Jaime Fennelly, as Mind Over Mirrors, makes music that pushes the known to the lip of the unknown, where it rocks precariously and in exhilaration. He scrambles the familiar and tweaks the comfortable, not through aggression, but a throbbing estrangement.
When placed at a distance, these require longer reaches to grasp. The reward for this effort is an enlarged field of perspective, experience, and also of feeling. This is deeply feeling music to feel deeply.
In all of Jaime’s records—and, arguably, especially in Particles, Peds, & Pores—there’s a seed of the pastoral, some ancient shepherd’s song ringing through nearby hills and groves, but one also yearning to plumb the uncanny and the creative possibilities of disintegration. “Farewell to woods,” the grieving Damon sings in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue. “Let all be ocean now.” Fennelly sounds vast, enveloping wildernesses and the thrilling disquiet of their echoless grandeur. (Maybe Burroughs speaks to the borders of these zones: “Pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns.”) There’s something of the heroic at work here, too, although the hero’s instinct has been suitably tempered—or awed—to know not to fly too close to the sun.
—Nathan Salsburg, December 2025
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1: All work and no play makes things pretty dull. And I absolutely love working and staying engaged/busy but when I force myself to take a break – the work, feels that much less like “work”.
2: Wherever I’ve lived for the past twenty years, I’ve grown food, herbs, flowers, plants – it undoubtedly creates a more dynamic human experience.
3: Living in a place where I can experience the starry night has a direct correlation to my groundedness.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
I recall reading some La Monte Young interview where he talked about growing up in Idaho listening to the electrical high wires make sound as they split the wind – thus creating these long tones and that was one of his inspirations for his work. I loved that. I had this old fire siren directly in front of my house on Long Island, NY that rang multiple times a day at deafening levels. I think I used to joke that was my La Monte equivalent for turning me onto drones. Maybe it was! But probably more likely it just created early hearing loss for me & my family. I did however grow up near the ocean, and I think being close to those sounds, waves rolling in, the sound of rigging banging against a sail mast, being in the berth of a boat, all of those low lapping frequencies in my childhood must have impacted me.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I first started playing piano in the late 80s, taking classical lessons from an old Italian-American woman in Massapeqeua, NY – think very dimly lit basement piano studio with this eccentric woman wearing a schmatta, recently dyed (still wet) black hair and lots of leftovers being eaten out of tin take out containers while I was playing “Arabesque”. There is vivid picture and smell in my mind, as you might be able to tell. But I don’t think I started actually making music until I was gifted a Mac Plus from my second teacher when I was fourteen. She taught me about MIDI and how to run sequencing software called Vision that could control a Roland sound module & digital piano that I was very lucky to have. I didn’t know how to relate to the piano as an instrument that I could make my own music with at the time, but the seemingly open ended palette of this sound module with it’s 128 sampled presets and ability to record really connected with me.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
These are like my desert island picks of the last 25 or 30 years.
1. Miles Davis “In a Silent Way”
2. Terry Riley “Shri Camel”
3. Mahmoud Guinia “Colours of the Night”
4. Brian Eno “Another Green World”
5. Harmonia “Musik Von Harmonia”
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
I haven’t been to Berlin in quite some time and would love to return. In the mid 00s, I maybe visited a handful of times for shows and recordings. I recall doing a couple of sessions at this fantastic studio in Prenzlauer Berg called AudioCue Tonlabor, I think I was maybe 22 or 23 – so young.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
I love eating. It’s the best part of any day. I really miss this great bakery/restaurant called Panciuto, which later became Hillsborough Bake Shop. The owner is really supportive of all of the local farms and he’s pretty dogmatic (mostly in a good way) about what he does and doesn’t want to do. I think he treats his food like an offering. It’s also the place nearby where you would very easily run into a handful of your close friends randomly so it has this nice community-centric air. Sadly, for us, he closed the doors at the end of last year and there is a great void.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
That would be a real shame, but I would continue keeping myself busy running my small farm, Riparia Gardens, with my partner.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
The last LP I bought was…Natural Information Society – “Perseverance Flow”
