INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Early Day Miners make a masterpiece

Releasing an album the record label denotes as “the director’s cut” of an obscure song off of an obscure post-rock record hardly seems to be a good method for artistic or commercial success. Bloomington-based Early Day Miners have turned this contrivance into the best album of its seven-year existence. The band’s auteur, Daniel Burton, has taken his doleful, minimalist tendencies and replaced them with a beautiful, multi-layered wash of sound on EDM’s fifth album, Offshore.

Burton’s beginnings

Burton grew up in Mobile, Alabama, developing early childhood obsessions with water, hurricanes and Southern civil and cultural imagery. It was after moving to Louisville while in high school that his lifelong obsession with music began. “It was there that I began to go to shows and check out bands on a local level,” Burton said. “I caught bands like Crain and Rodan there. It was fairly overwhelming and influential to me at the time, seeing people my age making art without radio aspirations or whatever. And all these people in Louisville going to the shows, supporting the craziest bands ... it was a good move.”

Relocating north to Bloomington for college, Burton soon hooked up with the instrumental rock band Ativin. The group put out a string of releases in the late-90s on an upstart, local record label called Secretly Canadian, now one of the most successful independent music operations in the country. The company continues to nurture and promote Burton’s art a decade later.

The Early Day Miners first appeared in 2001, with the slow and sparse Placer Found. Since those rigid beginnings, the band continually fleshed out its sound with ingredients from film music, slowcore and post-rock soundscapes, Brian Eno’s ambient work and My Bloody Valentine’s swirling, heady guitars.

After a short and disappointing internship at the Daniel Lanois-owned Teatro studios in California, Burton moved back to Bloomington and built his own home recording space. Now married and living a stately, quiet life in the always hectic college town, his music radiates a Midwestern historian vibe, sounding like the soundtrack to some melancholic Terrence Malick movie.

An appeal from the void: Offshore

After four albums, the band seemed to settle into a position of happy anonymity, heralded by a few, but mostly ignored by the lion’s share. EDM’s music seemed too emotionally muted and distant, too delicate and industrial for mass consumption. Released last month, Offshore is a mold-breaking album, a masterpiece for a band that seemed to fade before it ever got started. It seems like an incredibly passionate plea from a band needing rescue from oblivion.

The song “Offshore” first showed up on the 2002 album Let Us Garlands Bring as a slowly evolving, eight minute epic. The idea behind the new record, Offshore, was to expand on the song’s original concept of squashed dreams and desperate desires.
“It wasn’t an idea we always had,” said Burton. “Basically it’s a song we always messed with on tour. It could be loud all the way through one night, and then a ballad the next. I’ve always felt that it wasn’t fully realized on Let Us Garlands Bring. The old version is nice, but not quite there. Too straight forward. So we obscured it a little bit. Stretched things out, wrote new parts and in the process maxed my computer.”

Burton enlisted the help of talented friends and locals for the record, including Dan Matz (Windsor for the Derby), Amber Weber (Black Mountain), Darin Gray, Jonathan Ford (Pedro the Lion, Unwed Sailor) and John McEntire (Tortoise, Sea and Cake). This cast is used with great precision on Offshore, each sound and instrument seems to be cautiously placed and layered, which creates a dense fog of sonic perfection. The guitars are so thick and languorous on the recording that they sound almost like a string section. It’s an intense and suffocating record, its fragility can make it a difficult listen, but it stands as a superb musical statement.

Moving forward

Never one to keep his band in one place for too long, Burton has now expanded EDM to a seven-piece guitar army. “Bloomington is a town that requires its bands to be flexible in terms of line-up,” Burton said. “It must be the most transitional town on the planet. From day one, I liked the idea of EDM having porous borders. We’ve gone through numerous drummers, bassists, guitarists. For Offshore in particular I was looking at putting together a large band. The album featured so many friends and it is a large record. Not something 4 or 5 people could pull off.”

Offshore has already attracted the attention of rock elite. A rash of favorable reviews and a gig opening for Wilco in early October have the band pointed in new, exciting directions. Whatever the results of this push towards fame are, Burton will most likely continue making EDM music and engineering records for friends at his home studio.  

Early Day Miners embarked on a week-long tour into New York and Canada last weekend. The band is playing Offshore in its entirety each night, and the short trek will be capped with a homecoming performance Saturday night at the intimate Bloomington venue, The Art Hospital.