I dream about Cyanide/Because you have oil spills/Instead of eyes In Portuguese, the word “mariposa” means butterfly. In the Southwestern climes of America a mariposa can refer to a flower. If you listen to the topography of Madeline Johnston's human desert, you will find the larvae for her dreamy project by the name of Mariposa somewhere between all of the meanings of that same descriptor. Explicitly, Johnston’s musical Mariposa finds its genesis in a place of habitat, where thoughts are born to skate along the ethereal dust of the grasslands and semideserts in her native land of New Mexico. But while Johnston’s work can feel much like these things, like these places – her songs are mostly about her internal world: a soft melody of dry watercolors, vignettes of language and meditations on meaning. A photography student at Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design, Denver has been Johnston’s home for the last four years. Before her departure from the desert those years ago, Mariposa was yet an embryo. But by the time she migrated north, her musical project grew out and into the world as an infant. Since then she has watched her work grow into adolescence with the recording of three albums (“oilspills”, “Arroyo” and this year, “Sister Chromatid”). These albums have helped her shape the project’s character and aim for the rest of its life – all while Johnston’s child is still learning who it is and what the world around it means. Mariposa’s existential conversations, musically and otherwise, have been aided by the community of players and listeners alike that have commented on her faraway folklore. These are the bands that have helped encourage her forward, deeper into the desert of her musical psyche. One of those around Johnston probably most-aptly described her music as the creation of a mystery that even Johnston doesn’t have the answers for. When you lay in it and spread your angel arms, you hear it: the sounds of the world around you ringing like the windy insides of somebody else’s thoughts, high on a private purple plateau. You can call her work experimental or you can use the sounds as a filter for understanding. Mariposa’s music is certainly of the desert. And while one could choose to use that analogy to describe something infertile, bare and uninhabited – quite the opposite is true about Johnston’s rich inner world and its expressions. Having begun on the Ukulele, Johnston is only recently moving toward employing six-strings in her work – but don’t let this fool you: her aptitude for creating a lush and moving landscape with strings alone are astounding. Typically spacious in her instrumentation, Johnston has begun to fill her canyons with percussion and sounds on the lower end with her band. Slowly and sparsely you can begin to understand that there is so much life in the quiet spaces, in the cracks, the caves, the colors as she walks out and into the middle of it all, on her own. “Oil Spills” was a series of vignettes on exactly this: Johnston’s solitary and oftentimes unsettlingly quiet character. Its sound lexicon is, at times, jumbled with a long internal dialogue. It’s the beginning of Johnston’s voyage in so many ways, set-out on the cracked soil of the desert’s high plains in a wooden cart, a flag floating above her as she inhales and interprets the dry, sea-like air. Oddly, this is the Mariposa album with the most instrumentation and percussion, but it feels the most alone, as Johnston knits together a narrative fabric about the world that she ends-up wearing like an armored poncho around her shoulders as she crests over and into her arrival in the Queen City of the Plains. “oilspills” is the embryo of songs. The foundation. These are themes and memes that she will later grow into an infant, a toddler with nourishment from farmed photographs, from word pictures. Mariposa’s second album, “Arroyo” is an aptly titled collection of four delicate songs, a place where Johnston’s project finds its legs and spreads those toes wide, learning how to walk. As is the case with the whole trio of albums, the production here was more refined, polished than the previous one. The pace is more controlled. At times it is languid. Here, her heart really begins to beat. And the result is that “Arroyo” snakes like a wavy scar in Johnston’s human topography. What is left in this landscape isn’t spoken so much from words as it is embedded and left as a mystery in the soil, in its emotional water actions, in its flickering television hues of RGB. In this album, she feels like a fascinated child, with her eyes widened by experience, returning again to that quiet place in her dreams, to collaborate with the land – revisiting the place from whence she came. It is the third album, “Sister Chromatid” where this author believes Mariposa will find so many springboards in the soft soil of the land that Johnston has cultivated. There appears, here, to be a bringing-out of the ground, a raising, a rising: of all the sounds Johnston has been experimenting with, hitherto. There is a thickness in each of the songs, no matter how sparse – like something is about to happen. And something is about to happen. Johnston is aiming for much and everything and for only for the crest of her current. As life is sometimes ambiguous but certain, so too does Johnston’s plans seem to be for the future. She is working on the next album – which, at this point, is as mysterious as some of her ethereal lyrics. But be assured, from this next series of vignettes, Mariposa will continue to grow like one of the wavy desert flowers of her homeland. It will use the seasons for knowledge and the sun as guidance, for time, for place. Sometimes the articulation of our life doesn’t come from our mouth in the same way that one cannot learn the history of the land from the wind. Sometimes you need to lean in to listen to the music of the arroyos, of the mysterious places with no names and in the forgotten caves of our topography. If Mariposa is anything it is to heed this reminder: that what we are, we may not know, but listen – don’t take your ear off the ground, keep listening – for we all know what the questions are. |
