Photos by Sean Parrish (Diné)
Portrait of Lady Midnight with green and red lighting
Drop the needle onto the black vinyl of Lady Midnight’s 2019 album, Death Before Mourning, and you hear something woozy, soothing, strange, and spacious—the musical equivalent of floating in a warm, salty isolation chamber—harmonies, noises that sound like speckles and swooshes, and her sweet voice with its gospel and pop and thrum. But wait, it’s not 2019 anymore. It’s 2021. Yet as you listen, you may find yourself increasingly unnerved, as the album seems to foretell the traumatic events of 2020—is Lady Midnight psychic?
In her song “Ode to a Burning Building,” for instance, which came out a year before the George Floyd uprising razed much of south-central Minneapolis, she sings: “So wounded you hurt yourself / So wounded you hurt your own / Started fire in your home / To watch it burn, to watch it burn baby burn / And your walls crumble.” Or there’s “Fake News,” which seems to predict pandemic denial: “Read nothing but tomorrow’s sorrow in the headlines.”
“I went to 13 funerals before that album came out,” Lady Midnight, born Adriana Rimpel, told me in a long phone conversation for this story. “I had all this grief, all this discomfort, and once the album came out, and after everything started happening, I thought, Wow. Everything we all went through, it was all right here to see and feel before we went through it.”
So, not psychic. But profoundly attuned to the various currents coursing through society, as a true artist must be. When the uprising and pandemic happened, Rimpel was all over the internet, playing to empty concert houses in Rochester for web broadcast, hosting an open mic event for a nonprofit that works with homeless youth, helping her community when everyone was suffering.
“It wasn’t easy, to get through this last year. I just had to think of the caterpillar,” Lady Midnight told me. “To turn into a butterfly, if you’re a caterpillar, your body becomes goo in that chrysalis, formless. But you just have to stay in there, you can’t leave. Just be amorphous, uncomfortable goo without answers. Trust it. If you’re a caterpillar, you have no choice, right? If you’re a person, you can run out of that chrysalis, but you probably shouldn’t, and you’ll have to go back in if you want any chance to fly.”
Her spiritual musings are part of what makes Lady Midnight such an artist for our time. Andrea Swensson runs the local music show at The Current, and she’s been championing Lady Midnight since naming her an Artist to Watch in 2016. “This year has been so rough in Minneapolis, but because her music is so rooted in her own healing, I’ve found even more depth in putting it on this year,” Swensson told me. “She’s talking about her experiences as a BIPOC person in the Twin Cities, but with this inviting, healing energy in her music, which makes it feel so timely.”
Who is this futuristic artist? She’s the product of an astonishing biography, among other things. Adriana Rimpel grew up in St. Paul, daughter of a mother who deserves her own article: Pamela Zeller is a Spanish-speaking single mom to two girls; a pioneer in the field of freeing women from domestic violence; a former teenage choir star; a singer in Sabroson, the first Minnesota salsa band; a teetotaling religious woman who is proud of her Aztec, French, and Scottish roots. Rimpel remembers attending every Minnesota Scottish Fair and Highland Games at Macalester College with her French-Scots grandmother and her mother, visiting her grandmother on the Hudson farm where she raised Skye terriers—and then going to local powwows with her mom, which would lead to a greater understanding of her southern Indigenous Aztec heritage. Rimpel’s father, Kedner Rimpel, was a session instrument and tam-tam player with some of Haiti’s most important mid-20th-century bands, including Richard Duroseau et son Orchestre, a foundational group that helped invent konpa, a still-important genre that fused merengue and Vodou rhythms. Lady Midnight’s parents split up when she was a toddler. Kedner Rimpel was murdered when she was 13.
“It was a Hollywood producer he was wrapped up with in a whole lot of different addictions,” Rimpel said. “My mom, who was very innocent and very trusting, divorced him when I was little. I do have some memories of him, but I remember mainly phone calls in which he was very caught up in the lifestyle, always trying to make fast money, and living off the women who wanted to be with him—and a lot of women wanted to be with him.”
