Side Door No. 5: Water Damage, Setting, and Two

How two non-jam bands represent the essence of jamming plus three great new records from North Carolina groups. Read full story on the Bandcamp Daily .

Everyone in the amorphous drone rock collective Water Damage understood their marching orders late last April: They would play their early afternoon set at Austin Psych Fest in 4/4 time. They’d practiced it and even clued in the day’s special guest, Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey, to one of the few concrete plans for their 35-minute performance. So just before 2 p.m. on that Saturday, Greg Piwonka counted out the beat and began pounding.

“As soon as I started playing, I was like, ‘Fuck! I’m playing in three. How do I get back to four?

I can’t. We’re just going to keep going,’” Piwonka tells me on a Sunday afternoon a little more than a year later, laughing.

“We can’t stop once we’ve started. We’ve never stopped.” About three months after what could have been a disaster, Water Damage released a crowd-recorded tape of that show, so candid and uncut you can hear audience members talking shit about a stranger just before the count begins.

The band immediately catches Piwonka’s error but doesn’t flinch, with the bassline joining in with whiplash tenacity; the guitars and Thor Harris’s bowed strings come in howling, as if electrified by the unintended audible. They pound away at one chord, barely moving, their sound almost imperceptibly expanding. Listening to the blown-out tape feels a little like watching a surfer test physics at the edge of some gargantuan tube, courting disaster that never comes.

By the end of it, I somehow feel both amped and empty—grateful for the flogging, but frayed by it, too. I have been thinking a lot lately about the sensation that Water Damage—a simple and even silly concept for a band that happens to be one of my favorite things going right now—supplies because of a similar sense I get from one of the year’s most absorbing records: Setting, the self-titled second studio record from a North Carolina supergroup of sorts. Setting and Water Damage are both improvisational instrumental groups, but that is where the obvious similarities end.

Water Damage is like a backyard militia of primitive sound, with anywhere between three and 16 people lashing away at one relentless rhythm and chord until they grind it (and often the audience) into dust. The music is white-hot, radiant, unmitigated. Guests come and go, sometimes during the course of a single seamless set.

But Setting is a very deliberate trio built on the continual refinement of the interplay between synthesist Jaime Fennelly, banjo-plus player Nathan Bowles, and drummer Joe Westerlund. They test the boundary between drone and dance with Setting, each of the pieces eventually spinning skyward. The tones are warm and gentle, as if heated just so by an infernal wood stove in the next room.

Despite those differences, though, both bands excel in offering outlets of escape that do not feel oblivious to the world around them; they are places to process anger, joy, confusion, and contentment, walled-off spaces to work through whatever you’ve got. I wanted to know how both bands got there with approaches and sounds that seem so disparate. For a band that often navigates continual one-hour sets, Setting is built on five discrete and relatively concise pieces.

The irrepressible “Gum Bump” first rides a warped rhythm, synth tones moving through the strange funk as if trying to string it all together; the whole trio slowly leans into the strangeness, though, finding an unexpected intersection between kosmische and dub, then twirling inside the glow. The longest track here and the brilliant finale, “Derring-do” is about the push and pull between long tones and pointillist rhythms. Around the seven-minute mark, Westerlund plays a hammered dulcimer line while Bowles dances across the strings of his banjo with chopsticks; the electronics swaddle those busy sounds, wrapping them in hum.

The playing is fast, but the motion feels somehow slow, as if time suddenly forgot the way forward. “We’ve gotten into this specific rhythmic feeling, which is the tension between staying still and moving forward,” explains Bowles from his Durham living room, his cat, Bird, sitting in his lap. “There’s movement happening, but it’s not necessarily going anywhere—like an engine turning, but not going from A to B to C.

The movement of that engine is what is interesting.” Setting started the process of making its second album by openly improvising at length. The trio gathered a few times at Fennelly’s home studio and collected a dozen hours of tape, exploring their repartee; Fennelly then went through those sessions, scouting moments that stirred him and building synthesizer motifs that captured the essence of those bits.

Especially on its excellent early live cassettes, Bowles and Westerlund were often moving within the drone of Fennelly’s harmonium. But as he shifted more to modular synthesizer, the band’s elasticity grew, allowing for new interplay possibilities that they’re still discovering. When Setting headed into a studio in early 2025, they improvised to Fennelly’s punch list of prompts, taking the best response for the album.

Because each of those songs are improvisations, and not really songs at all, the trio cracks them open again live. “Within the song structure itself, there is a lot that isn’t figured out, so we have a lot of malleability,” says Westerlund. Whatever part of the first piece they happen to explore most on any given night often becomes the core of the transition to the next piece, making for seamless sets also built on some measure of risk.

“That’s where the adventure really drops in. There is abandon and unknown.” Those opportunities to explore within the framework of a long and continuous set led Westerlund back to fundamental questions about making music with other people after more than three decades of doing exactly that.

He remembers an epiphany during the 2024 performance captured on At Eulogy. “I remember thinking, ‘What does it mean to make a decision?’” he says. “We were in the middle of this section that no one has spoken about, and we were about to go to this next section that no one has spoken about.

I felt myself making a decision about what to play in that moment, but I realized I wouldn’t know where that decision would end up for another three minutes—because you have to wait for everyone else to move, wait for something to solidify.” Bowles nods and points at him: “And that is the shit.” Setting are talking about the frisson created through individual change within collective repetition, or letting one person’s choice drift into and change the whole.

Within Water Damage’s maelstrom, that is key. To put it simply, Water Damage mostly bashes away at a single musical idea for however long they have—a span of tape, a side of a record, a slot at Psych Fest. “My job is to be the dude doing the same thing forever and not slowing down,” admits Piwonka.

“Just keep going. Don’t fuck up.” But most everyone else has more agency, meaning they can move within that roar.

