Setting The Table

“If memory serves me right, French chefs have a saying about how to cook liver. It goes like this, the key to cooking liver right is to give it heavy makeup. What this means is that milk, herbs, ginger, and other ingredients are needed to mask and seal the odor of the liver. If you try to remove the odor of the liver, the flavor of the liver will also be lost. Instead, by masking or neutralizing the aroma, you succeed in drawing out the flavor itself. So let me repeat, the key to cooking liver right is …. heavy makeup.”  — Chairman Takeshi Kaga, Iron Chef 

The words of Chairman Kaga on the culinary preparation of liver—an organ responsible for removing toxins from a body’s blood supply and storing vitamins and minerals—tells us something about music and the way we talk about it. In 2021, we started a podcast that has approached music as something complexly toxic and as a crucial supplement to our health. Music is constantly being filtered, stored, metabolized, and regulated in our experience. The patterns of our musical consumption give us insight into this process and provide an organ for the biopsy of our commitments. With Flavortone, we’ve tried to offer a medium for this analysis, one realized through a range of methods such as richly reduced metaphors, odorous critiques, and expressive flambés that have formed the basis for our own kind of discursive cuisine. As Chairman Kaga evokes, we’ve sought to compose dialogues that mask and seal the ephemeral musical thing, synthesizing the repulsive with the sumptuous qualities of musical experience and thought. These quasi-culinary techniques both neutralize music and draw out its savory and stank qualities; they are the key to speaking about music on our podcast … a heavy makeup.

The addition of a site for writing is something we have considered since the beginning of Flavortone—a space that invites an entirely different orientation to the problems of musical and cultural description. We’ve both long considered the reciprocities of music and text and have engaged in our own writing processes across musicology, music criticism, journalism, and more for the better part of a decade. Our podcast has become a generative resource for charting curiosities amongst musical practice, political economy, anthropology, philosophy, criticism, and daily life. If speaking about music allows space to perform discourse about music, a designated site for writing about music will support the rehearsal of a different set of important methods and expressive tools for us. The abstract space of writing affords more precise tools—sharp knives, high heats, controlled pressures, and the execution of style. Here, we’ll develop new processes, methods, and techniques for our discourse. In 2023, we’re excited to both individually and collaboratively publish a regular series of essays, reviews, and musings that will expand our project, further develop existing inquiries we’ve explored on the podcast, as well as provide a publication space for colleagues. 

Allez Cuisine!

—Nick Scavo & Alec Sturgis

Image: Jacopo Chimenti, known as Empoli, Pantry with Barrel, Game, Meat and Pottery