Music Matters
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Viking's Choice: Mind Over Mirrors, 'Calling Your Name'

Mind Over Mirrors.
Saverio Truglia
/
Courtesy of the artist
Mind Over Mirrors.

At the center of Mind Over Mirrors' sound lies the Indian pedal harmonium, an instrument that elicits a piercing tone; it's at once devotional and alarming in its presence and volume. Jaime Fennelly typically surrounds these song-driven drones with tape loops and synthesizers, and on The Voice Calling, he's joined by Circuit Des Yeux's Haley Fohr, whose deep baritone voice could also be described as devotional and alarming. She's an incantatory force in "Calling Your Name."

Over nine minutes, Fennelly and Fohr clang bells, make oscillators hum, plunk muffled piano keys and pan a somber harmonium melody left to right to center to left... Fohr's voice is a bewildering force, felt in the desperate phrasing of "Forgot, forgot, forgot, forgot, forgot what I didn't know" and out-of-body lines that drift out of desperate, Loren Connors-style guitar feedback: "Which way does the wind blow / It doesn't know where you speak / Will it carry the weight of a million wings?"

The Voice Calling comes out Jan. 27 on Immune.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Listen to the Viking's Choice playlist, subscribe to the newsletter.