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Viking's Choice: Mind Over Mirrors, 'Restore & Slip'

Mind Over Mirrors.
Timothy Breen
/
Courtesy of the artist
Mind Over Mirrors.

The music Jaime Fennelly makes under the name Mind Over Mirrors creates a sense of everlasting wonder, driven by synthesizers and the Indian pedal harmonium. He finds the center of tones and timbres, then stretches them beyond their origins. With the forthcoming album Undying Color, Fennelly opens his music to a full band, featuring contributions by Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day), Jim Becker (Califone), Haley Fohr (Circuit Des Yeux) and Jon Mueller (Death Blues, Volcano Choir).

"Restore & Slip" opens the record with a cosmic hoedown, as Fennelly's harmonium drone rides at full gallop alongside Jon Mueller's hypnotic drumming and Jim Becker's fervid violin, continuously picking up speed in an ecstatic crescendo. There's an ancient, pastoral thrill to this music, which invokes Henry Flynt's minimalist Appalachian folk music as it rolls through lush hills and valleys. If 2015's The Voice Calling was a somber devotional, Undying Color is shaping up to be praise music for the American landscape.

Undying Color comes out Feb. 17 on Paradise of Bachelors.

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