Orbweaving, the new collaborative album by Midwife and Vyva Melinkolya out now via The Flenser, is what the friendship between Midwife’s Madeline Johnston and Vyva Melinkolya’s Angel Diaz sounds like.
“Angel and I met in 2019. We were initially supposed to play a show together in Kentucky on the (cancelled) massive tour I had booked for March 2020,” Johnston remembers. “We had started talking online, the correspondence eventually turned into almost weekly phone calls, and we became close friends really fast. We would talk each other through life’s big shifts of the early pandemic. I think we both found the confidant we needed within each other.”
This friendship was born from music, but quickly became so much more than that.
“First off, Angel sang on Luminol, and I really loved her contributions to my track ‘2020,’ the Offspring cover. In 2021, I moved down to southern New Mexico and began hosting artist residencies in my home studio. I live in a big warehouse which used to be a youth center. It’s an amazing space, there’s a ton of room for people, and we can be as loud as we want. The residencies have always been very collaborative. I honestly don’t remember whose idea it was to begin a bigger project together, but Angel made her way to my home in summer 2021 and we spent a little over a week in the studio making what would become Orbweaving.”
During Angel’s residency, they both went “herping,” a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians, along the empty roads near Las Cruces.
“The big themes of the album are hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure, a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread. Orbweaving is inspired by nature. It’s title refers to an orb-weaver spider,” Johnson explains. “The track ‘Plague X’ was inspired by the lifecycle of cicadas, whose 17-year periodical cycle took place in 2021. The group of cicadas that emerged are known as Brood X. In a post-covid world, we are no strangers to living in a plague year. The violent arrival of Brood X cicadas alluded to the Plague of Locusts written about in the book of Exodus. ‘Plague X,’ and the record in full, takes a look at an internal, emotional environment in the context of this bleak and terrifying event,” she says. “The locusts covered the face of the land and swallowed up every crop and all the fruits of the trees. Afterwards there was nothing green in the trees, and all the crops in the fields had been destroyed. Songs like ‘Hounds of Heaven’ and ‘NMP’ were inspired by faith and what it means to us, during a time when the turmoil of the world felt so intense, bleak, being grounded by belief felt especially important.”
Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists.
“It felt very natural to be together,” she says. “We brought ideas and a couple of songs each to work on. We sort of alternated roles between playing and producing, going back and forth to add different instrumentation to the songs as we went along. Our two distinct styles worked incredibly well together. Vyva Melinkolya is rooted in a more classic shoegaze approach which added floating sentimentality to my often minimal and structured ‘heaven metal.’ Angel is a genius and pictured the songs in a fully self actualized way, presenting many possibilities and options I may not have come to on my own. Alternately, I think I offered some restraint in areas Angel might have not seen before in our parts combined. We definitely helped balance each other out, and what was created was something in between, something new entirely – while remaining true to our individual aesthetics.”
Johnson concludes, “I learned a lot from this project, and I am so grateful for it. I learned about letting go, the nature of collaboration. It’s a lot about trusting the other person. This was also the first time I had done any co-writing with another artist, which was a big challenge for me. The reward was immense though, having faced my fear of not being in control and the preconceived ideas I had about perfectionism in my project, I came out on the other side feeling totally free. I had to break myself a little bit to get there. Collaboration is freedom.”
