Green-House on Collaboration, Beauty and Their New Album, Hinterlands

Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan discuss their new Ghostly International album Hinterlands, the sounds and ideas behind it and an upcoming performance at the Geoponika Greenhouse.

Green-House emerged at the start of the decade as the quietly radiant project of Los Angeles composer Olive Ardizoni, developed in close collaboration with Michael Flanagan. Early recordings for Leaving Records established a distinctive strain of melodic ambient music: bright synthesizer figures unfolding in gentle loops, music that seems designed to coexist with daily life rather than dominate it. Over successive releases the project widened in scope, evolving from intimate sketches toward richer arrangements and a stronger sense of narrative movement while preserving its characteristic warmth and clarity.

Today the project occupies a quietly distinctive corner of contemporary ambient music. With Hinterlands, released by Ghostly International, that sonic landscape widens further. The music still moves with the same attentiveness to texture and atmosphere, but the air around it feels larger, the arrangements opening to new colors and influences.

At the center of Hinterlands sit three interconnected pieces, “Hinterlands I,” “Hinterlands II” and “Hinterlands III,” a loose suite that anchors the album’s sense of place. Throughout the record, Green-House turns its attention toward earthen terrain and the tactile beauty of the physical world: song titles reference mist, valleys, islands and oak trees, landscapes as much as moods. The music mirrors that orientation. Guitar lines, synth washes, flute phrases and delicate plucked tones unfold in patient, circling patterns, each element angled slightly from the next, like the spiraling seeds at the heart of a sunflower.

When we spoke recently, Ardizoni and Cammarata reflected on how Hinterlands took shape, the subtle give and take of writing together and the listening habits that informed it, from the warm swing of Jamaican instrumental ska to the luminous modular jazz of Nala Sinephro. What follows is a lightly edited version of that conversation.

Randall Roberts: The new record, to me, feels more expansive than your earlier records, sonically. Did that shift happen consciously, or did the music simply start asking for more space?

Olive Ardizoni: I don’t think it happened consciously. I think we were always just trying to follow our hearts and desires and do what we want. So it kind of happened organically.

Michael Flanagan: Yeah, I think it’s just a natural progression. Anytime we’re working on a song, there’s always something else we’re hearing as something’s happening. We’re constantly orchestrating and constantly making a new thing in that way. As we’ve grown as artists, we just want to play with space in a different way.

“Music about seeing a squirrel pick up a nut and run up a tree can be just as meaningful as anger or darkness. Cuteness and aesthetics can be punk in themselves.”

Olive Ardizoni

Do you have conversations before you begin work about angles or approaches, or does that come naturally?

OA: Yeah, definitely. We talk a lot about what we’re listening to and what we’re inspired by with other musicians, kind of as a way to frame things. We’ll say we like this type of thing and want to try that type of thing. We also talk about general vibes. Maybe we’ll say we want to approach things that feel a little less joyful this time, maybe infuse a little more melancholy.

And does that happen in the studio together?

OA: Yeah. We work both separately and together. Sometimes we’ll write songs separately and then come together to rework or finish them. Other times we’ll start a song from scratch together in the studio.

MC: I think it’s often easier for us to start songs independently. You’re trying things and thinking, okay, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t work. Eventually you happen upon something you believe in that has room to grow. That’s the stuff I really like sharing with Olive. But we also sometimes start from scratch together.

When you start from scratch together, what actually happens in the first hour? I'm always curious about process, because the finished music arrives as this mysterious thing.

MC: It depends who’s starting it. For me it’s usually something harmonically motivated, like an arpeggiated chord sequence or a synth sound. Olive is more melodically focused and will build something from a loose melody, then we start adding different elements. When we’re starting together we take turns in the same room building something out. Sometimes we improvise and see what comes out. That’s usually not our best material, but it’s a really fun process and you can learn a lot through doing it.

OA: And because we’ve worked together for so long, I can be kind of messy with it. I’ll write a track where the rhythm is off or the sounds aren’t quite right, knowing Michael will still understand the vision. Then we come together and select better sounds and redo things that I did haphazardly. That comes from being a team for so long.

Did the move from Leaving Records to Ghostly International affect how you approached making Hinterlands?

OA: I think we felt a little pressure because it’s a bigger label and a different audience. We didn’t want to crash and burn at this moment of expansion and opportunity. But mostly it was excitement. Ghostly made it clear they had confidence in us, which was really nice. It gave us freedom to move in a direction that might be different from what’s associated with the Leaving Records catalog.

What were you listening to while you were making the record? And more generally, what are you currently listening to?

