Flavortone

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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. 

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.” 

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.

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.

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. 

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.