Mind Over Mirrors: Bellowing Sun

$9.00$37.00

A twelve-faceted sonic inquiry into celestial cycles and the illuminating nature of darkness, Bellowing Sun is the majestic culmination of composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly’s immersive explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for its world premiere performance, and recorded and mixed by Fennelly with John McEntire (Tortoise), it features Janet Beveridge Bean (Freakwater), Jim Becker (Iron and Wine), and Jon Mueller (Death Blues).

A twelve-faceted sonic inquiry into celestial cycles and the illuminating nature of darkness, Bellowing Sun is the majestic culmination of composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly’s immersive explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions and the dialogues between musical traditions—acoustic and electronic, vernacular and avant-garde. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for its world premiere performance, and recorded and mixed by Fennelly with John McEntire (Tortoise), it features Janet Beveridge Bean (Freakwater), Jim Becker (Iron and Wine), and Jon Mueller (Death Blues).

Highlights

  • Deluxe 140g virgin vinyl 2xLP features heavy-duty gatefold matte board jacket with artwork by Grammy nominee Timothy Breencolor LP labels, and high-res Bandcamp download code. PoB’s first 2xLP of contemporary music.
  • CD edition features gatefold jacket with LP replica artwork.
  • World premiere performance commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, April 6–7, 2018.
  • RIYLPopul Vuh, Henry Flynt, Arthur Russell, Laurie Spiegel, CAN, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, La Düsseldorf, Tony Conrad & Faust, Terry Riley, Alice Coltrane, Broadcast, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Bitchin Bajas, Circuit des Yeux, Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society.
  • Artist page/tour dates/back catalog

Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.

Tracklist

A1. “Feeding on the Flats” 4:24
A2. “Matchstick Grip” 9:27
A3. “A Palinopsic Wind” 3:40
B1. “Zeitgebers” 7:38
B2. “Lanterns on the Beach” 3:06
B3. “Vermillion Pink” 9:21
C1. “Halfway to the Zenith” 4:51
C2. “Oculate Beings” 6:35
C3. “Talking Knots” 5:32
D1. “Twenty-One Falls” 6:56
D2. “Acrophasing” 6:10
D3. “Pause to Wonder” 5:39

Catalog Number/Release Date

PoB-040 / April 6, 2018

Purchase from PoB above or support via

Bellowing Sun is a National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network (NPN/VAN) Creation and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in partnership with Alverno Presents and NPN. Additional support has been provided by The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Individual Artist Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, an Individual Artist Support Grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and Paradise of Bachelors.

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Album Narrative

“For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars, pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons, across eternal seas of space and time.”

– Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928)

In 1925, a thirty-seven year old American writer and WWI vet named Henry Beston bought fifty acres of desolate duneland on Coast Guard Beach on Cape Cod—the peninsula’s furthest fingers reaching into the gray Atlantic—and designed and built a small cottage overlooking the ocean. He named it the Fo’castle. For an entire year beginning in September 1926, he lived alone there in the hostile, briny wilderness and dedicated himself to closely observing the multifarious but unforgiving ecology of ever-changing sand and sea and to integrating his mind and body within its clamorous calm. He walked, he watched, he listened, and he wrote. The result was his masterpiece The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928). A seminal work of naturalist literature that remains revered by environmentalists, animal rights activists, and poets alike, it elevates description of the natural world to an incandescent metaphysical pitch.

In 2018, exactly ninety years after Beston’s book was published, composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly completed an ambitious multimedia production he called Bellowing Sun. Commissioned for its world premiere performance by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the work developed over the course of nearly three years, gradually accreting into a rapturous, prismatic seventy-three minute composition for a group comprised of Fennelly (Oberheim SEMs, OB-6 synthesizer, and Indian harmonium) and fellow veteran Chicago musicians Janet Beveridge Bean (Freakwater, Eleventh Dream Day: lead vocals, zither, percussion); Jim Becker (Iron and Wine, Califone: fiddle, vocals); and Jon Mueller (Death Blues, Volcano Choir: drums, vocals). In its live iterations, the quartet performs Bellowing Sun in the round, with the audience encircling the musicians, each of whom plays multiple instruments. The visual centerpiece (reproduced on the album cover) is a large kinetic light sculpture hovering suspended above the players, a monumental zoetrope in the shape of a great, internally illuminated drum, conceived and hand fabricated in collaboration with artists Eliot Irwin and Timothy Breen (nominated for two 2017 Grammys for album design) and lighting designer Keith Parham. This arresting cylindrical form, adorned with patterns, abstract figures, and dyed gradients on its translucent textile skin, rotates to create an ever-changing architectural kaleidoscope of organic shapes and color, a delicate but imposing firmament-tent that simultaneously evokes astronomical objects and microscopic life forms.

