Released Dec 1, 2023

order: Digital
(bandcamp exclusive)

Following a string of dates across the Midwest, from a low-slung backyard in Louisville to the Driftless hills of Wisconsin, this recording finds us responding to what seems to be an unanswered question posed by those previous performances: which criteria of group improvisation connote forward movement? Or maybe: which elements are born of this moment, and which are the fruits of previous plantings? Distinctions irrelevant in the playing become something else upon listening – a flowing out from and also back into. A coursing. Waves churned from the pebbled underneath: rising, crashing, dissipating, but all of one body. What need to ask whether waves move forward? Or if they move at all?

Setting is Nathan Bowles (solo/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, tapes, 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 on their debut album “Shone a Rainbow Light On” (Paradise of Bachelors), which Uncut gave a "9/10" and Mojo Magazine listed as #3 of Underground Records of 2023, calling it “a record that spectacularly reconciles micro-detailed improv with deep-listening ambience.”