Celebrating the fifth anniversary of Flavortone, Alec and Nick take a step back from more intensive topical discussions to look back over the development of the podcast, and beyond, into the preceding years of musical and theoretical projects which have informed it. Tracking the podcast's beginnings as a lit comparative music analysis effort, into political economy, media and cultural theory, raw aesthetics, roasts and foundational questions of music historicity and epistemology, the episode recalls key intellectual motives and contexts for this evolving discourse, and reviews the development of a generational experience and perspective in music. Topics include "putting your piece on the board," inter-generational social dynamics of thought, intellectual participation over time, tensions between pragmatism and analytic theory, John Dewey, and the question of audacity as a dynamic engine in the production of creative work.
9 Dec 2025
Episode 67: Now That The Audience Has Disassembled
Alec and Nick take a step back from their recent concentration on digital media technologies to stage a literary review of "the audience" as an evolving element in the material, cultural and epistemological formations of music. The episode tracks a historical arc of pre-modern power dynamics, industrial modernity and popular music, Fluxus' reframing of the co-consitutive role of audiences and a return to questions about the algorithmic base of digitally mediated, contemporary audiences. Topics include, Handel's Messiah, Jazz music, early commercial music's racialized categories, critical histories of power and participation, questions of counter-culture and authenticity in the audience, global music circulation as a reflection of geopolitics, the demands on and discomforts of the audience, the rituals, presence and temporalities of attendance, theoretical treatment of the audience as material, audiences during the holiday season and the re-problematization of music that is demanded of audiences in the TikTok ecology, in order to resist the stripping of music's depth and texture.
19 Nov 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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Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
26 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
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