A twelve-faceted sonic inquiry into celestial cycles, the rhythms of the natural world, and the illuminating nature of darkness, the accompanying album Bellowing Sun is the majestic culmination of Fennelly’s immersive explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions and the dialogues between musical traditions—acoustic and electronic, vernacular and avant-garde. It deliberately situates its questing, edge-of-earth spirit within the context of Beston’s Fo’Castle. The link to Beston is not merely intellectual, but rather experiential and geological. The solitary compositional genesis of the piece, and a significant portion of its early recording (before tracking and mixing sessions with John McEntire of Tortoise), occurred at Bean’s home atop a dune of fine quartz “singing sands” on the shore of Lake Michigan, an environment akin to the Cape. Beston directly inspired certain moments: the gulls he describes frantically “Feeding on the Flats” are mirrored here by a percolating synthesizer that mimics their dance with surf and sand; “Lanterns on the Beach” is named for a chapter about night in The Outermost House; and “Pause to Wonder” draws directly from his gorgeous description of butterfly migrations. But his methodology of extended, observational contemplation of nature, of carefully transcribing a world of witness, pertains most prominently.

Sonically, Bellowing Sun is both kaleidoscopic and telescopic in nature, offering a radiant palette of rhythmic, textural, and tonal complexity, as well as rapid shifts in scale, from the intimately corporeal to the dizzyingly cosmic. Though long associated with his meditative solo work for harmonium, tape delay, and other effects, with Bellowing Sun, Fennelly has ascended to a thrilling new communicatory stratum, departing the solo, interior monologues of his early work and the deeply focused dialogues of the album’s recent predecessor Undying Color (2017) for something broadly communal, massively polyphonic, and unabashedly spiritual in its scope and scale. All four J’s—Jaime, Janet, Jim, and Jon—appeared together on Undying Color, but have since solidified into a formidable, cohesive unit, a true band capable of increasingly expansive arrangements. Though divided into twelve movements, or aspects—zodiacal sectors, perhaps—the piece functions as a heroic, integral whole. Several instrumental components and vocal motifs function as modular and parallactic, originally recorded for different sections but interchangeably transposable elsewhere, much as certain constellations share stars in common. The album’s sequence reveals a dynamic push and pull between contemplative stasis and headlong momentum, imparting a palpably physical mass to the cataracts of sound.

Throughout, Fennelly’s Oberheim synths and sequencers stitch together a colossal quartet counterpoint, driven by a new emphasis on interlocking full-band rhythmic grooves. He relies less than ever before on the harmonium, though it still features prominently, contributing an airy link to the rhythms of human breathing. Bean sings on half of the tracks, including early stunner “Matchstick Grip” and the spectacular closer “Pause to Wonder.” Whether articulating words or intoning phonemes, her powerful, lucent voice elevates the proceedings to a devotional plane whenever it emerges from the saturated field of sound.

The mood is at once ecstatic and elegiac; death and decay are present here. The exuberant kosmische pulse of “Zeitgebers” (the title refers to environmental cues, such as light or dark, that synchronize an organism’s biorhythms) is tempered by the seething dirge of “Vermillion Pink.” Breen cites the elaborate funerary textiles of the Paracas culture of Peru as an inspiration for his paintings on the zoetrope. (“Oculate Beings” is not coincidentally also a reference to the Pre-Columbian coastal society who shared beliefs of regularly communing with the spirit world.) But the degradation of our planet, and particularly the impending end of deep night, provides a melancholy, reverent subtext to the otherwise celebratory tones. In most places on earth, careless and overzealous artificial lighting, coupled with overpopulation, mean that many of us will never see a truly dark night sky, with its vertiginous, multihued clots of seemingly infinite stars, planets, comets, and galaxies punctuating the black. As Beston wrote even back in 1928, “The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot … Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

In 1978, a decade after Beston’s death, a violent winter storm spun the Fo’Castle out to sea, leaving nothing but the glint of a commemorative brass plaque in the lucent moonlight. Can you imagine the sound of that? Mind Over Mirrors can, and does, with Bellowing Sun. It’s an elemental thing.

Videos and Streaming

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

8.0. A sci-fi symphony… a complex and beautiful synth-and-drone time warp. 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.

