Biography

DeYarmond Edison did not last so long—a few years spent making two beautiful folk-rock records in their native Wisconsin, followed by a final and transformational 12 months in North Carolina where the quartet reimagined their sound and accidentally ripped apart childhood bonds. But the work DeYarmond Edison made has had an unimagined, outsized staying power. The moment they broke up in August 2006, singer Justin Vernon, who had first tested his falsetto in the band, started Bon Iver, one of this century’s most imaginative acts. The rest of DeYarmond Edison—Brad Cook, Phil Cook, and Joe Westerlund—became Megafaun, who in turn became key to this century’s radical folk-rock reinvention. You can clearly hear the foundations of it all in the massive amount of music DeYarmond Edison produced in its short lifetime. As four friends tried to find their way beyond plaintive beginnings, they tried on gorgeous gospel and unbound free jazz, raw Appalachian folk and ecstatic minimalism, electronic abstraction and longform drone, funneling it all back into increasingly exploratory songs. Those results remain a testament to the way profound, lavishly praised art begins out of sight, when friends fully commit to one another and to their craft. And hatched in two small cities, their work also reaffirms the culture of communities beyond major metropolises, or how outsiders with a vision can make the most compelling sounds. At long last, with the release of Epoch, DeYarmond Edison lives again.