If their record label’s one-sheet is to be believed, Durham supergroup Setting’s music sounds like “a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog.” Setting does make droney process music that unfolds slowly over time, and they do combine otherworldly sounds with earthy acoustic textures, so… the codes check out. A trio featuring Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors), Nathan Bowles (Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Nathan Bowles Trio) and Joe Westerlund (Califone, Sylvan Esso, solo), no one in North Carolina is combining electronic and organic textures quite like Setting. Their first LP SHONE A RAINBOW LIGHT ON (2022) was followed by two live releases, SETTING AT BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (2023) and SETTING AT EULOGY in Asheville (2024), and they’re almost done with their next studio LP, recorded at Drops of Sun Recording Studio. The band was gracious enough to answer the Come Hear NC Artist Questionnaire, and you can read their thoughtful responses below:
Capsule summary-style, describe your band(s) (its members, home, history)
Nathan Bowles: Setting is an instrumental improvising trio of myself, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund based in the NC triangle. We began to collaborate in 2021 after playing in various other configurations with each other; since those initial outdoor sessions, we’ve released a studio album, two live releases, and are working on our second studio record. Our sound has evolved a great deal from a consistent live performance/touring schedule, and the music continues to grow in unexpected ways.
How long have you been in North Carolina, and what's your relationship with the state?
Joe Westerlund: I moved to the Triangle from Wisconsin in 2005, spent 2010-2016 in Los Angeles and have been in Durham ever since. Nathan moved here from Blacksburg, VA in 2015, and Jaime started traveling regularly to the coast of NC in 2018 for a work project, and then finally moved here to the Piedmont full time from Maine in 2022. Speaking for myself and likely the others as well, North Carolina has been a supportive creative community, a home base for me and the majority of the musical projects I’ve been involved in. I continue to experience my strongest creative connections through this place in some way.
Has North Carolina been a good place to be a musician?
JW: I tell people all the time that North Carolina, particularly the Triangle, is a great place to be a musician. From the very beginning of my time here, it’s been a place that seems to accommodate creative fertility and development very well. There is a particular feeling that everyone can make the time to dedicate to investigating their own voice, yet there is a very vital supportive network of interest. In short: there’s a ton of musical diversity here, and a very active community to share it with. Setting has enjoyed some nice attention and support from Asheville as well. There are many great artists living there right now, and exciting to be building connections there as well.
What are the important shared sensibilities between you and your collaborators? Divergences?
NB: Joe, Jaime and I all come from musical improvising backgrounds and that tends to inform everything we do in terms of the choices we make and the ways we relate to each other. That said, I think we all differ in how we navigate the relationship between control and chance, if that makes sense.
Technique, feeling, and concept — what's the relation to you as a musician? As a listener?
JW: This is such a fun question to answer, because I feel there are so many ways those three things interact with each other. People often think of technique as being very tradition-based; a joyless practice of toil and occasional self-loathing haha! It can certainly be that, but when technical practice is at its best, it often has feeling and concept attached to it. At its most fun, there is some type of adventure or question attached to it. Both Nathan and I use a violin bow on our cymbals, for example. It’s a technique that produces a beautiful sound, yet there is an acceptance of a balance between control and chance involved in that. It’s difficult to get the exact note you want to sound, and you just have to work with it. Jaime also has a lot of chance operations inherent in his synthesizer set up. These things could be very troublesome to a player or an ensemble, but we choose to listen and react and embrace the chaotic elements that can result. This approach creates a sense of discovery that all three of us deeply value. It’s perhaps my favorite part about music, as a player and as a listener.
How has your work changed over time?
NB: Our first music-making get-togethers were these outdoors-only affairs that were kind of fragile, both in terms of the sound itself and our approach to it. I think we were all feeling out what this would be. We’re still feeling it out, to an extent, but it was fairly quickly that a language developed out of those sessions and our music developed what I think of as some of its central vocabulary: polyrhythmic drive, emphasis on drone and slow harmonic change, the tension between clarity and haziness, etc.
Do you care about gear?