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’ve really been enjoying the films of Hlynur Pálmason and would love to make music for one of his films.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
I remember seeing Stereolab for my first time not long ago in late 2010s at Thalia Hall and just being totally floored the whole show. They are so good live and Thalia Hall is just one of the best sounding rooms.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
I think whether I’m working with synthesizers or organs, my process is really quite technologically driven. I work quite slowly to sculpt and manipulate until I find rhythms (overt or very subtle), combining frequencies, and sounds of interest. It’s a lot of experimenting and finding rather than “I have this end goal in mind” approach. It’s maybe even playful and exploratory. When it’s not playful, I find it easy to disassociate. Over the last sixteen years of making music as Mind Over Mirrors, it’s been a constant evolution of my instruments, building on top of what I have worked with previously. The drones started off as Hewlett Packard sine wave oscillators, which evolved to Indian hand pumped harmoniums, to a custom pedal organ, and then sampled, or what I call “electronic” harmonium – which are midi controlled. One of my first synthesizers I used when I started Mind Over Mirrors was the Oberheim SEM – a remake by Tom Oberheim of his very simple and compact synth he originally made in the mid-70s. Eventually I got two of them. I tried out one of those Two Voice Pros maybe 10 years ago but found it to have some issues and replaced it with the Dave Smith & Oberheim collab synthesizer – the OB6. The sequencer I first started using was the rudimentary Doepfer Dark Time, which I upgraded to the Audio Damage eurorack sequencer and then settling on the Five 12 Vector Sequencer – which I absolutely love. The UDO Super 6 is a somewhat more recent addition and it pairs incredibly well with the harmonium. It’s a long process of refining and evolving my sound, my instrument, my voice.
11. Please tell us more about the development of your new album Particles, Peds & Pores?
For three years I worked on transforming Mind Over Mirrors from a solo to an ensemble, through two records I released with the label Paradise of Bachelors. “Undying Color” (2017) and then “Bellowing Sun” (2018), which was commissioned for its performance premier at the prestigious MCA Chicago. “Bellowing Sun” was by far, up until then, the most ambitious album and performance I had embarked on. The performance itself was an hour and a half long, with the quartet performing in the round, with a 16 foot diameter zoetrope hanging and spinning above us. The kinetic sculpture was a collaboration between metal artist Eliot Irwin, visual artist Timothy Breen, lighting designer Keith Parham, and myself. All of this hands on work, orchestrating and building many moving parts – metaphorical and literal – was a massively huge undertaking. When it premiered and the album was released, I was quite honestly tapped out. I was exhausted creatively, physically, emotionally. Some months later, I just stopped playing music altogether for nearly a year. It felt like a type of work that I couldn’t bring myself to do. So I didn’t. And I focused on how to make a living, applying previous trade skills to a new platform – sailboats. I started traveling very frequently to the coast of North Carolina from Chicago not for music, but to rebuild marine electrical & electronics systems. There was something about the custom nature of each electrical system that really resonated with me. This eventually led me to move to Maine where I deepened that work further, working with a well known legacy boat builder that was implementing jet engines controlled by joysticks. Simultaneously I was completely rebuilding a 1970s passive solar house. It was during this time that I would have moments where I had desire to begin making work again, but wasn’t sure what. Maybe in the aftermath of “Bellowing Sun”, I felt like I didn’t know where to go from there musically. And I think that’s why “Particles, Peds & Pores” took so many years to complete. For one I was focused on doing other things, transitionary life stuff, moves – things that take up a lot of bandwidth. But it also was based on just taking my time to make the album. I wasn’t in a rush. The pandemic was unfolding, and when things opened up, I really wasn’t feeling compelled to go play live shows and be a good little worker bee in the greater music world. I think when I lived in Chicago, I had a specific type of work ethic that was about regular production. Trying to make a new record every year or other year. I think the long break I took was so fundamentally invaluable to where I am now. “Particles, Peds & Pores” also really started having forward momentum in its creation in 2022 when I started part-time living again in North Carolina, was in a new relationship that felt life affirming, and also began playing music with other people again regularly (this would evolve into my other group, Setting – with Nathan Bowles & Joe Westerlund). I think it was at this time that I began feeling inspired again – that playfulness that I mentioned previously – returned, and I was excited to try out and develop new approaches to making music.
