Mind Over Mirrors is the ever-evolving project of composer, harmoniumist, and synthesist Jaime Fennelly, who buttresses his modest instrumental foundation of Indian pedal harmonium with an array of tape delays, effect processors, and Oberheim synthesizers that belong to the world of classic analog electronic composition. The choice of the harmonium—a 19th-century pump and pedal-operated reed keyboard instrument that once featured prominently in North Indian and European classical and religious canons as well as the vernacular music of Scandinavia, the American South, and seagoing vessels—is significant for its historical, cultural, and folkloric associations as much the self-imposed compositional or technological limitations. But make no mistake—despite the academic and abstract valences, Mind Over Mirrors is body music. In live performance, Jaime’s feet are constantly pumping the harmonium’s pedals, and the music’s essential corporeality has fostered a close collaborative relationship with celebrated choreographer and dancer Miguel Gutierrez since 2001. The current quartet incarnation of Mind Over Mirrors furthers this essential physicality through a new emphasis on interlocking full-band polyrhythmic grooves, offering a radiant palette of rhythmic, textural, and tonal complexity.

A twelve-faceted sonic inquiry into celestial cycles and the illuminating nature of darkness, Bellowing Sun (2018) is the majestic culmination of Fennelly’s immersive explorations of the natural world’s sensory dimensions and the dialogues between musical traditions. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago for its world premiere performance, and recorded and mixed by Fennelly with John McEntire (Tortoise), 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 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.