Albums and Artifacts
Bio
Setting, befitting its name—which can be read as noun or verb, and simultaneously suggests the sun, or any star in the firmament from our earthbound perspective; a story and its surroundings, its scenic context or mise en scène; or a psychedelic experience, as in the prescription to mind one’s “set and setting”—arose outdoors, uncontained and unconstrained by architecture. The group’s debut recording Shone a Rainbow Light On traverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Kosmische correspondences are inevitable and valid, but also somewhat deceptive, given this meditative music’s terrestrial rootedness in the familiar natural world, more in native humus and humidity than in outer space. Fueled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, these four stately longform pieces sound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog (or, as we call it in North Carolina, a pocosin).
An instrumental trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones, Setting established its own setting and found its footing in regularly scheduled improvisational sessions outside Westerlund’s home in Durham, North Carolina, beginning in 2021. The three players began as two, in the context of occasional Bowles and Westerlund percussion duo performances dating back to 2018. Fennelly provided the initial impetus to gather and play together with intentionality and discipline, as well as an harmonic adhesive and thickening agent in the grain and gravity of his harmonium and synthesizer. As always, Bowles’s background as a pianist and drummer informs his approach to banjo, imparting a woodiness, a piney verticality and resinous tang. Westerlund’s training with Milford Graves is apparent in his polyrhythmic flow and its correspondences to human circulatory and corporeal rhythms. They recorded their collective discoveries with engineer Nick Broste in the spring of 2022.
The record begins, like the group’s name, and like the language of its unique instrumental interplay, with ambiguous grammar: “We Center,” the first and longest track at thirteen and a half minutes, builds patiently to a percolating climax of tidal heaving, with ceremonial connotations. “Zoetropics,” the shortest piece, follows, offering a more diaphanous counterpoint to the density of its predecessor. The zithery, shivering “A Sun Harp,” its title redolent of Sun Ra, showcases Westerlund’s unfettered drumming, which skitters restlessly until anchored, at its conclusion, by a minor bass progression. Finally, “Fog Glossaries” exhales through the maritime and meteorological evocations of its title, distant buoys clanging.
Although certainly elements and strategies of so-called ambient and drone musical traditions are invoked and deployed, those diffuse terms feel inadequate to describe everything else happening here: the devotional valences, the minimalist rigor, and even submarine jazz inclinations perceptible beneath the surface. Throughout this four-movement program, which invites deep listening, it is often difficult to differentiate individual instruments from the massed choir of the group’s unified sonic presence. At times what sound like field recordings—cicadas, birds, wind, water—splash out of this slow but powerful current, only to be revealed as overtones produced by harmonium, banjo, or cymbals. Setting’s sound is fundamentally synthetic—in the sense of synthesis, not artifice—in a manner remarkable for its almost entirely acoustic arsenal of instrumentation, often registering as the product of a single alien technology, perhaps the rainbow lights of that bog-marooned UFO. (“Setting,” of course, can also refer to a machine’s variable operational amplitude—its temperature, volume, speed, elevation, etc.)
Sometimes the most seemingly extraterrestrial lifeforms are in fact our unfamiliar earthbound neighbors. Despite the destruction of many such habitats, the coastal plains of eastern, tidewater North Carolina is home to more pocosins—freshwater, evergreen wetlands with deep, acidic, sandy, peat soils—than anywhere else in the world. These threatened peat-bog ecosystems are the only native environment to sustain the carnivorous Venus flytrap, among other oddities. The sonic ecosystem of Setting—similarly deep, acidic, and boggy—contains equivalent wonders, savage and delicate, for listeners willing to take the time to sink.
Videos
News
Setting: Shone a Rainbow Light On – Out Now
Setting's mesmerizing, meditative new album Shone a Rainbow Light On is...
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Setting: Shone a Rainbow Light On
Discover Setting, a trio comprising Nathan Bowles on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime...
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Exclusive First Look at Setting
Uncut's Sounds of the New West CD offers an exclusive...
