Despite the way Oakland avant-garde hip-hop collective WHY? spell their name, there is no question that their new record, Alopecia, stands with the very best releases of this year…so far.

The production on Alopecia interpolates something so human, relevant and recognizable into something like the inner-workings of a machine. Every listen reveals new shapes and styles as you slowly peel away layer after layer of finely woven vocals complimented by a continuous flow of beats and samples. No matter how confusing that must sound, WHY? has the ability to take something musically dense and complicated and transform it into something that is instantly a part of you.

It’s going to be especially interesting to see how the album translates into a live show and luckily WHY? will be showcasing their sound at Solar Culture this Saturday, March 8, which will no doubt shed some light on how such a technical album varies with spontaneity. It’s going to be just as interesting to see frontman Yoni Wolf find just the right words and cadence to hypnotize the entire audience. His particular brand of articulation screws-up the human mind. Literally.

To dig deeper into the bond that I (and everyone) probably share with WHY?, Wolf has graciously taken some time to discuss his internal rhymes and rhythms and his balance between fantasy and reality with us.

AZNB: The first time I heard you, you were a contributing member of cLOUDDEAD, which was a group where you collaborated with anticon artists Doseone and Odd Nosdam. Your early work still resounds throughout much of your music and I hear a lot of similarities on older and newer WHY? albums. How much or little do you think cLOUDDEAD has factored into your most recent album Alopecia?

Yoni Wolf: I learned a lot from my experience in cLOUDDEAD. Nosdam taught me a lot about recording and production tricks and Dose taught me a lot about rap styles. Also, the cLOUDDEAD experience was my first glimpse into being in a band that people actually liked and wanted to see live and whose records they wanted to buy. It was a very strange time. I don’t think about cLOUDDEAD conciously while we’re working on WHY? music, but I’m surely influenced by those days of yore. That’s not true. On several occasions during the making of Alopecia, we said something like “We need that dirty Nosdam type shit to come in right at this part of the song.” or, (when we were recording “The Hollows”) “We should get dose to rap those lines.”

Pound for pound, anticon weighs in as my favorite “hip-hop” label of all time. How did the label come about and how has it changed over the years? How do you feel about your past releases on anticon and of course your most recent release Alopecia?

I am psyched about anticon. We have a really good roster and the guy running the label (my buddy Shaun Koplow) is a tremendous worker and has a great head for business and marketing. I have always been happy with the label, but more so now than ever really. We have some great new acts and a steady stream of good records from the old school anticon homies.

I use the term hip-hop loosely when it comes to anticon homies because they work outside the genre creating what most run-of-the-mill hip-hop artists might call avant-garde or just not hip-hop. What kind of reactions do you get from hip-hop fans and what sort of audience do you most closely affiliate yourself with?

I’m not sure I think in that way where someone is a hip-hop fan or a rock fan or something. I’d like to think the people that listen to WHY? listen to us on our own terms because they are feeling us for us and not because we fit into some category in their record collection. I believe our listeners are smart people who can relate to the kind of shit I talk about and like how the songs sound and how the beats go and what not. I could be wrong. There are probably a lot of people that don’t like us that much but listen anyway because Pitchfork said we are cool.

Certain themes that play out on Alopecia that are very personal reflections, even stories. How much of yourself do you put in your songs?

It is unclear how much is me and how much is an extension of my fantasy life; the lines are blurry there. Not to say I live in a dream or something. Just that I don’t know how well I know myself. Writing these songs is an attempt to better know myself and my relationship to the world.

You mention suicide in a lot of your songs, but always with a certain poetic lightness, like in the opening stanza of “The Vowels Pt. 2” when you sing about, “filming my own fake death” and then later in that same song, “faking suicide for applause in the food courts of malls” or one of my favorite lines from “The Song of the Sad Assassin,” “I feel like a loop of the last eight frames of film before a slow motion Lee Harvey Oswald gets shot in the gut and killed.” What’s with idealizing suicide? Is it something you’ve always felt in your music?

I think thinking about suicide is very normal and healthy. “I am here now. I could make myself not be. I choose every day to not make myself not be. Good. I will get on with living then. Yes. Good.” To contemplate doing it for real is scary and not healthy.

Another one of the themes that pop out at me when I listen to Alopecia is stalking. On “Simon’s Dilemma” you sing about a stalker who, at the end of the song, reveals a 25 carved into his palm. Where’d you get that idea?

Satan or something equally as close to home.

Is it true that you have been collecting pictures of your fan’s palms for Alopecia? It seems like you are setting up a passive stalker ring with your fan’s hands. Did you ask them to carve anything into them?

I did collect pictures of peoples’ palms. I asked no one to carve anything. They did it on their own volition if they did it at all.

I love your line, “Stalker’s my whole style and if I get caught I’ll deny, deny, deny.” Have you ever stalked or had a stalker?

No. No. No.

I think the title of the song that perfectly sums up your humorous license with death and the occult has to be “Fatalist Palmistry,” which is ironically the most upbeat song on the album. Where’d you divine the origins of this song? Don’t say examining your own palms. What inspired you to make the beat so optimistic?

I wrote this song on the piano in the back room at my brother’s old house. It is about a palm reader friend who I was in love with and basically told me my palms rendered me hopeless. I thought this was funny it made me want to cry so I wrote a song about it.

The chorus for your song “Good Friday” is hypnotic, but I don’t really understand what it is you’re saying. When you think of rhyming words and getting the perfect cadence for a song do you always do it with words or sometimes noises?

I am saying “If I’m sinking in, laughing at something sunken in, I am.” I am very much into the sounds that words make and the many internal rhymes and alliterations a phrase can have. I like finding secret rhymes and rhythms within a group of words and then pulling it out by phrasing it a certain way or singing it in a certain melody.

What’s the dialogue at the end of “Mr. Fifths?” It sounds so familiar.

It is Will Oldham from an excellent subtle art movie called “Old Joy”.

My favorite song on the album is probably “The Hollows” because the beats are crafted perfectly to match the mood of the song and the ethos of the lyrics speaks to me. What was your favorite part about writing that song?

I enjoy how the different parts on the chorus fit together. It is a really fun arrangement.

Do you have anything you’d like to say to Tucson

We love your little town. So cute and flat and lovely.

More cute and flat and lovely things can be found on Saturday night at Solar Culture around 9 p.m. for $8.