Paradise of Bachelors is honored to announce the details of Bellowing Sun, the new interdisciplinary project by Mind Over Mirrors. 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 musi c.

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).