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

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 reso

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

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,

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 conversa

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 th

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, Althu

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 du

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 autho

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 ex