Young Lady Midnight grew up in a very woman-positive household, her mom working in different anti–domestic violence organizations and singing. “My mom and my grandma were both always singing—always, always. But it was also the kind of situation where I’d be singing like a little kid, writing my own songs like a little kid. I remember one song I wrote when I was about 7 years old—about a cappuccino named Fred who was a beatnik but in the end he got drank—and my mom would say: You’re not in key; can you open up your throat? I’d be like: Why can’t you just be like other moms and say ‘good job’? Then she’d say: Well, I can’t lie!”
Turning from singing, Adriana Rimpel poured her energy into dance. Especially tap dance, especially at the St. Paul school Spectrum Dance. “I was absolutely focused on dance for 12 years. Tap dance, ballet, jazz—tap. I saw the movie Tap with Gregory Hines and Savion Glover; I thought, I want to do that. During the school year, I’d take five to seven classes a week. In the summer, 10 or 12—I was living in my leotard. I’d practice routines on the back porch or in the living room. It’s a very crazy relationship you have with your dance instructor. I can’t remember how many times my teacher would threaten to cut off my feet or my legs. If you get it right, you’re showered with praise. If you don’t, you’re demoted to the back. We’d have these elaborate recitals at the O’Shaughnessy, with lighting technicians, costumes, everything—that’s where I learned the 30-second costume change.
“But I was the only one of color most of the time, and the only one with my body type—lots of curves. I remember just wanting to be in a dance company professionally, but even as a kid knowing, I don’t have that classical ballet body; it is never going to happen for me. But I still loved it. And I could salsa dance in the house! When my mom came home from work, my sister and I would put on a full fashion show, and then: I’m a figure skater! My sister would throw me, I’d stick the landing. It was all there.”
It being all there, in this instance, refers to the way Lady Midnight’s music is so interwoven with her dance and costuming to this day. “I remember the first time I saw her live at a Cedar Cultural Center showcase,” recalled Swensson. “Beginning artists at that stage, most are not doing much more than you’d see at a rehearsal. Then she came out. You could tell she had put so much thought into every detail, these beautifully spaced-out balloons, an elaborate stage show and costuming, thoughtful lighting. It was like, ‘Oh, what just happened? We’re watching a touring band all of a sudden.’ She created a total package, riding a line between live music and performance art. She’s thought it all through from a complete visual and sonic perspective. You don’t see that a lot.”
Lady Midnight found her way to that total visual perspective at art school. She went to St. Paul’s Creative Arts Secondary School for high school and then to MCAD for college, where she started grappling with the more difficult currents of her life. “I studied photography, which ended up being so important for me. I remember one of my first assignments: Shoot a self-portrait; develop the prints yourself. I had a few shots left on a roll of film, so I thought I’d put on these more masculine clothes. I didn’t have a tie, so I put a belt around my neck. I went out in the back alley, barefoot, shot myself. My teacher, she was like, ‘Wow. Honestly, what’s your relationship like with your dad? Is he alive?’ I just froze and started crying. My father was murdered in an alley. I didn’t even realize I was recreating it. It hit me hard: Wow, I have not processed these things at all. Maybe art is a way for me to process it?”
She started digging in deep to her identity, inventing costumes, hair, ways of presentation, thinking about how image and identity and society related. Through it all, she kept writing songs—secret songs. “I was still writing, only I’d save them for myself or share with friends in secret.” After graduating MCAD, Rimpel took a job at the Walker Art Center working with teens, and out of the blue an MCAD friend asked her if she’d be interested in auditioning for a new Afro-Cuban dance band called Malamanya. The first time she ever auditioned for any singing gig at all, and she got it.
“The band director, Tony Schreiner, he just wanted to create this sense of passion and seduction, this idea of indulgence and vices. We had a residency at the Driftwood Char Bar every Tuesday, and we would pack that place out to the street for a sweaty good time—a couple of marriages and babies came out of those nights.”
But after a few years of sweaty Tuesdays and other people’s happy romances, Rimpel wanted to start trying out some of the original material she had been banking in her private notebooks, while Schreiner wanted to keep the band more traditional. She resigned. Meanwhile, in 2012, friends from MCAD asked her to collaborate on an electronic art house project called VANDAAM, and Lady Midnight as we know her today was born.
portrait of Lady Midnight with red lighting
“One of my friends in VANDAAM was going by Adept, the other Sloslylove, and I didn’t want to be Adriana in the middle of all that. I wanted a cool name too! At first we thought Lady Midnight was the name of the album, but the more we kept saying it, I was like, No, that’s me. That’s the persona that comes to me when I’m in that space.” (Adept is the artist Andrés Guzmán, whose iconic image of George Floyd has defined the protests worldwide.) Lady Midnight, Rimpel said, started out as “a woman from the cosmos who is silent, who wants to give messages to humankind.” Rimpel wore masks; Rimpel designed wigs. “I was given permission to be weirder and weirder,” she said. “I loved it. Our album was received super well, First Ave named us one of the best new bands of the year, and then I guess I felt it wasn’t the right time.”
