Setting - A new project from Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund

Paradise of Bachelors have shared the details on Setting, a new instrumental trio featuring 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, Daughter of Swords, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones.

Their debut album, Shone A Rainbow Light On, will be released on September 29th and has been beautifully described as – traversing textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine and sounding like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog.

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.

Zoetropics, the first track to be revealed, is a dreamy and translucent piece, and also the album’s shortest. It is one of four movements across the album that offers a deep listening experience, one to surrender to –

“…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.“

I once heard a recording of aquatic vegetation photosynthesizing; the oxygen bubbles created a pattern of short sonic pulses…it was both alien-like and beautiful. Such natural wonders, and their fragile status, seem to also be a touchstone for this music:

Sometimes the most seemingly extraterrestrial lifeforms are, in fact, our unfamiliar earthbound neighbours. 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.

Shone A Rainbow Light On is out September 29th on Paradise of Bachelors.

As well as being released on Bandcamp and Streaming services, some deluxe offerings featuring artwork by Timothy Breen.

Deluxe LP edition features 140g black virgin vinyl and a reverse board jacket with art by Timothy Breen
Deluxe CD edition features a gatefold jacket with art by Timothy Breen

Breen is an animator, multimedia artist, musician, and Grammy nominated designer who has worked with several artists we’ve previously featured on Folk Radio, including David John Morris, Bill MacKay and Jeffrey Silverstein.

Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/PoB72