Early Day Miners/Unwed Sailor/Chris Bennett - Stateless
(Great Vitamin Mystery)
When I interviewed Early Day Miners after the release of their excellent Placer Found album in 2000, I asked them about the photography of Chris Bennett used in the cover art of the album. According to Dan Burton, Chris Bennett "has been living the past year or so in Santa Fe, NM... Chris took all of the photos out of his van window while driving around Santa Fe, which gives them a nice unsteady, unpremeditated look." While the photography of Bennett wasn't taken in order to match with the Southwestern soundscapes of Placer Found, it certainly does match almost perfectly. Now we get the reverse of that relationship as the musicians create a soundtrack to accompany some of Bennett's images.
In addition to his still photography, Chris Bennett has been making Super 8 movies of his travels throughout North America and Europe. Stateless is a 30 minute montage of those movies available in Quicktime format on this enhanced CD. To compliment the film, Early Day Miners has collaborated with bass-centric group Unwed Sailor to provide the soundtrack to this film—in other words, soundscapes to match the landscapes. Just like the images on the Placer Found cover, though, the music seems to be connected to the film only by happenstance or divine intervention. Instead of trying to match the scenery, the musicians seem satisfied in just creating something that seems to go nicely beside it.
This music has a loose, almost improvised feel to it, the songs sprawling and flowing like the rivers and plains featured in the film. The EP starts with "The Ninth Ward," a droning, mellow Kraut-like epic. A rhythm guitar plays the same short staccato phrase over and over again as the other instruments swirl around it, creating ghostly sounds, like the wind over a person-less field. This is followed by the equally epic organ drone of "Scandanavian Comfort" that can be soothing or grueling depending how eager you are to be soothed. The second half of the EP contains two more structured songs. "Chandelier" uses two crystalline guitar lines to create a tense but meditative mood before leading into a gradual, swaying build that accompanies the final scene of the movie at the ferris wheel (see the cover). The most riveting song on the album, though, is "Treeline," which sounds the most like what one would expect an Early Day Miners song to sound like. From quiet twinklings of guitar and haunting, whispy vocals, the band injects aggressive, forceful instrumental sections to great effect.
The movie has some interesting imagery, however, Burton's description of Bennett's still photography applies here too. Most of the movie is taken out of the window of a moving vehicle (a road picture slightly different from Spears' Crossroads). Trees, curves on the road, and a giant cross by the side of the highway are the stars of this movie, shown with a grainy, unsteady, imperfect quality. In fact, images taken outside of the van seem to be more compelling. When Bennett zooms in on a flowing stream, the mind does get lost in the motion of the water over the rocks. In general, Bennett's approach is the opposite of Ansel Adams in this movie as Bennett cares little about perfectly framing the beauty of nature. Instead, like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, impulse is his guide.
This CD is the complete package, including both the music and the movie with the music. The music may be less focused than the two band's normal material, however the idea and execution of this project are so strong that scanning through the movie a few times and studying how the music and images interact will definitely pique your interest enough to make this CD worth getting.
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