OA: It’s hard to remember everything from when we were writing, but right now Michael showed me this record called The Singers Unlimited A Cappella from 1971. It’s all these amazing multilayered a cappella songs and it’s recorded unbelievably well. It has no business sounding that insane.

That sounds amazing.

OA: It’s so good. You have to check it out. I’ve also been listening to a lot of ska lately, like Tommy McCook and the Supersonics, the soul rocksteady instrumental classics type of stuff. I love it.

“There’s this expectation that experimental music needs to be brooding or academic. There’s freedom in simply finding music beautiful.”

Michael Flanagan

Jackie Mittoo too. He's a great organist in that world.

OA: So good. I’ve been enjoying instrumental ska, even though I listen to Desmond Dekker and vocal stuff too. Another record we were listening to during the writing was Endlessness by Nala Sinephro.

Oh yeah, that's a beautiful record.

OA: It’s incredible. Michael actually has a jazz background in jazz guitar, so if you hear jazz influences in Green-House that’s a lot of Michael brain stuff. I love how on that Nala Sinephro album there’s this amazing ability to incorporate modular synths and arpeggiating synths in a way that’s new but still blends beautifully with jazz.

OA: And speaking of jazz, I’ve been listening to Alabaster DePlume’s album Gold a lot. Beautiful spiritual jazz. I love the spoken word on it.

Michael, what about you?

MC: Olive covered a lot of good ones. Another artist we talked about a lot while making the album was Misha Panfilov. I think he’s Estonian. The album Days as Echoes from 2020 is really wonderful. Small-ensemble jazz with this sort of library and exotica feeling. I was also really into Jessica Pratt’s album Here in the Pitch. I listened to that every day for several months. The texture and tonality are phenomenal. The reverb on that album especially. There’s beautiful spring reverb and hall-like spaces. I wanted to bring some of that into our world.

Can you talk a little about sequencing Hinterlands and how you approached the flow?

OA: It started to come together naturally. We didn’t begin with a strong concept and we actually talked about not wanting it to be a concept album. But things started sequencing themselves emotionally. It felt like a journey on an island, going underwater and resurfacing.

I've been thinking a lot about beauty in music and the West Coast tradition of composers like Jon Hassell and Lou Harrison who rejected the academic music world for being cold and insular. You've spoken about joy and beauty in interviews before. In 2025 does that feel like an aesthetic choice, a political one or just an honest one?

OA: I think both. It’s inherently political to find ways to express joy right now. Not in a way that spiritually bypasses the trauma of the moment, but as a way of defying the forces that want us to feel hopeless.

MC: I think the desire to make experimental music without putting it on a pedestal is important too. There’s this expectation that experimental music needs to be brooding or academic. There’s freedom in simply finding music beautiful.

I came up in the punk world and it took me a long time to admit how great The Carpenters are.

OA: Same.

Now I mostly listen to beautiful music.

OA: There’s also this perception that joy equals childishness or femininity while aggression equals seriousness. That association is a problem. Music about seeing a squirrel pick up a nut and run up a tree can be just as meaningful as anger or darkness. Cuteness and aesthetics can be punk in themselves.

You're performing next month in Highland Park, right?

OA: Yes. We’re playing at Bob Baker Marionette Theater. We both love puppets. It’s a dream come true.

What changes when you perform live?

MC: It’s evolving. Electronic music live can be challenging because our pieces are composed and don’t loop the way other electronic music does. We’re building a new live set for this material with more room for improvisation.

OA: We’ve been enjoying improvisation more recently. We’ve played with our friend Nina Keith and her installation water creature called Periphery. That reminded us we can improvise and people are okay with it.

Do you like being on stage?

OA: I do. I used to front metal and punk bands in my twenties. That was cathartic because I could move and scream. With electronic music you sometimes have performance anxiety without that same physical release.

MC: Our music is experiential. It’s subtle. The same setup can feel totally different depending on the room and the speaker placement.

Will you be touring in support of this?

OA: We’re not sure yet. Some smaller runs are in the works but nothing announced. I’d love to tour internationally. I’ve never been to Europe. We’d also love to go back to Japan.

Is there anything about the record you wanted to mention that I didn't ask about?

MC: Just gratitude. This album felt like a deviation for us and we were nervous about it. But people have been supportive and we’re really thankful for the community.

OA: We’ve been really lucky. Leaving Records was a beautiful start and now Ghostly is incredible. We’ve had support from people like Noah from Living Earth, dublab, and In Sheep’s Clothing.

You should put a shout-out track at the end of the record like rap albums used to.

OA: I love that. Everyone should bring that back.

Green-House’s new album Hinterlands arrives March 20 via Ghostly International, with Olive Ardizoni and Michael Cammarata will be performing live for a Living Earth session at the Geoponika Greenhouse on March 29th.