In 'Pursuit' of one of the Twin Cities' best-kept music secrets, Lady Midnight

St. Paul's electro-R&B singer Adriana Rimpel confronts family trauma with heavy dance beats on her new record and accompanying VR film.

By Chris Riemenschneider Star Tribune

April 30, 2024 — 6:05am

On her new album, Lady Midnight sounds about as far away from her roots singing salsa dance music as a polka player would be in AC/DC. The beats are all electronic and highly danceable. Swirly synthesizers and booming bass parts surround her billowy, ethereal, intensely gorgeous vocals. Comparisons could easily be made to SZA or Portishead, but not to Celia Cruz.

That's why it was so surprising when — without any prompting — Lady Midnight herself tied her musical past to the bold new album she's promoting Saturday at the Turf Club.

"A lot of the songs in salsa music are dealing in really intense subject matter and difficult history," explained the St. Paul singer born Adriana Rimpel. "But those themes are put into this jubilant, percussion-heavy music with big, bright horn sections. It's a really passionate way to talk about pain and connect with other people around it.

"I guess this is my contemporary version of that: using up-tempo song-and-dance music to heal."

Widely considered one of the Twin Cities music scene's best-kept secrets, Rimpel gained attention in the popular salsa/merengue band Malamanya and then transformed herself into the electro-R&B personality Lady Midnight with the 2019 LP "Death Before Mourning." That record, too, had healing qualities — a soothing sonic and lyric panache that helped make it a local sleeper hit during the pandemic.

"Death Before Mourning," though, was slower and more somber. During lockdown, Rimpel decided she wanted to literally up her groove, even while still processing some of the grief that inspired that first album, plus a whole other backstory of family trauma.

She also began thinking of how to work more outside the box visually vs. all the lo-fi livestream videos prevalent during the pandemic. Those ideas resulted in a virtual reality film that's a companion piece to her dancefloor-ready new album, titled "Pursuit & the Elusive."

"I think we all wanted to get up and dance after being inside doing nothing for so long," Rimpel remembered, flipping the nearly 7-foot ponytail that she calls her "weapon" to emphasize her desire to dance.

"I was already heading in that direction."

Before lockdown, she contributed vocals to two tracks on the debut album by Night Stone, an electronic dance music duo created by Twin Cities producers/beatmakers Icetep and Lazerbeak (the latter a ringleader in the Doomtree and Dessa camps). That collaboration stuck with her.

A regular mentor and teacher for youths pursuing the arts — she was up at the Red Lake Indian Reservation just last week leading a songwriting class — Rimpel actually met Icetep as a teen when he enrolled in the Walker Art Center's Teen Arts Council (WACTAC).

"She had a lot of really valuable advice to us as young artists and was just a huge inspiration, someone here in our own city being such an incredible artist," recalled Icetep, aka Gabriel Bethke, who's now based in Los Angeles.

Bethke was thus thrilled when he got to work with Rimpel a decade later on her second Lady Midnight album — especially once he started to hear how she took their high-energy dance tracks and turned them into deeper, personal compositions.

"She brought in a whole new vibe and emotional themes and weaved it all together beautifully," Icetep raved.

Those themes center around the story of Rimpel's late father, who was murdered in New York City in a drug-related shooting when she was 13.

She and her sister only saw their dad sporadically, she said. He lived and worked as a musician in Haiti while they were raised on St. Paul's West Side. However, his death and struggles with addiction factored heavily in their upbringing.

"When you go through that as a kid, I think you get this sort of savior mentality, that if you can somehow be perfect or good enough it will resolve your family's issues," Rimpel said.

"That kind of co-dependency and savior complex is a theme within this album, and how we sometimes mimic the relationship patterns that stem from physical or emotional absence."

That theme is on bright display in the darkly infectious album highlight "Good," about trying to balance pleasing others with being true to yourself: "I would hate myself if it meant that you loved me," she sings. "I help myself, hold myself, know my wealth / But I can't sacrifice myself."

Another standout track, "Father, Figure" — which starts out as a mellow, ambient dirge and ramps up into a blood-pumping blowout — is more about the way her dad's story has influenced her adult relationships ("I try repatterning, keep gathering in memory of his toll").

The album's closing song, "Stormborn," and its first single, "All of My Life," both hit home a message of self-love whatever emotional baggage you're carrying.

"Recognizing that the only person you can really change is yourself," Rimpel summarized, crediting years of therapy for putting her in that mindset. "I'm in a place where I'm ready to hold my own chaos and not entangle myself in anyone else's journey."

Despite her dad's tragic story, Rimpel said she otherwise had an enviable childhood filled with music and culture from her mom's Mexican side of the family. Her mother, Pamela Zeller, also was a pioneering advocate for women suffering from domestic abuse and is now the executive director for Women's Initiative for Self Empowerment (WISE).

Rimpel was initially involved in creating the women-led "safe space" music venue Auntie's, for which a GoFundMe campaign raised more than $70,000 in 2020. Citing her father's addiction issues, though, she said she "didn't want to be involved in running a bar" and bowed out of the project. (Auntie's other co-founders, Sophia Eris and DJ Keezy, did not answer emails asking for an update on the long-inactive project.)

Post-Auntie's, Rimpel hopes she's still following her mom's lead in Lady Midnight's music.

"I feel like my way to best serve this world is being able to translate painful, difficult experiences into song," she said. "That's such a powerful tool for being able to relate to others and to get to know yourself."

Rimpel also has gotten to know a lot about virtual reality technology over the past year working on the short film version of "Pursuit & the Elusive."

The VR movie initially was going to be shown as part of Saturday's album release party, but instead it's being shopped around to film festivals (which value getting "premiere" status). Working with filmmaker Brian Skalak of REM5 Studios in St. Louis Park, she filmed scenes in such locally iconic locations as First Avenue, Mancini's Char House and the old Stillwater beer hall Meister's.

Here's the official synopsis for the movie, in which she plays the lead role: "A vengeful private eye is hunting down a shapeshifting culprit linked to her father's murder, only to discover his death may not be the revenge she was seeking."

Putting a lighthearted spin on all the heavy, autobiographical subject matter, Rimpel offered with a coy smirk, "Not saying it's about me."