Jaime Fennelly, who performs as Mind Over Mirrors, often writes in seclusion. For his latest album, "Undying Color," he created its skeletons using a harmonium and synthesizer while secluded on Red Clover Ranch, a cabin in southwest Wisconsin.
But it's not a romantic process.
In fact, Fennelly describes his time in seclusion as creatively challenging. The near-total isolation forces him to confront his ideas and intentions as a musician. "I still find that being in more rural or quieter environments for periods of time is really actually a quite challenging time and space to be in," Fennelly said. "It actually really puts you face to face with your work and what your intentions are and what you're trying to do and what you would like to do."
And for this latest record, Fennelly is doing a lot. "Undying Color" is unlike nearly anything else you might hear. For one, Fennelly extensively uses the harmonium, a pump organ more likely to be heard in churches or early 20th-century recordings than in 2017. Fennelly manipulates the sonic structure of the instrument, making its eerie, viscous sound more like impenetrable, body-blasting drones than the stuff of Catholic churches. It's heavy music for a heavy time.
A listener can hear how the seeds of it were built in a quiet little cabin in the Midwest. The music might, on occasion, sound unforgiving. Fennelly is precise about his instrumentation and musicality. Tracks like "Glossolaliac" have a hypnotic quality, as rolling synths wash over the listener. Although Fennelly might buck at describing his music as rooted in classical composition, there are strings that tie that particular genre, and Fennelly's music, together. Everything is in its place.
"What I'm trying to do with how harmonium and synthesizers connect in a technical way takes huge amounts of time, which no one else really needs to witness," Fennelly said. "It's about creating space in the music as well, because it can really easily get overwhelmingly dense, and that's not really my intention with my music at this point in time."
Although Fennelly is a solo artist, many of his songs include a slew of different collaborators across different musical genres. "Undying Color" features Califone's Jim Becker, Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux, Janet Bean of Eleventh Dream Day and Jon Mueller of Death Blues. As Fennelly stresses, despite the precision in his secluded creations, his work with collaborators reveals itself more organically.
"They have kind of revealed themselves as the ideal people to be on the record," Fennelly said. With Mueller, for example, Fennelly said the two created a dialogue and, through listening and talking about the music Fennelly made, developed their ideas into notes for each track. "It was a step-by-step process, which was actually quite different than how I had worked in some previous groups of mine," he noted.
Although "Undying Color" dropped in February, Fennelly is already at work on his next release, and like his previous music, he has secluded himself to better refine his ideas.
"At least for the initial stage, I'm spending a week on my own working with my instruments and just trying to have a quieter, more focused period of time," he said. "I think the point of inspiration, they've remained the same, but the actual day-to-day reality of my life has changed."
