Band on the Rise: Setting Sun
by Peter Aaron

If you want to catch the Hudson Valley’s king of D.I.Y. rock, you’re going to have to do some driving—either down the Thruway to New York, where Gary Levitt and his band Setting Sun play roughly once a month, or through the village of New Paltz and onto cornfield-lined Libertyville Road. If you choose the latter, look sharply; it’s easy to miss the tucked-back 19th-century farmhouse where Levitt lives with his partner—and the local D.I.Y. queen, naturally—Erica Quitzow, and where the couple operates their Young Love label and recording studio. Right now, with the insane schedule of a deadline-straddling music journalist, Manhattan is out of the question. So off to New Paltz it is. But why is a house call the only option—doesn’t Setting Sun do local shows?

“We don’t really play out a lot around here,” says Levitt, who sings and plays guitar, bass, and keyboards in the band, a studio-birthed project augmented by multi-instrumentalist Quitzow and a changing cast of drummers. “It’s weird, we draw way more people in New York. The people who come to see us in the city are there to base their lives on art, while most people up here have serious jobs, families, whatever. So we play more down there more and tour a lot. But I still think it’s important to play locally whenever we can.”

Levitt grew up in Queens, where he was inspired to make music not by the teeming New York rock scene, but by his acoustic guitarplaying high school friends. “I just thought it was really cool, how they wrote their own songs and did their own thing,” he recalls. Oh, and there was also The Beatles. “They’re still my absolute favorite band. The way they put something like ‘I Am The Walrus’ together—just amazing.”

Levitt’s first foray into the indie scene was as a guitarist in New Paltz-based punk/noise quintet The Kung-Fu Grip, which he joined in 1993. The band cut its jagged teeth on the East Coast circuit, but on the night before a planned national tour the group’s singer and second guitarist quit. Instead of throwing in the towel, however, Levitt and the remaining bassist and drummer decided to hit the road anyway, the three members learning to sing and playing improvised music along the way—D.I.Y. to the core. Rechristened The KFG, the trio moved to San Francisco in 1996, where Quitzow, Levitt’s then-new girlfriend, soon followed.

The band did well for a time on the Northern California scene but eventually broke up, leaving Levitt and Quitzow to form psychedelic pop outfit Heavy Pebble. The new group, with its quirky sound and trippy film-projection backdrops, was another hit in the San Francisco clubs, but it too came to an end when several key members left. After twice being burned by intra-band dynamics, Levitt knew what he had to do: start his own project.

So in 2001, Levitt sequestered himself in a friend’s apartment with some borrowed gear and “two cheap microphones” to record what was to become Setting Sun’s debut, the appropriately titled Holed Up. Marked by a sense of palpable urgency that betrays the shoot-from-the-hip conditions of its creation, the album seamlessly fuses Levitt’s chief references—warmly strummed acoustic guitar, bent Beatles/Bowie pop, loud/quiet Pixies/Nirvana dynamics—into a catchy and inversely intimate lo-fi blend. Levitt describes his sound as having an “orchestral approach.” “Whenever I’m writing or recording, I’m always hearing a lot of different parts for songs,” he says. “Lots of counter-melodies, different things for strings and keyboards to do.”

Unfortunately, it would be a little more time until the world at large would get to hear the album. Before Levitt could plan Setting Sun’s rise, he and Quitzow detoured to Los Angeles to play with Inner, the brainchild of sometime Hudson Valley resident and Natalie Merchant guitarist Jennifer Turner. Inner recorded an album in London and toured, but, alas, also soon broke up. So finally in 2002 the couple started Young Love Records and released Holed Up, which was met with a healthy stack of positive reviews. Levitt put together a threepiece Setting Sun to tour the Western U.S. and also did a couple of lengthy solo tours to plug the disc.

When it came time for the follow-up, Math & Magic, Levitt called in producer Richard Chiu. “I thought I’d try something different and work with someone else,” Levitt says. “He gave the music much more of a sheen than I would have, but the songs still come through.” True, Math & Magic is slightly polished compared to the earlier disc, but it’s light years away from real mainstream slickness. And Levitt’s fine pop song-craft still emerges uncompromised.

By 2004, having had their fill of the West Coast, Levitt and Quitzow (by now writing and recording under her last name) were back in New Paltz, determined to continue making, releasing, and promoting music on their own, self-contained terms. They set up Young Love Studio in a spare room of their house at first to record themselves but soon began taking on outside clients like singer-songwriters Pete Laffin, Meryl Joan Lammers, and Doug Wapner, pop-punk trio Fink, and others. “I love helping other artists work on their music,” says Levitt. “If they come in with just bare-bones sketches of songs on acoustic guitar and want to make them sound bigger, I can usually come up with ideas that add to the songs but don’t compete with them.” In addition to running the board at Young Love, Levitt works as an engineer at Sonart Studios in Woodstock.

It’s pretty much impossible to write about the music of Setting Sun without touching on that of Quitzow. Like the proverbial yin and yang, the two “bands” feed and complement each other’s art while remaining very different animals. “Setting Sun is more of a traditional, organic rock band, more song-oriented,” says Quitzow. “But [the band] Quitzow’s music is more keyboard-based, more electronic and experimental. We usually back each other up on stage, and it’s really cool when people come up to us at the end of the night and say, ‘Wow, you guys both play in each other’s bands but the music is so totally different!’”

Of course, for a do-it-yourselfer the Internet is a godsend. “It’s so unbelievably easy to book a tour now,” Levitt says. “In the old days, you had to call the club at some particular time to catch the booking agent while they were in, then send them a package, do follow-up calls, and wait. Now you just send them a pdf of the press kit and a link to some mp3s, and they can just get back to you from that.” The MySpace revolution has added yet another dimension to online profile building. Recently, MTV found Levitt through the popular website and approached him about licensing his work for background music. Ca-ching!

“[Levitt and Quitzow] are really inspirational,” says the Hudson Valley’s other leading D.I.Y. diva, Laura Pepitone. “They’ve set themselves up so well, with the label and the studio and the tours they do together. They’re such hard workers.”

Currently, Levitt is working hard at finishing up Setting Sun’s next album, to be released simultaneously with the new Quitzow record this June. “Since again we’re going to tour with both bands, we’re gearing the releases so we can send out press packages with both CDs—way cheaper on the mailing costs,” says the savvy Levitt.

But there’s no scrimping on the quality of what’s inside. Judging by clips of new tunes like the cello-lashed “No Devil Me No More” and the crawling mood piece “Inside My Love,” the forthcoming fulllength looks to be another episode of homegrown pop perfection. In a world of vapid boy bands with guitars as props, lovers of inventive and honest sounds can take heart: Setting Sun shines on.

Setting Sun will play at Oasis Cafe in New Paltz on January 10.
www.settingsun.com | www.youngloverecords.com

 

  
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