Woodhouse Interviews

Miles Davis’ “Générique” floats in like he was blowing fog through his trumpet. It’s a surreal, beautiful, late-night ode to the night itself and all its pain and delight. To stretch that feeling over an entire album, rather than three minutes, would be a Herculean task of skill and restraint. And yet, La Saboteuse exists. Yazz Ahmed’s document of psychedelic, Bahraini-inspired Jazz feels and soun...

Where does a genre end? Not when, as in, not when does a genre die. But where does our labeling regress into fetishism rather than anything helpful? Timbre is quite aware of the boundaries we place upon music and ourselves when dissecting sounds. The Nashville based harpist tours internationally on more traditional orchestral fair, but has also played with Jack White and avant-metal cuckoolanders...

“Ode to Physical Pain” is the exact title you’d expect a metal band to whip out at the end of an album. But Thou are no nihilists. Hell, they don’t even like being called a metal band. “Ode to Physical Pain,” is, instead, the logical conclusion to the tortured, yet triumphant Heathen ; a deep dive into the physical world, our interactions with nature and humanity’s base desires. No, this is far fr...

A boy, a teen, a man, but one dream. That’s the vision of A Dream Deferred . Skyzoo channels himself at 7, 15 and as a young man, daring the world to defy his ambition. Over some of the most lush production of the decade, Brooklyn becomes a character as much as an environment, breathing down Sky’s neck, threatening and encouraging in equal amounts. And in that cradle, Sky reflects on himself and c...

Michigan’s all-stars go from Barry Sanders to Danny Brown, Sufjan Stevens to Carol Wald. But if Michigan was going to pick one rep, one person to be a synecdoche for the whole warped energy of the state, it might be Shigeto. Zach “Shigeto” Saginaw’s last name isn’t a reference to the Michigan town, it was a misspelling on Ellis Island scribbled into lore. And that sort of flux, of happy accidents...

Rap vagabond is about the only way to describe Rav. The USSR-born, London-based, East Coast-terrorizing rapper is a man out of time and without a land. A founder of the internet only EXO label, Rav and his cohort met through the fertile grounds of Newgrounds, looking for fellow hip-hop heads who held Akira and Illmatic in equal reverence. Rav burst out in 2012 with the Hyperkinesis EP, a rambuncti...

So your famed indie-rock band, a staple of the 2000s, is breaking up. Your influence is such that your own son plays your most famous song just to piss you off. What’s your response?  Well for Peter Matthew Bauer it was to hunker down in hotel rooms across Europe, demo like crazy, awash himself in his own mystic upbringing and craft Liberation! Though it might feel like a cheeky poke at The Walkme...

Peter Oren is tired. There’s a weariness associated with all bass-baritones. Something in that low-rumble and rust that radiates a sense of pleasant exhaustion. But for the abyssal voice of Oren, there are troubling questions that ripple through and weigh him down. Anthropocene takes a micro and macro view on a rapidly evolving world and Oren’s (and our) inability to keep up with the speed. And th...

Proper polymaths have one guiding principle: love every genre you explore. And it’s clear from the first note of any Olga Bell album she’s dedicated to that rule. The classically trained pianist, electronic warlock and hip-hop connoisseur hasn’t found a sound she can’t warp and adore. At the beginning of the decade she toured with The Dirty Projectors and Chairlift and released Край an exceptional...

“ It’s easy to fall in love, ” but is anything else easy? Nick Shattell doesn’t think so. The paranoid, beautiful, rambling sprawl of  It Could Just Be This Place rushes its way through decades of country music, detailing every hardship and heartbreak Americana loves to soundtrack. Yeah, falling in love is a piece of cake, but late night conversations with an obstinate god, growing old and getting...

Casual, brutal contradictions fill up Mister Goblin’s mind. From the forced cheer of “Holiday World” to the military discount at the fireworks store and the healing balm of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Que Sera Sera” soundtracking the depths of the pandemic, BUNNY, Mister Goblin’s newest album, lives with paradoxes. And that expands to the music, with bandleader Sam flipping from fluttering falsett...

Supposedly, the apocalypse will be rung in with horns. But they won’t be horns like this, unless the rapture is truly rapturous. The 2010s showcased Moon Hooch’s evolution from studious Jazz disciples to rave-inducing dance barons. Using a “reverse DJ” set up, they filter their saxes, vocoders and another set of mad brass weapons that would make Cannonball Adderley smile, through Ableton, playing...

