Mind Over Mirrors with Zelienople + The Ashcan Orchestra

Sat 17 Nov, 2012, 8pm
($15 - 12)
Actors Fund: 160 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn

Mind Over Mirrors, AKA Jaime Fennelly, performs with Zelienople as part of Fennelly's two-night residency at ISSUE Project Room. Hailing from Chicago, Zelienople have been etching out a place for themselves in the Windy City for fourteen years. In a rare New York appearance Zelienople teams up with Mind Over Mirrors to perform a live soundtrack to Donald Prokop’s film Gone. The Ashcan Orchestra, simultaneously the audio/visual work of composer P. Spadine, a large collection of toy, re-appropriated, and "real" instruments, and a revolving performance ensemble based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, open the evening.

Multimedia artist Donald Prokop continues his exploration into hidden realms of sensate beauty through his piece entitled Gone. Working off of a short story by Ian Wolf, Gone gently sends the viewer adrift in a wash of fragmented imagery and isolated thoughts. Moods and impressions unfold as the visual world is deconstructed and recontextualized against a meditative sound scape. There is sorcery at play here, some unnamed science built in deserted places with an attraction towards the sublime. A passage is revealed and then dissolves in a bloom of abstracted motion



Mind Over Mirrors is the solitary reeling of American harmoniumist/electronicist Jaime Fennelly. Known as a founding member of the late Peeesseye (with Chris Forsyth & Fritz Welch), and psychedelic free jazz trio Acid Birds, Fennelly began developing Mind Over Mirrors when he moved from Bushwick/Brooklyn, NY to a remote island in the Salish Sea of Washington State from 2007 - 2010. Utilizing an Indian pedal harmonium, oscillators, tape delays, and an assortment of synthesizing processors, Fennelly bends slowly-building, repetitive melodies into massive sonic mountains, that fits somewhere between a droned-out American Primitive, and early-Kosmische aural territory.

Formed in Chicago, Illinois in 1998 out of the ashes of several failed rock bands, Zelienople is made up of the core trio of keyboardist/clarinetist Brian Harding, bassist/synth player Matt Christensen, and drummer Mike Weis, in collaboration with a rotating cast of guest musicians.

Donald Prokop is an Independent Filmmaker and Video Artist who resides in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His films and videos have been screened throughout the New York City area, including this years Scene:Brooklyn. Donald uses the filmic language to playfully experiment with paradoxical states of stasis, motion and time. He is also an accomplished Stone Mason.

The Ashcan Orchestra is simultaneously the audio/visual work of composer P. Spadine, a large collection of toy, re-appropriated, and "real" instruments, and a revolving performance ensemble based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since 2007 the ensemble has been popping up in D.I.Y. style and art house venues thoughout NYC and the eastern seaboard, employing everything from children's handbells, prepared tape recorders, stacks of discarded televisions, homemade circuitry, colored lightbulbs, mirrors, to more widely accepted noisemakers to create new music in forms more familiar than the instrumentation would lead the listener to believe. This process from humble and understandable beginnings to grander and more complex ends, has been a vehicle to both celebrate and emulate the physics that bind the known universe.

Zelienople - Island Machine from Donald Prokop on Vimeo.