It’s possible to trace a strain of contemporary improvised music back to (or at least through) the pivotal 1970s meetings of infinite trumpet explorer Don Cherry and minimalist quester Terry Riley when their respective horizons aligned to generate an even wider landscape. On their second studio album, and fifth overall, the North Carolina trio Setting tend their own field in this vast electroacoustic openness, rhythm and drone pointing further outward across five sculpted improvisations, ready for the latest of nights or the earliest of mornings. Though they leave themselves plenty of room to explore, they also jump directly to the dreamiest vistas.
Setting’s live releases and studio debut, 2021’s Shone A Rainbow Light On, drifted through ambient cloud-shapes before almost imperceptibly taking flight. Here, the group achieves instant lift-off on the opening “Heard a Bubble” when a banjo pattern by Nathan Bowles is subsumed into layers of counter-rhythms and keyboard figures. Though the pieces retain the conversational dynamics of the improvisation they presumably started as, especially when Joe Westerlund is playing drum kit, each also finds extended levitation as the sound sources obscure themselves. Jaime Fennelly’s synth melds with Westerlund’s gong colors and Bowles’ banjo into a vivid and timeless totality.
Less cosmic than earthy, Setting even pulse briefly into something like Balearic funk on the big rolling “Gum Bump.” But it’s not necessarily the groove that creates the bliss so much as the sense of Setting breathing together as a band, which manifests at different rates in different places, finding equally rare air inside the gamelan-like density of the closing “Derring-Do” or the ominous and pastoral “Ribbon of Moss.” With the distinct feeling of close editing of their improv, it captures both the arrival of discovery and the feeling of relaxing into a series of new places.
The question of whether Setting is a jazz trio is less interesting than how their music connects to a decades-long methodology across players, bands, labels, trends, and scenes. Recent sonic relatives can be found on the driftier end of the Los Angeles swarm, ala Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson, and Carlos Niño’s Openness Trio. It’s a thread that DJ Scott McDowell has dubbed as “gorp jazz,” the spiritual drifting towards the atmospheric, with a loose canon stretching across the ECM discography, the outer banks of the New Age, the edges of post-rock, and from the Australian long-form mega-jammers the Necks to the spaced beats of the late jaimie branch’s Anteloper. “Comforting, functional, and a little stoney,” as McDowell describes it.
Setting find their own place in the conversation. Building on the trio’s long-established voices, all three weave threads of their own, including Bowles’ folk-drone, Fennelly’s sweeping Mind Over Mirrors, and Westerlund’s recent string of adventurous solo joints (and new collaboration with Trever Hagen). Though connected through other projects, Setting began their collective life as a pandemic jam session in Westerlund’s backyard. And while the new album took shape at a proper studio and is a fabulous headphone listen, filled with washes and vibrations and rich stereo swells, it still feels like music for the open air, mixing with the local environment and stretching to its own horizon like water seeking its own level.
