Milwaukee, WI - Setting, Taffy Puller

**EARLY SHOW**

TICKETS

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.”

Drummer Jon Mueller and guitarist Chris Rosenau became friends in the early 1990s and have been playing together in bands and projects ever since.  Taffy Puller is one of those projects.  A duo started in the summer of 2005 with a set of unplanned and unrehearsed improvisations, Jon and Chris found themselves unexpectedly embracing the most frenetic and textural areas of their abilities.  Taffy Puller has only played a handful of times since 2005, but each instance has embraced the DNA from the original show to explore similar spaces of energy and texture through volume and improvisation.