Flavortone Nick Scavo & Alec Sturgis

After witnessing a TikTok “beef” between the “Mozart of Gen Z” Jacob Collier and Rick Rubin, Alec and Nick take up “des arts de boeuf” as a space to discuss the implicitly disagreeable nature of musical aesthetics. The conversation uses these two maestro’s different perspectives to inquire into the role of the audience and its relationship to creativity, musical genius and virtuosity, and the underlying political assumptions evident in their arguments. More, the two discuss the act of a “beef” or disagreement as an illuminating tension that highlights core hypocrisies, embarrassments, and ironies within our aesthetics and politics. Irony is discussed as a dominating “coin of the realm” in which true untruths are exchanged with untrue truths — a continuum that develops into political binaries of liberalism and fascism, and the nature of aesthetic and political revolution. The conversation also uses this as a foil to discuss the recent full course Beef of Drake versus Kendrick Lamar, and questions the musical “avant-garde” as a progressive medium for art or politics.

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? Sibling rivals? Two towers? Or, why does interpretive dance often evoke laughter, humiliation, or come across as potentially overstated and ridiculous? How would would you choose to express yourself through dance? The conversation also recounts comfortable and joyous experiences of dancing and probes critical assumptions and entrenchments within the music/dance dichotomy. The conversation touches on John Cage and Merce Cunningham, The Club, musical theater, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, ethnomusicological accounts of movement and music, improvised music, ballet and classical music, music and dance’s extensions into visual culture, Kim Gordon’s new album, and more.

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 resonance; and, how the social aesthetics of online media consumption have transformed the dynamic interplay of commerce and liberatory expression. Topics include relational aesthetics, adolescent literary tastes, generational culture wars, Soundcloud’s next gen, Nietzsche, Kerouac’s “On the Road” and autofiction, the hybridity of classical and novel forms in Indie music, the Verismo Opera of Puccini, Julia Holter, Pitchfork’s integration into GQ, participatory art, recent MOMA PS1 presentations of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work, Baudelaire and distinctions between Cyber- vs. Crypto- bohemianism.

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 of London and NYC’s cultural exchange. Taking up discussion of “the band” as a conceptual and presentational format, rather than as a presumptive participatory vehicle,  the episode examines the alternative forms of consumption, exchange and imaginative role-play, which Bar Italia’s approach invites. Topics include the question: “Do we like this?,” the band’s 2023 quasi-residency of multiple NYC concerts, transatlantic indie rock history, Dean Blunt, and Thomas Turino’s cultural framework for “presentational” (as opposed to “participatory”) music.

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, and practice is at at the dawn of 2024. The episode questions contemporary music culture’s relationship to the history of 20th century experimental music, the legacy of John Cage and Sylvere Lotringer’s view of him as “The American Philosopher,” historically “legitimatizing” the disparate internet music culture of the 2010s, music culture’s production of “reliable disappointments,” year end list-making, holy and sacred music, and more. 

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 conversation touches on Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities,” Bang on Can’s Longform Festival, Accelerationism vs. “trad” culture, neorationalist philosophy, ethical and/or relativist music appreciation, Sylvere Lotringer, The Beats, Post-Internet Art, the problems of using collapse as a vision of the future, the dubious quest for authenticity—and music as a special annex for the quandaries of what’s behind us and what’s to come.