Painting the Roses

S Midnight Sister, multi-disciplinary LA artists Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian make motion pictures. Yes, sometimes with moving images - but most often only with the music they create together. Balouzian's serpentine, string compositions are movie scenes that allow Giraffe, a brilliant character actor, to cloak herself in a new roles and voices. A bit of Jon Brion's score work; some old Hollywood strings; a solid dose of glam and outsider disco from 70s independent cinema. Any perceived artifice is always matched by an indelible human fingerprint, something perfectly off. Giraffe and Balouzian's respective work in fashion, visual art, video and film scoring - along with the gang of virtuosos with which they surround themselves - all wonderfully coalesce as Midnight Sister. And if 2017's 'Saturn Over Sunset' was their collection of short films about outcast life in The San Fernando Valley, then their new album 'Paining the Roses' is the inventive, meta motion picture that cements them as auteurs. 'Painting the Roses' is in many ways a fairy tale - not so much the sweet-and-happy-ending kind as something richer, packed with imagination and rooted in the complex human messiness beneath a story's artifice. Frontwoman Giraffe descr