For the next interview in my latest series, I was able to finally sit down with one of St. Louis’ hardest working creatives, Matthew Waushausen. I have been a fan of Matthew’s work since I first heard his post-metal project KODIAC back in 2023. Matthew and I played “Facebook tag” for a long time until we were finally able to schedule a time for an interview, and it ended up being one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever conducted.
In addition to his work in St. Louis bands like Unfleshing and KODIAC, Matthew is one of the primary organizers for the annual Music at the Intersection festival, which is one of the (if not the) largest annual music festivals currently operating in St. Louis. (The festival takes place in the Grand Center Arts District this weekend! This year’s edition features headliners Jon Batiste, Zapp, Killer Mike, and Wyclef Jean. Stay tuned to The Arts STL for coverage of the festival.) Matthew is also a new father, and we also discussed the fascinating crossroads between being an extreme metal vocalist and a parent.
Note: Due a technical glitch, direct audio for this interview was not available, so the Q&A was reconstructed using Google Meet transcription and the Gemini application, edited, and reviewed by Mr. Waushausen for accuracy prior to publication.
Part I: Music at the Intersection
The Arts STL: Matthew, I appreciate you jumping on the line with me. It’s wild to think that we’ve been trading thoughts back and forth on Facebook for years now, but this is our first proper sit-down.
As a journalist, I find my work mirrors the lifecycle of a band; it’s an absolute labor of love, but there are moments when life gets chaotic and you have to deliberately hit pause to maintain your sanity. Right now, I’m deep in the trenches of an ambitious series documenting the history of the St. Louis scene, taking a bit of a “Pokémon approach”—trying to collect the vital voices from every single subcultural pocket. Given Unfleshing’s heavy fusion of black metal and crust punk, you are officially my designated expert for the subgenre.
Matthew Waushausen: [Laughs] Man, no worries at all about being late, I completely understand the chaos. And I’m honored to step into that role for the series. Unfleshing really occupies a specific lane here—we pulled the project together in late 2023, blending that freezing black metal atmosphere with raw D-beat and grind elements. It’s a mix that definitely draws from a lot of divergent corners of heavy music.
It absolutely stands out. I have to make a confession, though: I didn’t get a chance to spin Unfleshing right before this call because my brain has been entirely melted by Archspire’s latest record [Too Fast to Die]. I’ve been utterly obsessed with drafting an epic review for them—technical death metal at that level isn’t just music, it’s a way of life.
Oh, you don’t have to defend that to me. Archspire is incredible. Their technical execution is mind-boggling.
Beyond the band, I’m fascinated by your professional footprint in the city. You handle the creative direction for the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, which basically means you’re designing the visual fabric of Grand Center’s arts district. On top of that, you’re six years deep as the creative lead and project manager for Music at the Intersection (MATI). How are the logistics shaping up for this year’s festival, especially with the recent shakeup to the calendar?
It has been an incredibly intense, condensed timeline this year. We moved the entire MATI festival up by two months, scheduling it for July 17th through the 19th. It’s a massive logistical puzzle to solve in a shorter window. For those who haven’t attended, MATI is a three-day weekend festival and conference using multiple venues across Grand Center. We have the live music tracking Saturday and Sunday, a big kickoff party on Friday, and a massive footprint for local vendors, food trucks, and visual artists.
But the anchor I’m proudest of is the conference side. We partner directly with the Recording Academy to offer completely free educational workshops. For musicians and creators, the copyright and trademarking panels we host are invaluable. It gives independent artists the baseline legal knowledge they need to protect their intellectual property so they don’t get exploited by the industry machine.
That educational aspect is massive. It immediately reminds me of Inferno Fest over in Oslo, Norway. Obviously, that’s a black metal festival, but they host these brilliant daytime conferences diving into the history, philosophy, and business of extreme music. It proves that music isn’t merely passive entertainment—there is a deep academic and industrial architecture behind the art that deserves to be studied.