– Grayson Currin, Pitchfork

8/10. An extended kosmische treat… rhapsodic. Two generations of experimental Chicago converge in this album of shimmering long-form grooves.

– John Robinson, Uncut

On Bellowing Sun, Mind Over Mirrors creates a widescreen aura. Fennelly’s synths are met by Bean’s rising vocals and Mueller’s rattling drums. In composing Bellowing Sun, Fennelly focused on rhythm more than ever… that tactic pays continual dividends, injecting blood into his oxygen-rich music.

– Marc Masters, NPR Music

Bellowing Sun manages to touch on fascinating iterations of drone music, presenting a wildly diverse landscape of tracks that are both individualistic and work in lock-step to present a cohesive whole. This, perhaps, is the crowning triumph of Bellowing Sun: Its ability to spring naturally from a source, presented as music that’s existed forever, previously untapped before Fennelly awoke it from a slumber. It feels both massive and intimate, a hulking presence yet easily digestible… Bellowing Sun is merely a part of a larger vision. But the music—this current iteration of Mind Over Mirrors’ constantly evolving vision—is so powerful, so alive, that it carries a meaning all its own.”

– Will Schube, Noisey

The solar system is an awful big place, but synthesist and composer Jaime Fennelly makes it feel close enough to touch.

– Aquarium Drunkard, “2018 Year In Review”

An awe-inspiring opus of limitless revelry. The key ingredient that allows the novel to transcend, and for Mind Over Mirrors’ electroacoustic miasmas to aurally replicate, is the description of the natural world in a metaphysical vein. [The 12 tracks] oscillate and breathe, melding in with the synapses of the listener and lulling them into a rapturous state.

– The Quietus

A masterpiece. One of the marvelous things about Mind Over Mirrors is the way the group’s music feels both spacey and earthy. On the new album, which is at turns ecstatic, spooky, and revelatory, Fennelly and company the band maximize that ability, putting the idea of our planet as a cosmic vehicle into context.

– Aquarium Drunkard

These interlocking musical relationships are like a sun-nurtured ecosystem.

– Bill Meyer, The Wire

Radiantly transportive music.

– Jennifer Kelly, Popmatters

A richly textured opus, which totally eclipses every previous Mind Over Mirrors effort. Fennelly ups the ante in terms of compositional vision, often layering Bean’s melodic chanting in mesmerizing patterns. Mueller’s thundering drums add bottom end and depth as much or more than they add rhythm, melding in a simpatico fit with Fennelly’s rich, pulsing synthesizers and lush harmonium drones and Becker’s draggy fiddle, which bridges the gap between rustic old-timey sounds and Tony Conrad-style minimalism. I’m still grappling with the album’s ambitious sprawl, which weaves together various threads Fennelly has followed over the years—new age, Indian classical music, drone, Krautrock, minimalism—into a spectacular, cohesive whole that envelops the listener in color and rhythm. Exquisitely crafted, meditative music.

– Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader

 An atmospheric groove that somehow sounds both intergalactic and medieval. 

– Stereogum

It is the most expansive expression to date of an aesthetic that is inspired by a reverence for nature and imparts a non-prescriptive, spiritual experience. It is by turns as stilling as a gaze at an oceanic horizon, as remote as an unmapped Appalachian hollow, and as bracing and immersive as a winter gale. this music invites you to surrender to reverence without telling you what to believe.

– Bill Meyer, Dusted

It does an amazing job of convincing you it’s 1974 Köln instead of 2018 USA … emulating klassik krautrock is always a winning move—especially if it’s done with the nuance and ear for sublime tones possessed by Mind Over Mirrors.

– The Stranger

Kosmische masters.

– Uproxx

It feels like some jittering, liminal version of 1920s ex-pat Paris, but on a Stanley Kubrick set.

– Flypaper

One of Fennelly’s best and most brightly colored albums yet. Let the great drum spin, let the harmonium roar and the synthesizer dance in an ecstatic mesh of mind and matter and sensation.

– Blurt

Near-religious drone. The effect is kaleidoscopic.

– The Quietus 

Devotional ambient dreamscapes … follows in the fertile footsteps of Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane.

– Uncut 

Creates a sense of everlasting wonder … praise music for the American landscape.

– NPR Music 

Recalls the time-lapse of an epic nature documentary … Such intention, such mindfulness, such clarity of vision.

– The Observer 

Sounds like something plucked out of an Andrei Tarkovsky film, or produced by mapping the orbits of celestial bodies on an LP record.

– Blouin ArtInfo