Woodhouse Interviews

“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 Physic…

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 prod…

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 st…

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 …

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 …

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, the…

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, ele…

“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 count…

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’…

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 discipl…

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 craftin…

“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 …

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 t…

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, turne…

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 s…

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 Chlo…

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 effervesce…

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 unea…

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 nois…

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 …