She ended up cutting off all her hair, broke up the band, and went to Mexico City. “I was like: ‘This is it! I am rebuilding my life in Mexico City anonymously,’” she said. “Four months later I came back. ‘Ugh, I’m broke. I don’t want to live in Mexico. I want to live here. I do want to be seen. I do want people to hear my songs.’ I feel like they are my message, my medicine—but I had to get to that conclusion myself.” Rimpel got a job as an arts administrator and set herself to the hard task of becoming the larger-than-life character Lady Midnight.
At the end of 2015, she had her first solo show, at the Kitty Cat Klub. By 2016, the Twin Cities music scene started to pay attention. A night she curated at the 7th St Entry cemented it. “It was the first time I ever wore cornrow braids to a show, with beautiful gold woven through, plaited down my body,” she said. “I had four costume changes that told a story, different jewelry—it was so much work. It felt great.”
Keith Harris, longtime City Pages music editor, is another high-powered fan of Lady Midnight’s work. “I saw her at that showcase at the Entry, and immediately she caught my attention with this sort of sci-fi/Afrofuturist look,” he said. “I thought, ‘If that person is going to be onstage, I have got to see it.’”
By 2017, she placed third in the City Pages poll of the local music community called Picked to Click. “She feels to me a key part of a certain scene that has been growing in the Twin Cities,” explained Harris. “She’s part of it, and Astralblak is. It’s got some hip-hop, some R&B, a lot of atmospheric electronic music. It’s not funk-first or rap-first, but it’s these arty young people with a futurist sensibility who create an atmosphere and pull you into it.”
I asked Harris to help me define Lady Midnight’s style, and he elaborated. “Maybe it’s a little smooth jazz, but not smooth jazz for your parents—it’s weirder than that. This music style functions somewhat the way acid jazz or trip-hop did. It’s music that’s pretty adventurous in its way but also has a familiar feel to it because of the style. And because that style is so identified with relaxing, you just kind of glide along with it. You could call it electronic, but it’s mostly hearing what sounds cool to them and going from there. She typifies a new style of music in town. It’s hard to guess where it’s all going to go, but it’s here to stay, and she’ll be a part of it. It feels like she’s just getting started.”
Andrea Swensson situated Lady Midnight in a continuum with avant-garde hip-hop artists like Janelle Monáe and FKA twigs. “These artists that combine dance, movement, and visual art all together—it’s a really cool way of creating an immersive experience,” said Swensson. “The way Lady Midnight uses light, it actually reminds me of Prince in the 1980s, when Prince had a dedicated lighting designer—The Revolution described him as the sixth member of the band.” (Prince’s ex–lighting designer, LeRoy Bennett, now works with Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.) “I feel like she’s still on the precipice of figuring out who she wants to be,” Swensson said. “Paying attention to her now is going to be awesome in five years when she’s touring nationally. You can just tell she’s on this path—she shouldn’t be at the Entry; she belongs at the Palace Theatre.”
When Lady Midnight does find her larger stage, it will likely have a healing component to it. This winter of 2021, she is working on a new online aural project she calls virtual sound installations. “It’s the beginning of something new for me, space investigations with sound, focusing on healing through sound frequencies,” she told me. These sound installations will be accessible through her social media channels and the Cedar Cultural Center’s channels. The virtual reality company REM5 helped create an avatar component for the project to help navigate the space.
“I really want to help people,” she said. “We’ve all been so traumatized by the last year. Can this suffering be something more than what just happens to us? If you blame your lack of peace on your circumstances, at the end of the day the only person you’re hurting is yourself. I’m called to help with healing and getting that sense of peace for everyone who wants it.”
If Lady Midnight can lead us all to use our late-pandemic months to find peace, it will be the needle drop to eclipse them all.
This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue.
