of Flavortone, Alec & Nick talk through the recent acquisition of Bandcamp by the massively successful creator of Fortnite and Unreal Engine — Epic Games. Examining the broader indie music scene's antagonism towards this merger, the conversation interrogates the microtransactional status of digital media economies shared by both music and video games. Topics include music dist...

Returning from a trip to the sunny coast of Sayulita, Mexico, Alec & Nick reflect on their recent ocean fishing excursion and drop a line into the psychogeographies of the fish, the fishermen and the high seas. The episode considers aquatic ecologies as networks of geo-political power and discourse as well as sites of leisure and solitude. Topics include  Annea Lockwood, Donna Harraway, Bruce Ster...

The Flavortone Study Group sub-series continues with Alec & Nick progressing in their reading of Jacques Attali's "Noise: The Political Economy of Music." Discussing the book's second chapter, "Sacrificing," this episode gives a deep reading and commentary on Attali's position that the earliest essential social role of music was to serve as a substitute or simulacrum of sacrifice—and was a way of...

Alec and Nick meditate on the Valentine's holiday with a consideration of musical romance and romanticism. Charting a history of musical thought regarding topics of love, collectivity and intimacy, the episode investigates deeper foundations of romance as well as its contemporary commercial and social constructions in sound. Topics include Edgard Varèse, Johannes Brahms, João Gilberto, Éliane Radi...

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 Trecarti...

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 c...

In this first podcast of the Flavortone Study Group sub-series, Alec & Nick begin their reading of Jacques Attali's "Noise: The Political Economy of Music." Discussing the book's first chapter, "Listening," this episode offers introduction and commentary on Attali's central theme of music as a prophetic social force and as a mirror of political and economic circumstances.

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...

Alec & Nick inaugurate the new patron-exclusive Editorials and Opinions sub-series with a sportsmanly report on music they did not listen to in 2021. Topics include The Wire Magazine, the live music show, Coldplay, Fuerza Regida, Klein, aesthetics of failure and participatory discrepancy.

In this final episode of 2021, Alec and Nick wrap up the year by revisiting an early concept from the Flavortone archive: the Cochlear Wind. The Cochlear Wind is a figurative mascot, intended to both cheer and taunt the way composers bamboozle listeners (and often, themselves) through flurries of tactical language, technological posturing and evocations of site-specificity. Poking fun at platitude...

Inaugurating the launch of their Patreon and merch projects, Alec and Nick discuss their ambitious "mise en place" for a new year of podcasts, guest appearances and exclusive publications. "Mise en place"—the french culinary term for "putting in place" or "gathering" an array of ingredients—serves as a way of framing these new Patron benefits. On the menu: The "Editorials & Opinions" sub-series, f...

In preparation of cooking their own turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, Alec and Nick make a broad comparison of the venerable bird to the production of music albums and the heights and depths of American culture. Topics include tensions around suspicion and comfort, the trauma of American capitalist and familial ritual, obsessive indexing and preparation tactics, gratitude as radical subjectivity, an...