Grant Kirkhope is the sound of your childhood. Or at least the games he scored have that nostalgia swirling around. But even more impressively, Kirkhope isn’t a relic. Despite ushering in and crafting one of the most melodious eras of video game soundtracks in his time with producers Rare, Kirkhope is still pushing out hits. An architect who is ever at the forefront, Kirkhope is near unparalleled...

“Softness” is a common insult in the modern age. A declaration that most of us wouldn’t survive past eras of turmoil and torture, where the people were hardier damn it! But, as the unfortunate truth tells, even the most “hardy” people usually didn’t survive their respective ages. It wasn’t that long ago that all the gold or moral fortitude in a kingdom wouldn’t do jackshit against cholera. And Ric...

Burn your body, free your soul. Metal, even at its most neanderthalic, has been about transcendence. The moment in the mosh where the flailing limbs start to resemble a larger pattern, the chaos in the wall of sound solidifies into coherence. And no one puts that duality to work like Whores. The Atlanta trio makes the meanest sludge-rock this side of The Melvins and their debut EP CLEAN was a brut...

And we journey into the unknown. But what will they be singing there to greet us? After listening and watching Over the Garden Wall , it’s still hard to explain. The Cartoon Network mini-series, turned cult classic to straight classic in a few short years, was a longing, autumnal elegy and tapestry of misremembered pasts. Flapper girls giggling along to shape note choirs, beastial operas ringing o...

Hex is wonderfully wrong. Through a haze of fake nostalgia, warped tape loops and wayward saxophones, Canadian space cadet Jon McKiel has delivered an album as catchy as it is unnerving. The rhythm slinks and shudders underneath the hooky overtones. The guitar heroics of “String” unspool at impossible angles, “Everlee” sounds like a lost Byrds classic retrofitted with dread and song of the year co...

Polyglot, polymath, call Rhys Langston what you want—there’s a lot going on. Multidisciplined and disciplinary LA mage Rhys Langston released a tightly wound and densely packed EP in Polyglot on Chloroform . It stuffs in as many ideas, scenes and bars as most double albums in a curt runtime. From the sludgy noir of "casino petit bourgeois” or the troubling soul of “still to this day,” Langsto...

I feel like I need to wear a suite while listening to The Fish Factory Sessions. Luxury oozes from every note, whether it’s being radiated by Gigi Masin’s scrumptious synths or Greg Foat’s effervescent piano. But don’t mistake this for an overly stately affair. Warmth and giddy joy are core components of this album, and all of Foat’s work. The UK pianist has been working at an absurd clip, releasi...

A man catches his reflection in the mirror and sees something wrong . Storefront Church’s cinematic, maximalist music delights in mixing the surreal and the mundane, creating a pervasive sense of unease. Fitting, considering composer Lukas Frank was in a manic fugue state while writing the sprawling Ink & Oil. A score for an unseen film, Ink & Oil holds some of 2024’s most vibrantly beauti...

The jazz club is slowly filling with laughing gas. That’s the approximate experience of listening to K. Freund’s newest album Trash Can Lamb. Piano, sax and found sounds mingle with otherworldly noise, beamed in from a parallel dimension. Surreal, yet welcoming, the core of Freund’s work is a sort of Cheshire Cat joy, ever winking and ever fluttering away from reality. We spoke to him below.

Everything is haunted. Horror movie logic dictates that a death makes the haunting, a blood soaked basement, an insane asylum, take your pick. But the places most filled with death are also the most peaceful—within nature. The peat bog doesn’t exist without the passing of uncounted critters, trees can’t grow without corpses below them. The pact between death and life is stronger than we could imag...

Ambient and drone do not have to be calm. In fact, C. Diab would prefer you to be overwhelmed. Not out of any sense of maliciousness, but on his newest album, Imerro, the flooding textures, bursts of horns and hypnotic passages are all created to craft ascension through stimulation. We talked with him below.

I went to two memorials that weekend. I scattered my grandmother’s ashes in a bluebonnet patch and napped in bluebonnets myself before I consoled my step-brother after his mother passed. It weighed on me through the month—but was briefly lifted and crushed by Frail Body. At SXSW, just before the release of their new album, Artificial Bouquet, Frail Body ripped through the record. An unyielding exp...

There’s a train waiting for you. No clue where it’ll take you, how long the journey will be—but the train is there for you . And Minhwi Lee is your guide. The South Korean singer-songwriter reaches into a deep well of beauty and melancholy on her album 미래의 고향 Hometown to Come , reflecting Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Lee is searching for community, for home, in an ever changing world. We spok...