Midwife

Midwife

Luminol

Flenser

Midwife is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston. She lives and works in San Miguel, New Mexico by way of Denver, Colorado, where she spent the better half of the past decade developing her experimental pop project. As a self taught guitarist and recording engineer, Midwife explores dark subject matter in her anthemic, soft-gaze hits. Self-described as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation and catharsis.  When 2020 began, Johnston had several national and international tours planned, but the pandemic shifted her focus back to recording, and back to her internal landscape. Midwife’s third full length record, Luminol, was written and produced during quarantine.  Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators to reveal trace amounts of blood left at a crime scene. When it reacts with blood, luminol emits a chemiluminescent blue glow that can be seen in a darkened room. In the same way this chemical reveals evidence at a scene, Midwife is interested in profound truth—turning trial and tribulation into sources of light. Luminol navigates themes of incarceration, locus of control, clarity, self harm, confinement, agency, and truth-seeking, all erupting in a bioluminescent Rothko color-field of blue. The album cover shows a dark figure standing at the edge of a body of water. It symbolizes the way humanity had been on a precipice throughout 2020, to later find out they had been there all along. Being one of Midwife’s most personal records, this cover artwork is a picture of Madeline Johnston’s mother taken in the...

Midwife

Like Author, Like Daughter

Flenser

On the heels of Midwife’s 2020 sophomore album, Forever, The Flenser is pleased to offer a new vinyl edition of her debut Like Author, Like Daughter, remastered as a double LP in a gatefold jacket. Like Author, Like Daughter is a portrait of Madeline Johnston’s final year as a resident of Denver’s famed D.I.Y venue Rhinoceropolis, which closed in a rash of politically motivated assaults on creative spaces across the United States. The album internalizes loss, addiction, and abandonment and wrings them through distorted power chords, melancholy leads, and sheets of drone to create building, aching monuments to past-selves and lost relationships as positivist statements of resilience and self-love. It’s a record that is impossible to listen to without a lump in the throat. All songs on this release were written by Johnston between November, 2015 and January, 2017. It was performed and recorded by her and Tucker Theodore in Denver at Rhinoceropolis and INAMBULANCE in Olympia, WA.

Midwife

Forever

Flenser

As Midwife, Denver-based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston plays what she describes as “heaven metal,” or emotive music about devastation. Johnston began developing the experimental pop project in 2015 while a resident of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis. The venue / co-op started in the early aughts and nurtured local artists until 2016, when its doors were shuttered due to high tensions surrounding the safety of DIY spaces (not coincidentally following the horrific Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). Residents were displaced around Denver and artists like Midwife were forced to start over.  However, it was at Rhinoceropolis that Johnston became close with Colin Ward, an artistic confidant and friend to whom her new album, Forever, is dedicated. Johnston comments, “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place [Rhinoceropolis] in a lot of ways. We became really close friends there. I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” When Ward passed away unexpectedly in 2018, she turned towards sound to express the indescribable feelings that partnered with her grief.   These mournful sounds ultimately developed into her new album, Forever. The six-song LP is a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies—anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone. On the track “C.R.F.W.,” we hear Colin Ward reading a poem that speaks of a leaf falling from a tree in autumn: “imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body...