Part II: Violent Reason & The Filmmaker’s Approach
I want to pivot back to Unfleshing’s conceptual framework. When you’re drafting lyrics, do you find yourself writing from an emotional, reactionary place, or do you take a more academic approach?
It is incredibly research-driven for me. My favorite part of the lyric writing process is doing deep, conceptual dives. I love studying a topic thoroughly to give the lyrics a definitive purpose and a distinct visual identity. When you research a concept deeply, the end product carries a level of specificity and passion that you just don’t get when you’re simply writing about your immediate feelings.
Right now, we are actively writing our sophomore album, which is built entirely around a bleak, dystopian world concept. The spark came from our guitarist, who noted just how essential heavy, aggressive music feels in the current socio-political climate. The lyrics explore ideas that feel completely alien on the surface, but are inherently, terrifyingly human.
That aligns perfectly with your debut album from last year, Violent Reason. That record was a spectacular love letter to horror cinema.
Absolutely. Every single member of Unfleshing is a massive horror movie nerd, so Violent Reason was an incredibly fun record to piece together. The blueprint was simple: ten tracks, with each song meticulously dissecting a specific motif or narrative found within classic horror—ranging from visceral slasher tropes and zombie apocalypses to pure bloodlust.
Because of my background in design, I naturally think about music in an inherently filmic way. I’m obsessed with giving abstract sounds a concrete visual identity. As the lyricist, I view my role as being the band’s storyteller. My bandmates are insanely talented musicians, so I need to put an equal amount of conceptual weight and physical effort into the text to match what they are doing instrumentally.
That shared vision is why Unfleshing sounds so cohesive. There’s a massive difference between a band built on genuine camaraderie and what I call the “mercenary approach,” where a primary songwriter just hires session musicians who have zero emotional equity in the art.
You can hear the lack of soul in those mercenary projects instantly. True longevity and impact stem from communicative, friendly relationships within the room. I’ve been kicking around the St. Louis music scene since my mid-teens, and you watch generations of bands constantly cycle through—people arrive, make some noise, and vanish. But the projects rooted in real friendship always leave a lasting mark.
Lately, though, my perspective on the art I leave behind has shifted significantly. I recently became a father, and now every time I sit down to write an aggressive riff or a dark lyric, I find myself thinking about how my son is eventually going to perceive and experience the things his dad created.
Part III: Artistic Integrity & Algorithm Discovery
That generational shift is fascinating, particularly when we look at how technology is redefining how our kids will interact with creativity. As a statistician and data analyst, I use A.I. daily to write and optimize code in Python and R. It’s an incredible force multiplier for professional efficiency—it handles the heavy lifting of syntax, which actually frees up my personal time to listen to more records and attend more underground shows.
But as we discussed in my earlier interview series, the wild west of A.I. art and automated music generation is a different beast entirely. As a creative director, how is this technology actively creeping into your daily workflow?
In my full-time role, I don’t use A.I. for design work at all. The absolute extent of its utility for me is using basic language models as an advanced grammar editor to clean up social media copy. And honestly, it’s incredibly easy to spot text written by a machine—the “fake voice” and the flaggable, repetitive keywords give it away instantly.
From a design standpoint, A.I.-generated imagery is a total nightmare. Clients will routinely send me these disorganized “brain dumps” of A.I. images they generated, asking me to refine them into marketing materials. But these files completely lack structural quality. You can’t scale an A.I.-generated JPEG up to fit a massive highway billboard without it completely pixelating and falling apart. It’s incredibly disheartening to see businesses choose a soulless, automated logo over hiring a talented local designer.
It’s a massive paradigm shift, not unlike the initial panic and resistance when the internet first arrived. A.I. isn’t going away; it’s permanently integrated into the matrix now, and honestly, how a person chooses to deploy it says a lot about their fundamental character. If you use it to optimize boring background workflows ethically, it’s brilliant. But using it to replace human craftsmanship is a tragedy.
It’s going to be wild seeing a generation grow up with this tech as a baseline. But no matter how advanced it gets, an algorithm can never replicate the tactile, uncorrupted experience of holding and reading a physical book or a vinyl record.
