Woodhouse Interviews Nathan Stevens

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 imagine, it is only our own discomfort at their entwining reality that makes us uneasy. And that unease and unbreakable pact are at the center of Keeper of the Shepherd. A masterful meditation on grief and passing, Hannah Frances’ newest album is as marvelously beautiful as it is ambitious. We talked to her below.

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 exploration of grief, lead singer and guitarist Lowell Shaffer relives the loss of his own mother through the single most cathartic album made this year. We talked to them below.

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 spoke with her below.

Existentialism usually isn’t this catchy.

Nor are songs about Virginia Woolf, black holes and the process of the body destroying itself to create a new form. But Sofia Freire finds and tempers the horror and wonder of each subject with aplomb. The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist has made one of the finest progressive pop albums in recent memory on Ponta Da Lingua. And we talked with her below.