A wooden box dusted with mold. The crumbling façade of a duplex. A lone oak still rising out of a green patch in the vacant lot. I listen to the solo works of Chicago-based experimentalists Mind Over Mirrors (Jaime Fennelly) and Circuit Des Yeux (Haley Fohr) and I picture inevitable urban decay claiming new territories as human hands and voices struggle with whatever available tools to keep hope alive. Fennelly’s baroque arrangements drape wheezing harmonium drones over steadily expanding webs of modular synthesis charged equally with liturgical grandeur and analog warmth. Fohr’s voice is unmistakable in the context of any session she joins: stentorian proclamations, flecked with moments of tremolo and moments of abject terror, sketching out a one-woman opera whose handwritten libretto we can only begin to unpack from this vantage point.
The Voice Calling, the new Mind Over Mirrors tape available on January 27 from Immune Recordings, finds Fennelly and Fohr conflating their melancholic visions into a single cloud of pulsing tones and words. “Calling Your Name” stretches over nine minutes through passages of bell percussion, percolating synth bass patches, and slammed piano keys. The session unfolds with a natural sense of drama as it bursts out of a field of clanging acoustic voices into long swathes of guitar feedback that manage to convey, if not a sense of triumph, then at least an effort made to stave off the encroaching despair. “Which way does the wind blow?” Fohr asks. Nestled in beds or armchairs, ignoring the forces of nature from behind a few feet of plaster and brick, we can’t tell.
• Mind Over Mirrors: http://mindovermirrors.tumblr.com/
• Circuit Des Yeux: http://www.circuitdesyeux.net/
• Immune Recordings: http://immunerecordings.net/
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