NB: This is a group with pretty specific gear needs, but I think we all prioritize our bodies/hearts/minds as the main engines of this music. If there’s a sound we need that we can’t get, sometimes it’s a matter of finding the tool that can deliver that, but sometimes the gear can give you something you didn’t expect and you get to follow that new path. It’s important to not let music be defined by the tools, though, otherwise I think the listener is focused on the machinery and not the cumulative effect of the sounds.
Is music a job, a vocation, or hobby for you?
JW: I view music as a craft and a practice first and foremost. It is work. There is certainly labor involved, and even more than that is the way of life. The three of us have centered our lives around music. We all think about it constantly, even when we are working on different projects, jobs, or just focusing on other parts of our lives. We schedule our year around where and when we can tour or record. It can occasionally create problems, but generally speaking, it feels like a meaningful way to structure one’s time on the planet.
What makes good music? Bad music? What do you love in a great song, hate in a bad one, and what renders you indifferent in a blah one?
JW: I think “compelling” is a word I’d rather use than good/bad. I listen to and work on a lot of different styles of music that are subject to different ways of listening, measured by different standards and traditions. You can get in the thick of it pretty quickly thinking of all that, but I’m always struck by earnestness and authenticity in a performer. It’s sort of tough thing to describe what makes someone authentic or inauthentic, but it’s something we all feel and intuit very clearly, whether we’re watching a performer or just meeting each other at a bar and having a conversation with someone new.
What does the genesis of a song for you look like, how does it come about?
JW: Pretty much everything we make begins with improvisation. We record ourselves constantly and listen back frequently, looking for new ideas and directions our music can take. From there, we discuss and develop a palette as a unit, and then continue to improvise off that theme, creating a deeper relationship with the piece. So each “piece” is always subject to instant revision and exploration in the moment that it is being performed.
Do you have your audience in mind as you write?
JW: The three of us are improvising to each other first and foremost, so we are, in a way, our own audience. I think of it kind of like some authors say that they usually have one person in particular they are speaking to when writing a book, yet creating something universal enough to be read by an audience. I feel that way when I’m making solo records, but when playing with Setting, my subjects are Jaime and Nathan. I feel like I’m speaking directly to them, and at the same time, we’re aware that there is an audience eavesdropping on our conversation. So, that maybe makes a difference between what we would play in practice and what we would play at a show, but the two are probably not terribly different, to be honest, unless we are developing a new idea somebody brought to the table.
Do you theme and conceptualize projects beforehand or do you prefer spontaneous creation?
NB: We certainly prioritize spontaneity as an improvising unit, and we tend to use moments/movements we find most potent as grounds for developing material over a series of live shows, which then feed into the basis of studio recordings. In terms of ahead-of-time conceptualized projects, we sometimes apply that approach to live shows, particularly these series of shows we were calling “Setting Sounds” that allowed for lengthier performances in specific spaces, oftentimes outdoors.
What's the relation between electronic and mechanical/acoustic instruments in your work?
NB: Setting is particularly exciting for me in the way that we incorporate a bunch of sounds on that acoustic/electronic continuum. Contact mic-ing resonating membranes, amplifying the resonance and buzzing and creaking of a harmonium, overdriving a banjo through a guitar amp, blending all of this with digital synthesis and sequencing… it’s not so much that we’re blending all of this stuff with the express purpose of marrying acoustic and electronic music-making, but that the sound we’re drawn to draw from all of these sources and more. The relation between them is just that we like all of them and are excited by working with them, and some of our favorite music is stuff that incorporates all of that.
Do you need constraints to work within or long stretches of unstructured time?
NB: I think constraints, whether those be gear limitations or specific time allowances, can be helpful guides to staying focused on the tools at hand. I tend to favor the deep focus, zoom-in approach on musical ideas, and constraints can help me stay on track in that regard. But I guess I’m speaking of performance in those cases… my private music work oftentimes benefits from the freedom of the long, aimless, weekend evening.
Are genre concepts meaningful to you?
NB: Genre can be helpful for classifying music after the fact in terms of finding resonances between like-minded things. I don’t think genre concerns inform any of our work, though. Genre is best applied descriptively, not prescriptively, I think. Maybe that contradicts itself though!
Hopes and schemes for 2025 and beyond?
NB: Some sustainable overseas touring, more outdoor gigs, the perfect affordable keyboard flight case…
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