Initially a solo affair, Jaime Fennelly’s shapeshifting endeavor Mind Over Mirrors has existed on record since 2011, but nothing in the project’s discography tops sixth album Undying Color; recruiting a strong assisting cast including Janet Beveridge Bean of Freakwater and returning contributor Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux and Jackie Lynn, the outstanding results span from roots potency to the edginess of the avant-garde with iconoclastic warmth a constant. It’s out February 17 on vinyl, compact disc, and digital via Fennelly’s new label Paradise of Bachelors.
Jaime Fennelly has amassed some worthy credits including studies with a quartet of 20th century experimental music heavyweights in Maryanne Amacher, David Behrman, Richard Teitelbaum, and the recently departed Pauline Oliveros. The accumulated experience has certainly impacted his current undertaking, but prior to forming Mind Over Mirrors Fennelly was a participant in numerous underground experimental outfits.
For starters, there was the free jazz-edged unit Acid Birds with drummer Andrew Barker and saxophonist/ bass clarinetist Charles Waters, the duo Manpack Variant with Chris Peck, and the somewhat higher profile Peeesseye with percussionist/ vocalist Fritz Welch and guitarist Chris Forsyth of the Solar Motel Band, with whom Fennelly also collaborated in Phantom Limb.
All this activity predates Mind Over Mirrors, which emerged with a pair of releases, High & Upon (cassette on Gift Tapes, vinyl on Aguirre Recordings) and The Voice Rolling (LP on Digitalis Recordings) in 2011. Check Your Swing promptly arrived the following year on the Hands in the Dark label, and When the Rest Are up at Four came out in 2013 through Immune Recordings.
In 2015, the same enterprise issued the superb The Voice Calling, a record that felt like a culmination of Fennelly’s opening-up of Mind Over Mirrors to outside input; Check Your Swing was the first release to welcome an additional contributor, namely Mike Weis on drums, with the tactic expanded on When the Rest Are up at Four via the guitars of Matt Christensen and Scott Tuma.
While those instances were isolated to specific tracks and registered as support, The Voice Calling brought on a full-blown guest vocalist in Haley Fohr, the collaboration resulting in Mind Over Mirrors’ strongest outing. Undying Color doesn’t better its predecessor’s achievement, but it does equal it by broadening to a full ensemble: Fohr joins vocal counterpart Bean as Jim Becker of Califone lends fiddle, the trio reinforcing the record’s Windy City ties.
The group is rounded out by Jon Mueller of Death Blues and Volcano Choir on drums and percussion, with Fennelly’s Indian pedal harmonium and analog synthesizer providing the album’s basis through two weeks he spent alone in the Driftless region of Southwestern Wisconsin, recording on both instruments through the Winter Solstice and into the beginning of 2016.
The results were enlarged upon through overdubs at Chicago’s MINBAL studio with recording and mixing assistance by Cooper Crain of Bitchin’ Bajas. Although Paradise of Bachelors’ typically engaging “album narrative” describes second track “Gravity Wake” as Undying Color’s centerpiece, opener “Restore & Slip” serves as an immediate attention grabber in its deepening of Mind Over Mirror’s “folky” side, a previously extant facet that mainly pertains to natural environments and vigorous roots musical inclinations.
Fennelly has cited the Mississippi Hill Country fife and drum music of Otha Turner as an influence on this LP, and listening to “Restore & Slip” bears this out. Earlier Mind Over Mirrors material has been tagged by this writer as churchy, nautical, and mystical, and the cyclical interweaving of this album’s opener immediately triggers thoughts of summertime insects; it’s quickly followed by the repetition of baritone snare drum and Becker’s fiddle, his playing simultaneously Celtic-tinged and reminiscent of the great US avant-gardist Henry Flynt.
Additional patterns develop, in part through Fennelly’s harmonium-synth bedrock, and the cumulative effect is like tripping balls with Steve Reich on Roscoe Holcomb’s back porch. Bluntly, that’s a hard act to follow, but the 12 minutes of “Gravity Wake” are up to the task, though the track does so partially through redirection. Offering a martial drum beat accompanied by woozy synth waves that have brought comparisons to ’70s electronic ace Laurie Spiegel, early in the piece the combined voices of Fohr and Bean arise.
Much of the fun in “Gravity Wake” comes from that incessant rhythm and synth pulse, but nearing the end Fohr gets the spotlight; brandishing a husky and occasionally operatic voice, she’s been compared to Patti Smith, Diamanda Galás, Catherine Ribeiro, Anohni, and Scott Walker, but a useful contrast for newcomers is to Nico. There is a crucial difference; where detachment was a major component in the German chanteuse’s style, Fohr consistently connects as emotionally invested.
It’s an attribute that extends to Fennelly’s work, as well. The experimental music field gets frequently and somewhat unfairly portrayed as a rather cold milieu, but Mind Over Mirrors diverts from this stereotype; through a combination of buzzy electronics, buoyant analog synth, wordless vocal chant, and raspy fiddle patterns, “Glossolaliac” does so quite effectively. And ditto for the rich harmonium strains and gradually-paced and unchanging rhythmic foom of “Gray Clearer,” the track enhancing the folky angle quite nicely.
In this case folk = human, and this reality drives home the appropriateness of Paradise of Bachelors’ comparisons to such street-level composers as Harry Partch, Charles Ives, and Moondog. All three of those names are also varying degrees of eclectic, and Fennelly gets there too; “Splintering” momentarily leaves percussion behind as Fohr and Bean’s voices interact with electro-clouds and Mike Weis’ singing bowls, while the magnificent “To the Edges” layers electronics and percussion to suggest a baroque organ and choir in a futuristic cathedral.
“600 Miles Around” blends fuzz-ripple motor-like grind (described as “electronically simulated harmonium brushwork”) with synth timbres and the prettiness of Bean’s vocal for a beautifully achy and appealingly abrupt finale. With Undying Color Jaime Fennelly has kept Mind Over Mirrors on the stylistic move and delivered the project its second great record in a row.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
