Flavortone

Nick Scavo & Alec Sturgis
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Flavortone is a music commentary podcast hosted by Nick Scavo and Alec Sturgis.

  1. 18 Feb

    Episode 68: Fifth Annual Report

    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.

  2. 09/12/2025

    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.

    Episode 67: Now That The Audience Has Disassembled

  3. 19/11/2025

    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.

    Episode 66: On the Sixth Day, God Made Algorithmic Music

  4. 03/11/2025

    Episode 65: Two Chopped Uncs Discuss TikTok Music

    Alec and Nick finally discuss the processes of music consumption and distribution through smart phones, and the means of production of "sounds" on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other video sharing social media platforms. Picking up a quandary from past episodes about digital music, the duo ask if TikTok sounds are, in fact, music—and conduct an inquiry into the form and processes that TikTok sound sharing has redefined in our musical lives and experiences. Spanning Phonk music, millennial woop glockenspiel music, Gen Z bed room folk, 80s Muzak commercial music, and more, the conversation analyzes a dark Dostoevskyian worldview of new commercialized music on smart phones—and how this underpins a capitalized sadness enframing the music's focus on the daily grind, the hustle, and success. The episode reviews new populisms, cultures of embarrassment and professionalization, Alec's practice of dredging the depths of Spotify, "out of timeness" and "out of tuneness," the haunting quality of various sonic spaces on the phone, and a comparison between the social experience of cell phone music and Opera. The episode serves as an initial material and cultural review of algorithms future episodes may expand upon.

    Episode 65: Two Chopped Uncs Discuss TikTok Music

  5. 20/10/2025

    Episode 64: Digital Music & The Solo-Doloistic Turn

    Alec and Nick examine the emergence and proliferation of digital music technology in the 1980's as it maps onto a "solo-doloistic" turn in our increasingly individualistic music listening and production habits. First discussing this transition through the lense of conceptual innovations by Robert Ashley and other Sonic Arts Union composers, the episode charts commercial and cultural implications for digital media distribution on CD, .MP3 and so on, and constructs a historical arc for the relationship of experimentalists to this technological paradigm. Topics include: personalized media experience, television, Yasunao Tone, George Lewis' jazz to computational music arc, sampling, Noise, tech complacency, electronic music sub-genre accession and the creative thresholds of digital workstations and resulting aesthetic commonality across genre.

    Episode 64: Digital Music & The Solo-Doloistic Turn

  6. 06/10/2025

    Episode 63: Ill-Tempered Clavier [PATREON PREVIEW]

    Alec and Nick complete a series of discussions on foundational music discourses — classical music, sound systems, and in this episode: musical temperment. Defining temperement as the organization of the acoustic harmonic series, applied in performance, engineering and musical epistemology, the conversation expands on historical nuances in the aesthetic, technological and cultural implications of this evolving theoretical construction over time. Anchored with a comparison of J.S. Bach's equal tempered proof-of-concept — "Well-Tempered Clavier" (1722) — and LaMonte Young's 1964 rebuttal in just intonation, "The Well-Tuned Piano" (1964), the discussion extends the broad history of temperement into the realm contemporary music and inquires into the affect of digital sound production on this discourse. Topics include: Pythagoras, autotune, Vincenzo Galelei, Harry Partch, John Cage's works for prepared piano, the evolution of the western orchestra, Indian classical music, Noise, and more.

    Episode 63: Ill-Tempered Clavier [PATREON PREVIEW]

  7. 29/09/2025

    Episode 62: ABCDEFG Soundsystem

    Alec and Nick take up sound systems as a point of entry into the discussion of technological and cultural evolutions of listening. The episode explores a range of material, social and philosphical contexts for musical mediatization including Dub sound systems, the contemporary DJ, musique concrete and multichannel acousmonia, and the production of a pure abstract music via word scores and other speculative music forms. The conversation touches on the concept of shizophony, similarities between audiophile and classical music paradigms, the social contract of witnessing sound dissemination as an acoustic phenomenon, Henry Flynt's "concept art" notion of constitutive dissociation and personal reflections on the good old days — presenting stereo sound art at the local bar and grill. Ultimately, the discussion asks: in what way does the material dissemination of sound consitute the cultural dimensions of listening?

    Episode 62: ABCDEFG Soundsystem

  8. 22/09/2025

    Episode 61: Music & The Miraculous [PATREON PREVIEW]

    Alec and Nick pull another unreleased conversation from the archive, recorded one year ago, discussing the "the miraculous" as a concept within music. The episode traces an idea of the miraculous as an occurrence in time that pulls you outside of an expected context, going beyond the perimeter of what is anticipated or even possible in that given moment. Questions around unrepeatable music, the unexplainable nature of the world, computation, chance and musical time, and more are discussed. What are the musical boundaries that define the orderliness of our experience of music? What are musical situations that could pull us out of this order? Improvised, determinate, and indeterminate music, Loren Connors, planes of consistency in technology, DJ culture and classical music are discussed.

    Episode 61: Music & The Miraculous [PATREON PREVIEW]
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About

Flavortone is a music commentary podcast hosted by Nick Scavo and Alec Sturgis.

Information

  • Creator
    Nick Scavo & Alec Sturgis
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    68
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Flavortone