Painting The Roses (Vinyl)

As Midnight Sister, multi-disciplinary LA artists Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian make motion pictures. Yes, sometimes with moving images — but most often only with the music they create together. Balouzian’s serpentine, string compositions are movie scenes that allow Giraffe, a brilliant character actor, to cloak herself in a new roles and voices.

And if 2017’s ‘Saturn Over Sunset’ was their collection of short films about outcast life in The San Fernando Valley, then their new album ‘Paining the Roses’ is the inventive, meta motion picture that cements them as auteurs.

‘Painting the Roses’ is in many ways a fairy tale -- not so much the sweet-and-happyending kind as something richer, packed with imagination and rooted in the complex human messiness beneath a story’s artifice. Frontwoman Giraffe describes it as “this tightrope of being real yet synthetic, organic yet staged, light yet dark, logical yet irrational, beautiful yet dilapidated. Joyful nonsense.“ Here, disguises like masks and paint are not meant to hide but to liberate, to “set a part of us free”, and Midnight Sister often embody this themselves, appearing highly stylized, curious, warm and inviting but a little askew. ‘Painting the Roses’ is a story told through the looking glass, one where we examine ourselves in a funhouse mirror but find clarity in its twists.