Mind Over Mirrors did not always sound so bold. At the start of the decade, the name was simply a solo shield for Jaime Fennelly, a nomadic experimental musician who had begun to big deeper into a world of ascendant drone with synthesizers and Indian harmonium. For years, he had played in Peeesseye, a tempestuous and unclassifiable guitar-and-drum Brooklyn trio, and collaborated on several immersive pieces with celebrated choreographer Miguel Gutierrez.
But Mind Over Mirrors represented a sort of musical and geographic escape, allowing Fennelly to immerse himself in arching strands of tone as he fled the city to write. He penned the great 2017 album, Undying Color, during an extended furlough in Wisconsin’s gorgeous Driftless region, where he improvised and edited under the impressive influence of nature before recruiting an ad hoc band to help fulfill his vision. All of those elements—the retreat, the environment, the rendezvous, the drone, and the unclassifiable nature of it all—culminate at last in the brilliant Bellowing Sun, Mind Over Mirrors’ transfixing sixth album, its first as a commanding full band, and its debut large-scale multimedia art production. For Mind Over Mirrors, it is an arrival.
Three years ago, Fennelly first referenced an audacious project that would involve a full band, an album, and a live stage show. As he has often done, Fennelly decamped to a rural location and began writing, inspired by the setting and the work of essential American naturalist Henry Beston. Sketches in hand, he re-assembled a top-tier cast of Midwestern collaborators who had, in recent years, sometimes acted as his ensemble: Califone violinist Jim Becker, Freakwater singer Janet Beveridge Bean, and Death Blues and Volcano Choir drummer Jon Mueller. Together, they built what is essentially a sci-fi symphony—a seventy-three-minute suite of twelve seamless pieces, often interconnected by recurring motifs and cast from elements as far-flung as bluegrass and harsh noise. Commissioned in part by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bellowing Sun is not only an album but also a mobile art installation. The quartet performs beneath a gigantic rotating zoetrope, an internally illuminated cylinder that spins overhead, casting a series of images and colors around a room. The space becomes an invitation to get lost in this magnificent sound.
Bellowing Sun warps space, time, scope, and scale. While the record officially clocks in at 73 minutes, it somehow feels shorter and longer, as if expanding or contracting as it plays. Restless swirls of melodies and drum patterns maintain a sense of motion so that 10-minute track times seem to pass with the briskness of a pop hit. For instance, “Zeitgebers,” in which the entire band spends nearly six minutes rising into one miraculous chord change before letting it smear into silence, feels like it lasts for only an instant. The quartet pulls the tension so tight that all you remember is its sudden release. On the other hand, some of these moments feel like they have lasted and will last forever, suspending you in permanent states of being. During “Lanterns on the Beach,” Bean repeatedly intones “Light” against sparkling rays of guitar noise and nested keyboard melodies that bounce endlessly among a few notes; it is a hymn for that time just after the sun has set, when the world glows orange and pink and seems as if it may always be that way. Mueller’s solo gong-and-tom exploration, “Acrophasing,” holds you permanently at the lip of an abyss and dares you to flinch, to slip forever from this side of safety.
What’s more is Mind Over Mirrors’ ability to move from the macrocosm to the microcosm and back, from music that truly occupies the astral shorthand kosmische to sounds that seem to score activity on the cellular level. With serial synthesizer lines that phase in and out of one another, “Feeding on the Flats” recalls middle-school science class, with the dropper of pond water placed beneath a rudimentary microscope. But it flows directly into “Matchstick Grip,” which soon aims for the heavens. Bean sings of the sun. Mueller and Fennelly lock synthesizer to bass, the melody and meter synchronized in dizzying propulsion. In the distance, Becker adds extended fiddle tones, like the solar wind rushing by as the band gathers speed. “Halfway to the Zenith” seems as vast as the widest horizon, its wordless vocals and neon arpeggios rising together toward the sky.
Again, it empties instantly into “Oculate Beings,” a fiddle-and-drum hoedown that pairs the Southern gusto of Othar Turner and the Teutonic strength of Faust and actually manages to intensify both; grounded and gritty, it is a return to earth. Bellowing Sun thrives on these oscilations—between electronics and acoustics, between the stars and the soil, between infinity and this instant. From the fulcrum, it unfurls as a stream of constant surprise and intrigue.
Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present. Its power forces the issue. And its interdisciplinary approach to genre and form push firmly against our propensity for silos, finding unexpected connections in unlikely places. This is ecstatic hillbilly krautrock raga drone—with celestial vocals and a drummer who loves to rattle the room—built to be played in a modern art museum beneath a spinning phosphorescent orb. Despite all that, or maybe because of it, this is one of the decade’s true experimental wonders.
