A move to the Windy City has broadened Mind Over Mirrors’ musical palette
A change of scenery can straighten your head, but Jaime Fennelly really cleared the decks when he moved from Brooklyn to Washington state’s Salish Sea in 2007. He traded city living and touring and recording with Peeesseye, his trio with future guitar hero Chris Forsyth and drummer Fritz Welch, for a cabin reliant on solar power on a five-square-mile island.
Mind Over Mirrors is rooted in the solitary, wide-open state induced by his island sojourn. On early albums, Fennelly played trance-inducing rhythms and million-mile-stare drones using an Indian harmonium and analog electronics. But after moving to Chicago in 2011, the same year that Peeesseye wound down, he found common cause with Midwestern musicians similarly committed to sonically inducing transcendence.
Mind Over Mirrors first swapped instrumentals for songs on 2015’s The Voice Calling, and on the new Undying Color (Paradise Of Bachelors), the project has become a band. Drummer Jon Mueller, fiddler Jim Becker and singers Haley Fohr and Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day) deepen the grooves and broaden the sound, freeing Fennelly’s synths to play a lead role rather than carry the show.
“I think on the surface level, what I play looks different compared to solo Mind Over Mirrors albums, but I feel like I’m striving to communicate similar ideas,” he says. “Jon and I have been exploring complementary sonic and thematic terrain. I’ve been hearing fiddle in my work since the beginning, but it took me several years to find someone that was equally footed in American vernacular string music and drone music. I feel like there’s so much to explore with Jim, and what we’ve been able to do together so far feels like just the beginning. Likewise with everyone in the group.”
—Bill Meyer
