Setting Performance
An evening of explorative improvisation with North Carolina trio Setting, plus a set from multi-instrumentalist Wednesday Knudsen.
Join us for a performance by Setting, supported by Wednesday Knudsen, at the Chapel House Meditation Hall. Doors open at 7 p.m. with music starting at 8 p.m. The North Carolina Piedmont-based trio of Setting brings together their substantial collective skills as musicians and their collaborative, explorative mindsets from groups such as Mind Over Mirrors, Califone, Black Twig Pickers, Pelt, Peeesseye, Sylvan Esso, and Jake Xerxes Fussell to bear in their inventive and rich improvisations.
Multi- instrumentalists Jaime Fennelly, Nathan Bowles and Joe Westerlund subvert expectations while creating a sense of ease and wonderment. Their intricate interplay of synthesizers, cassette loops, banjo, keyboards, electronics, zithers, and a litany of percussive instruments form a tactile amalgam of celestial transcendence and terrestrial rhythm, a loamy pulse fluidly guiding every minute fluctuation in feel.
Dedicated improvisers with years working together, the band has developed their own idiosyncratic vernacular and sense of flow. Setting's self-titled album (Thrill Jockey) is a definitive statement of their improvisational acumen meeting compositional rigor, a robust wellspring of hypnagogic grooves and mosaiced textures.
Setting harnesses the euphoria of communal creation. https://settingsounds.com Developing her craft as a multi-instrumentalist since her youth, it took Wednesday Knudsen nearly two decades to arrive at her own distilled beautiful sound that is disentangled from the fuzz guitar-haze of her pillar underground band Pigeons.
Records such as Jordan De La Sierra's Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose, Harold Budd's Pavilion of Dreams, and Éliane Radigue's Biogenesis played roles gravitating Knudsen to stillness over the years, but it was only in spring of 2020, around when the pandemic first set in, that Knudsen experienced a full-on genre meltdown. Rock 'n' roll stopped making sense to her. She had to stop listening. She couldn't relate to it anymore.
She never believed rock 'n' roll was dead or invalid—she just needed to mute the wailing guitar solos to think. In the absence of rock 'n' roll, Knudsen asked herself, "What do I do on my own? Who am I? What do I like? What does it mean to come up against my own limitations in an environment where I'm the only actor?"
https://wednesdayknudsen.bandcamp.com/ Sponsored by: Colgate University Chapel House, WRCU, University Studies, University Libraries, and the Live Music Collective