Onstage, Water Damage arranges itself in a kind of semicircle, with the drums facing off, the bassists behind them, and an array of stringed instruments at their flanks. They don’t typically use stage monitors, meaning no one is hearing how exactly the entire ensemble sounds at any given point. This prompts a real-time game of telephone, where each musician is listening to the sound of their neighbors and, hopefully, the drums.

“Where I ideally want to get is where I am confused between what I am playing and what other people are playing, where I don’t know who’s making the sound,” explains Travis Austin, who wields a modified pedal steel he calls the Versophone and also mixes the band’s recordings. “I’ll dip in and out of the frequency where I can find my spot or hone in on the rhythmic parts. It comes out of the circumstances: Who can I actually hear?”

The effect of that can be mesmerizing—or even shocking—for the listener, as maybe a dozen people onstage react to the way the band is supposed to be sounding at any given moment. Water Damage, then, makes very basic rock music complicated by an extreme indeterminate core, where no one except the listener has a complete sense of the din. There are moments on Water Damage’s albums and live tapes where the only real response is “What the fuck is that noise?”

The band is sometimes left wondering the same thing. Their surrender, and the way it transfers to the audience, is intoxicating. Bassist Nate Cross tells me about a recent show in Lisbon that sounded great from his position on stage; when he listened to the recording, he loved it, too, but barely recognized it as the same set.

And Austin remembers working on Water Damage’s 2 Songs, trying to isolate and boost one instrument, only to realize it wasn’t possible, because it was several instruments interacting with one another in real time—“combination tone,” a phenomenon he learned about from Pauline Oliveros. “Not to get too hippy-dippy with it, but the more of us that are onstage, great, the more people that are in the room, better,” Cross explains. “They take up space.

They are all part of the sound.” Late in my conversation with Setting, Fennelly stares into the middle distance for a long time, holding his chin. Finally, he asks his band and me when we last read Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, the 1980 landmark of research and reasoning by Derek Bailey, a lodestar guitarist two decades after his death.

It’s been a while, everyone admits, Fennelly included. “I read it 25 years ago, but the part that stuck with me is his exploration of improvisation in a lot of forms of music, like Bach or Indian classical music,” Fennelly says. “I remember all these improvisational tactics being used in what is perceived as very rote, but that’s not the case.

That was hugely inspirational for me in setting up how to get from A to B with exploration.” That is, I realize, one of the factors that draws me so deeply into the worlds of Setting and Water Damage: the ostensible ordinariness of the idea and the extraordinary execution. Water Damage plays rock music rooted in The Velvet Underground and Faust’s collaboration with Tony Conrad, in noise-rock tones and hardcore pugnacity.

A dozen different strains float through Setting, from old-time and gamelan to desert blues and the Berlin School; none of the elements will surprise you. Instead, with both bands, the fascination and magnetism stem from the way those ideas, and the group’s members themselves, dissolve within the sound, creating something so grand that even they can’t always comprehend or control it. They instead give themselves over to it, to the risk of making decisions without knowing entirely what they mean.

That is the best essence of improvisation or jamming or whatever you want to call moving without an absolute destination. “When Greg started playing in 4/4, I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ But then I thought, ‘Let’s just ride this train,’” Cross remembers of that afternoon at Austin Psych Fest.

“It created a whole new song, because we didn’t get stuck in that. You just gotta go.” Three New North Carolina Records I Recommend Though Water Damage is based in Austin, its members are scattered across the country.

Setting, however, is a band of transplants who found one another in North Carolina. To that end, here are three new records from the Tar Heel State that fit perfectly for me at the intersection of experimental music and jam. Object Hours Solved by Walking Power trios are so often about the pyro, or how explosive the guitar can be above an unshakable bulwark of bass and drums.

But there’s no bass in this trio of indie rock and heavy metal veterans, and the two guitarists—Nora Rogers and Jenny Waters—are less interested in fireworks displays of riffs than they are in textural panoramas, especially on the spectacular “Transcription Beta” and pensive “Mare Chiaro.” They stack notes, chase one another’s lines, and play smart countermelodies until the whole thing feels as meditative as a workout or a fast hike on a hot day, headphones up. Les Savy Fav drummer Harrison Haynes moves behind them with finesse and ease, understanding that the job is to underline the tandem and not override it.

Magic Tuber Stringband Heavy Water Courtney Werner, the fiddler at the center of this trio, is a biologist who has long done field research about the interactions between ecosystems and society. In this role, she stumbled upon a South Carolina town that had been dismantled during the Cold War to make room for nuclear production. Heavy Water is a wordless concept album not just about that place, but about cycles of destruction and renewal, about the woe we inflict upon the world and the beauty that happens when we stop.

It is, at turns, harrowing and disorienting, tranquil and assuring, observant and delighted. Even without context, this is a sweep of brilliant and engaging instrumental music, its emotional depth seeping from every note; with the context, it is a jolting reminder to bear witness, to advocate for the stories and places lost to supposed progress. Croz Boyce Croz Boyce One of my favorite musical moments of the year—and perhaps of the whole Animal Collective universe across the last quarter-century—comes a little less than 18 seconds into the start of this collaboration between Avey Tare and Geologist.

After a few slow introductory chords, Avey Tare tries settling into a simple acoustic riff. He plays it unsteadily, like a kid finally trying to master the alphabet in front of a teacher. Geologist’s electronic washes feel like a grin, an acknowledgement that he’s seen his friend work through riffs before.

That sense of shared discovery animates this set of nine backyard tunes, from the expansive and emotional “Eternal Dream Drone” to the halting-but-loping “Abundant River Zap.” Animal Collective long ago helped fuse tie-dye kids and indie rockers; these tunes bask in the afterglow.