Particles, Peds & Pores (vinyl LP)

Blending Indian harmonium, analog effects, and electronic pulses, Jaime Fennelly's new solo album under the name Mind Over Mirrors, released 14 years after the magnificent Check Your Swing, evokes the wide open spaces of organic, pastoral landscapes.

Jaime Fennelly, as Mind Over Mirrors, makes music that pushes the known to the lip of the unknown, where it rocks precariously and in exhilaration. He scrambles the familiar and tweaks the comfortable, not through aggression, but a throbbing estrangement. When placed at a distance, these require longer reaches to grasp. The reward for this effort is an enlarged field of perspective, experience, and also of feeling. This is deeply feeling music to feel deeply.
In all of Jaime's records—and, arguably, especially in Particles, Peds, & Pores—there's a seed of the pastoral, some ancient shepherd's song ringing through nearby hills and groves, but one also yearning to plumb the uncanny and the creative possibilities of disintegration. "Farewell to woods," the grieving Damon sings in Virgil's eighth Eclogue. "Let all be ocean now." Fennelly sounds vast, enveloping wildernesses and the thrilling disquiet of their echoless grandeur. (Maybe Burroughs speaks to the borders of these zones: "Pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns.") There's something of the heroic at work here, too, although the hero's instinct has been suitably tempered—or awed—to know not to fly too close to the sun.
—Nathan Salsburg

Limited edition of 200 copies.

Mind Over Mirrors was founded by Jaime Fennelly in 2010 after living for three years on a remote island in the Salish Sea of Washington State and moved to Chicago. There he made & released albums with a number of labels, including Paradise of Bachelors, Immune, Hands in the Dark, Aguirre, Gift Tapes and Digitalis. Beginning as an Indian harmonium & synthesizer solo, it evolved over the years to include Haley Fohr as a duo, then as an ensemble with Janet Bean, Jim Becker & Jon Mueller for the MCA Chicago commissioned Bellowing Sun. All along the way, Fennelly forged an onging visual conversation with artist Timothy Breen.
In the early 2000's, Fennelly co-founded the iconoclastic group Peeesseye (with guitarist Chris Forsyth and drummer/visual artist Fritz Welch) in Brooklyn and fostered a close collaborative relationship with celebrated dance artist Miguel Gutierrez. Fennelly received his MFA from Bard College in 2006, where he studied music and sound with Maryanne Amacher, Richard Teitelbaum, David Berhman, and Pauline Oliveros, among other sonic and visual luminaries. After living in Chicago for 10 years, Fennelly relocated to the Blue Hill Peninsula of Maine in late-2019 to rebuild a 1970s passive solar house and repair marine electrical systems. In 2022, he moved again to the Piedmont of North Carolina, where he is a founding member of Setting, with Nathan Bowles and Joe Westerlund, and has been establishing and operating a small ecologically-focused farm called Riparia Gardens.

wishlist

2026 (publication expected by 1st quarter)

forthcoming

topics

related to