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Jake Xerxes Fussell Announces Out of Sight, Shares “The River St. Johns” via NPR and Essay by Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
On his third and most finely wrought album yet, guitarist,...
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Acknowledgments
9/10. Cosmic improv folk that flows like the river Eno.
– Uncut (Best New Albums and Best of 2023 Lists)
Together, the North Carolina instrumental trio revel in heady improvisatory zones; across four tracks and about 40 minutes, they mix and match banjo and harmonium, zithers and keys, all driven by a steady-but-subtle rhythmic undercurrent.
– Uncut (Best New Albums and Best of 2023 Lists)
That open-endedness is a key quality of Shone a Rainbow Light On, which sees the band moving from misty Popol Vuh landscapes to incandescent Necks workouts, blending acoustic and electric instrumentation to striking effect.
– Uncut (Best New Albums and Best of 2023 Lists)
4/5. Heavenly. ‘We Center’ is levitational kin to Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting, or Cale and Riley’s Church Of Anthrax. Elsewhere, the ebbing post-jazz fugue state of ‘Zoetropics’ is in a neighbouring zone to that of Natural Information Society, while ‘A Sun Harp’s’ freeform pluck and rustle bears comparison with The Necks. High-end reference points for a record that spectacularly reconciles micro-detailed improv with deep-listening ambience.
– MOJO
Like Fripp and Eno holed up in a mountain cabin looking for UFOs, Setting’s debut is a luminous slice of kosmische Appalachia that’s like scanning the horizon until you lose all separation between earth and sky.
– Aquarium Drunkard (Best of 2023 List)
Shone a Rainbow Light On, by the new instrumental folk trio Setting, evokes the dark, infinite expanse of the night sky with its shimmering stars.
– Pitchfork
The trio’s songs move in cycles, like a storm blowing through a field, and their instruments often flutter like birds or buzz like insects. Though Settings’ music sprawls, it feels minimalistic in practice, exploring just a couple of chords like Philip Glass and encouraging deeper listening like Pauline Oliveros.
– Pitchfork
Shone a Rainbow Light On’s twists and turns give each track bottomless dimension … nature’s thorniness displayed in full beauty.
– Pitchfork
The sort of record for which the phrase ‘organic drones’ was built, Setting have produced a beguiling, earthen record that slots neatly into the pantheon of meandering new-age ambiance.
– The Quietus
Richly textural and delicately performed, Setting exude a lingering warmth, their edges softened as if left out in the sun. [Shone a Rainbow Light On is] lethargic in all the right ways, untroubled by the need to shock or surprise its audience – and yet surprise it does.
– The Quietus
A dark, motorik melter. Falling in nicely with some of the hypnogogic folk on Ghost Box or the works of Tenniscoates, [it] simmers with an insistent energy that’s hovering between white-knuckle tension and oblivion.
– Raven Sings the Blues
[A] kind of cosmic ambient music with a lot of subtle action under the hood.
– The Wire
‘Zoetropics’ coasts up on a throbbing synth pulse, its easy melodic drift tattooed by Bowles’s cyclical banjo arpeggios, one of several subtle timbral elements that churn and glisten beneath the sparkling, hypnotic surface.
– The Wire
Simultaneously minimalist and maximalist, serene and frenzied, static and melody-rich.
– Chris Forsyth
A bold artistic statement … Those that successfully tune in will find an intense, immersive instrumental set that defies easy categorisation – is it prog rock? Jazz? Folk? Classical? Americana? – and is unexpectedly absorbing.
– Morning Star
Harmonium, zither, Appalachian strings, and synthesizers route through waterworn percussion that splash and buzz in peaceful chaos with only the aroma of earth left lingering.
– New Commute
The overall mood is relaxed and confident, but there are details that will be missed on the first few listens. For all its space and organic spirit, there is a complexity present that the band allows the listener to discover at their leisure.
– Folk Radio UK
Setting plays hypnotic, long-form music that’s historically aware, but feels immediate and fresh.
– Magnet Magazine
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