Sam Amidon – Salt River (Album Review)

Eclectic is an easily applied word, but Sam Amidon’s groundbreaking, spirited and adventurous Salt River is genuinely worthy of the description.

Sam Amidon’s Salt River is a deep, highly individualistic title, released on River Lea Records, the music-releasing folk wing of the Rough Trade camp, which continues their digging into the more esoteric and groundbreaking corners of the modern scene with real purpose. To that end, Sam Amidon feels like a perfect fit for their vision, what with his keen ear for a long untapped tune and questing spirit infecting him with an obsessive drive to find a place for this musical buried treasure in the modern landscape. It has been said that he tries to recontextualise folk music in order to understand what it means to sing folk music today. If that is true, then Salt River is the most fully realised solo release of his career, for moulded into these grooves are raw acoustic textures married to avant-garde found-sound and electronics, alongside a deliciously eclectic range of material that takes in both folk tunes connected to shape note singing in the 1700s and material by some of the twentieth centuries most visionary (and legendary) artisans. At the centre of it all is Sam, his acoustic guitar and that ravenous head hungry for audio stimulation and awash with songs and tunes long embedded in his mind decades ago.

The Salt River project was brought to life when Sam pulled in two close musical associates to work as a trio. He has been a huge admirer of saxophonist and producer Sam Gendel thanks to his endeavours in the field of electronic music, and percussionist Philippe Melanson joined the sessions at Gendel’s home in Los Angeles. The three worked up material with minimal forward planning, preferring instead to jam around the laptop and work the music up from whatever spark of inspiration should happen to enter the room on the day. The first song that they actually played together as a trio was the lead single, I’m On My Journey Home. It is a genuinely mesmerising track, a modernist re-working of a song first noted in the 1700s which came to Sam’s attention via a field recording of early 20^th century vocal group The Denson Quartet. Sam describes the track as having a “loose swing that I had not heard in other shape note singing recordings,” something which is authentically captured in the acapella closing moments of the track. Before that, however, it is a shimmering heavy roller of a song, all drone-like smoky mysticism that I would favourably compare to the sound of Lankum.

The magic in this album is subtle and, like many great records over the years, has a habit of revealing more and more hidden layers of sonic wonder and beauty with each listen. At times, Sam’s love of Jazz music comes through, and this is a spirit that prevails throughout; you can feel the loose, adventurous nature of the players. and even more remarkable, considering the extensive use of electronic sound and modernist drum pad and laptop-type tools in use, the whole piece feels like a live in the studio recording, which by and large it was. That aforementioned love of Jazz can be heard, for example, with the weaving, urgent saxophone patterns that play out on Tavern, a tune that is based around the traditional American fiddle tune Salt River. Three Five is also a piece worked up from the skeleton of the traditional hymn Old Churchyard, but this time, the conveyor belt guitar figure is elevated by an oncoming storm of synthesiser washes and careful, dramatic percussion splashes.

Arguably, the headline-grabbing pieces are the ones that casual observers may assume to have very little to do with folk. Yoko Ono’s Ask the Elephant is a classically childlike piece with a deeper message challenging us to look outside the boxes we build ourselves into and embrace the world with innocence and wonder. Friends And Neighbours is an Ornette Coleman piece, a groundbreaking outsider Jazz giant from the classic Bop era whose influence on Amidon can be heard in waves throughout the album, but this one was actually a song Coleman wrote. It was the title track of a live album recorded in Ornette’s Prince Street loft space in 1970, and that ’rambunctious party mood’ is also captured here. Then it plays out with some notes-between-the-notes riffing far more recognisably Ornette. Then there is Lou Reed’s Big Sky, once a fist-pumping rocker that closed out Reed’s Ecstasy album but brilliantly re-imagined here by Sam as a simple, slightly forlorn folk ballad. In fact, so thoroughly does he deconstruct it that it almost feels like an entirely different song. But right there in a flash is the essence of Sam Amidon. Always alive to the possibilities within music, looking for ways to cook up an exciting new flavour, searching for connections where no obvious pathways can be seen. Salt River is deep, but it will not give you the full kaleidoscopic experience if you only dip your toes in the water; this one demands a deep dive followed by a long lingering emersion and, best of all, when you climb out, you may just find yourself hungry to explore different music of varying shapes and colours. With a range like this, Sam Amidon can open so many doors. Eclectic is an easily applied word, but here we have an artist releasing a groundbreaking, spirited and adventurous album that is genuinely worthy of the description.