Setting, the trio of multi-instrumentalists and esteemed collaborative artists Jaime Fennelly, Nathan Bowles and Joe Westerlund have announced additional tour dates throughout the US late summer and fall, including sets at Pickathon and Sound & Gravity. The additional dates follow the trio’s recent appearances at Big Ears, Nelsonville Music Fest, Suoni Per Il Popolo, and Solid Sound. They’ll be supported by Keith Fullerton Whitman and Wednesday Knudsen on select dates.
The North Carolina Piedmont-based trio of Setting bring together their substantial collective skills as musicians and their collaborative, explorative mindsets from groups such as Mind Over Mirrors, Califone, Black Twig Pickers, Pelt, Peeesseye, Sylvan Esso, and Jake Xerxes Fussell to bear in their inventive and rich improvisations. Their intricate interplay of synthesizers, cassette loops, banjo, keyboards, electronics, zithers, and a litany of percussive instruments form a tactile amalgam of celestial transcendence and terrestrial rhythm, a loamy pulse fluidly guiding every minute fluctuation in feel. Setting’s self-titled album is a definitive statement of their improvisational acumen meeting compositional rigor, a robust wellspring of hypnagogic grooves and mosaicked textures.
Setting was recorded with kindred traveler Adam McDaniel at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, whose engineering and production work forms an indispensable piece of the album’s dynamism and luminescent fidelity. The album harnesses the euphoria of communal creation. “This is one of the most joyous albums I’ve made with other musicians. It felt like we were all in the slipstream,” notes Fennelly. Bowles adds: “Making this is maybe the easiest thing in my life; it’s not struggle music. This collaboration feels like it’s just coming out of the air, like it’s breathing.”
Built on long exploratory sessions, the trio developed their own syntax and an ability to shift in new directions with finer and finer grains of detail. The pieces of Setting use that shared understanding of each other as players and the electric spontaneity of improvisation as a framework for more elaborate, impactful compositions in the studio. Westerlund elaborates, “When you keep playing together show after show, things take a different shape. The elements can be subtler and more specific, and there are more references of past performances and past discoveries to draw from.”
The eponymous album from Setting is the product of three intuitive players and deep listeners, artists who use those skills to create transformative music. The trio shirk any broader categorizations, as their unique dynamic pieces are alight with arrangements urgent and smoldering, patient and emotive.
Setting tour dates:
7/23 – Eau Clair, WI – EAUX CLAIRES OPENING CEREMONY @ Masonic Temple
7/31 – Happy Valley, OR – Pickathon
9/4 – Buchanan, MI – Inner Freedom Farm
9/5 – Chicago, IL – Sound & Gravity
9/6 – Milwaukee, WI – Vivarium #
9/8 – Minneapolis, MN – The Cedar Cultural Center # –
9/9 – Madison, WI – Art Lit Lab –
11/4 – Brooklyn, NY – Public Records ~
11/7 – East Meredith, NY – West Kortright Center ~
11/8 – Philadelphia, PA – Solar Myth ~
# w/ Keith Fullerton Whitman
~ w/ Wednesday Knudsen
