MIND OVER MIRRORS: BELLOWING SUN (PoB-040)

PRE-ORDER NOW:

$9.00 – $37.00

Or support via:  Bandcamp  (2xLP/CD/digital) |  Other Options (2xLP/CD/DL/stream) | Local Record Stores

 

 

We are honored to announce the details of Bellowing Sun, the new interdisciplinary project by Mind Over Mirrors. Today NPR Music has premiered “Matchstick Grip,” the first single from the album, which is also PoB’s first 2xLP of contemporary music (and for good reason.)

On Bellowing Sun, Mind Over Mirrors creates a widescreen aura. On the album’s second track, “Matchstick Grip,” the band starts busy and get busier. Fennelly’s synths are met by Bean’s rising vocals and Mueller’s rattling drums. Perhaps because the music is constantly ascending, “Matchstick Grip” feels shorter than its nine and a half minute duration. But the song’s rush also comes Mueller’s 3-D beat, which punctures air in multiple directions. In composing Bellowing Sun, Fennelly focused on rhythm more than ever. On “Matchstick Grip” that tactic pays continual dividends, injecting blood into his oxygen-rich music.

– Marc Masters, NPR Music

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 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).

 

WATCH THE BELLOWING SUN TRAILER

 

In its live iterations, the quartet performs Bellowing Sun in the round, with the audience encircling the musicians. 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.

Get tickets to the April 6–7 premiere at MCA Chicago

 

Photo by Saverio Truglia.

 

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the April 6, 2018 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Matchstick Grip”. 

For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

Use coupon code SUN during checkout for 20% off Mind Over Mirrors‘ previous album Undying Color.

 

 

Acclaim for Mind Over Mirrors

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

– NPR Music 

Near-religious drone. The effect is kaleidoscopic.

– The Quietus 

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

– Uncut 

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 

 

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.