Exactly. Though if there’s one area where the algorithms genuinely get it right, it’s music discovery. Back when I was a kid, my entire musical world was dictated by what was playing on MTV2’s Headbangers Ball. That communal era of music discovery is completely dead. But today, the recommendation engines on streaming platforms are incredibly precise. If you want to dive down a highly specific, niche rabbit hole—like finding obscure underground slam death metal bands—the system is remarkably efficient at feeding you great art.
I completely agree. Honestly, just letting a YouTube autoplay queue run in the background while I work has led me to some of the coolest, most avant-garde music I’ve discovered in years.
Speaking of live transcendence, I remember that you and I both went and saw Wolves in the Throne Room and Blackbraid when they were at Red Flag in 2023. Do you remember that show?
Man, that was hands-down one of the best live shows I have witnessed in years.
It was absolutely beautiful. The entire atmosphere—the vocalist swigging wine straight from the bottle, the burning incense and candles on stage—it felt like a sacred ritual. It’s exactly what live music should be.
Part IV: The Sanctuary of Dark Art & The Local Circuit
The St. Louis concert calendar is insanely stacked right now. I’m actually headed to Pageant soon for the Behemoth show [April 26th] which lets me cross four absolute veteran bands off my bucket list in a single night. The best part? I’m taking my friend’s eleven-year-old daughter along as her honorary metal uncle. She’s already seen Hulder, Devil Master, and Worm, so her underground credentials are ironclad!
But checking out our local venues, you must have some incredibly strong preferences given your line of work. What are the definitive spaces for heavy music in this city?
Off Broadway and The Sinkhole are my absolute top tier. Off Broadway is phenomenal because of its pure physical capacity, the great balcony view, and the breathing room it gives the crowd. But The Sinkhole holds a massive piece of my heart because I literally grew up in the neighborhood right behind where the building stands. The owner, Matt, is an incredible human being. His absolute dedication to providing an authentic, uncompromising DIY space for local St. Louis bands is the lifeblood of this scene.
It’s great seeing the venue diversity blooming here too. The return of Fubar—now operating as a really cool, well-trafficked spot in South County—is huge. Plus you have Red Flag, Platypus, and Moshmellow occupying the old Foam space on Cherokee. There is a space for every tier of music, from a basement punk bill to Metallica headlining the stadium.
St. Louis really does punch above its weight class when it comes to venue infrastructure.
I have to give a couple of shameless plugs here too. Our annual Unfleshing Halloween charity show always goes down at CBGB, with all the proceeds donated to a different local charity every year. And the Kranzberg Arts Foundation recently finished building a gorgeous new venue called The Sovereign right near Red Flag—the production value is beautiful, and they are booking incredible talent.
I’ll definitely have to stop by The Sovereign. To wrap things up, Matthew, I want to ask a philosophical question about fatherhood. You’re a new dad, but you spend your creative capital screaming in a bleak, aggressive crust band and designing dark, macabre art. What do you say to the outside world when they question how that dark aesthetic meshes with raising a child?
For me, extreme music and dark freelance art are forms of healthy, controlled self-expression and mental compartmentalization. It gives me a safe, constructive arena to exercise and explore those intense, heavy human emotions. Because I have that raw creative outlet to vent all that darkness into the microphone, it allows me to be an incredibly chill, relaxed, and present person in my daily life and for my family.
That’s the ultimate therapeutic truth of extreme music. It’s a sanctuary. Matthew, Unfleshing is doing incredible work, and we’ll make sure the MATI conferences and your upcoming shows get the coverage they deserve in The Arts STL. Before I let you go, do you have any non-musical entertainment recommendations for our readers?
Lately I’ve been doing a deep dive into old episodes of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits—the focus on pure conversation in those classic scripts is a masterclass in storytelling. They don’t make television like that anymore! | David Von Nordheim
Pick up Unfleshing’s debut album Violent Reason via their Bandcamp page. For the latest on shows, check out the band’s Facebook page.
