Midwife + Matt Jencik’s stirring new single “Only Death Is Real” is another offering off their brilliant collaborative album. A dazzling fusion of sight and sound, the song is accompanied by a music video directed by Yannick Mosimann who comments: “Jencik and Midwife’s music feels like it barely touches the ground it’s slow, heavy, full of silence and grief, but also strangely bright. Working with their sound felt natural to me. It didn’t need much it gave me the space to look around, to listen, and to respond with what was already there.”
Despite the outright denial in its title, death is present in every one of the songs on Never Die, the collaborative album from Midwife’s Madeline Johnston and Matt Jencik (of Implodes, Don Caballero, and Slint’s live band).
Johnston and Jencik met in 2015 when they first shared a bill and again in 2018, when they eventually became friends. A year later, Jencik started working on what would become Never Die. Following a number of ambient-industrial drone instrumental albums, he felt the need to set himself a new creative challenge: to write vocal-heavy songs. He worked on them alone in his basement, recording directly to a four-track cassette. He sent those demos to a different collaborator to tinker with before that partnership eventually dissolved. Then, he thought of Johnston: the way her voice glowered in her songs, as well as her commitment to minimalism, which fell squarely within the project’s aesthetic and spiritual impulses.
In both of their work, Jencik and Johnston understand minimalism as a vehicle for enormous, desperate and universal emotions. Entire worlds come in and out of existence between each of their sparse notes; a great breadth of feeling is bedded into the simple structure of their songs.
Never Die offers a calm confrontation with the dour inevitability that bookends our lives. When the fact of death looms over life, it tends to denature every experience we have and every relationship we know we’ll eventually have to forfeit back to the Earth. No one, no matter how hard we love, makes it out of this thing alive. But we feel anyway. And we love anyway. And we sing anyway. Here, Jencik and Johnston have sung ‘die’ over and over, snowglobing life in the process.
