Flavortone

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.

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.

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 affect—analyzing Wagner's work as a possible litmus test for the role of music in philosophy, and, in broader terms, in ideology.

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 trace the limits of political economy, music scenes as liberatory associations, and the critiques of late capitalism from theorists like Franco "Bifo" Berardi & Christian Marrazi, the conversation arrives at the production of a "Captive Music"—an embodied, local, entrapped, but warrior-like music. Other topics include the machineries of irony and sincerity, musical "guilds," auto-surveillance, american politics, loyalty, colonization, the club, Keiji Haino, and more.

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 masculinity and coolness, the conversation explores broad cultural dynamics of authenticity and "normalcy" as an aesthetics of traumatic, reparative coping. Topics include the Lindy effect, the old Hollywood/New York divide, PC Music, Jean Baudrillard's 1996 headlining appearance at the Chance Event (organized by Chris Kraus), and more.

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: Changes In American Music Festival. Notions of community, consumption, and audience take shape around anecdotes of DIY organizing, non-profit culture, Dick Higgins, Black Mountain College, Alvin Lucier, George Lewis, and more.

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, Jeff Witscher & Jack Callahan's recent performance of "Futility 2022" at Union Pool, Morton Subotnick, Godrick The Grafted, decadence, and the dismembered dynamics of media.

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 distribution, video game chat rooms, the NYC experimental music Fortnite contingent and the state of avant-garde discourse in light of the proliferation of metaverses.

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 Sterling's "Pirate Utopia," Temporary Autonomous Zones, Buckminster Fuller, and more.