Live Report: Sam Amidon scintillates at the Gate Theatre

You can usually get a pretty good sense of a folk gig just by scanning the crowd. Some audiences are made up of a sea of grey hair and cozy, unassuming jumpers. Others sport neatly twisted mustaches and plaid flannel shirts. The crowd for Sam Amidon, undeniably passionate, fit somewhere in between. You might call him the future of folk, if it weren’t for the fact that Amidon just dropped his eighth album and plays music that stubbornly refuses to fit into any traditional folk mould.

His latest record Salt River boasts no exception, and to witness it live at the intimate Gate Theatre offered the ingredients for an unforgettable experience. Not even a day since its release, Amidon fearlessly stepped on stage, with his trusted collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Vatalaro, to deliver the splendour of Salt River.

A small, largely unadorned set surrounds the duo as they settled into their instruments. After a brief interlude, Amidon burst into 'Golden Willow Tree', an Appalachian ballad that took on a haunting quality in this sparse, guitar-laced rendition. Posturing as a centrepiece for the album, the track told an epic seven-and-a-half minute story about the sinking of a ship, and boasting the threads of discovery, the act of bearing witness and the flux of life.

Amidon and Vatalaro then shifted to the album's opener, 'Oldenfjord', a gorgeous solo guitar offering, originally by Grey Larsen, that didn't try to impress, but was quietly absorbing, highlighting Amidon’s unapologetic embrace of a traditional folk sound. The sonic interpreter changed gears slightly on the next track 'Big Sky', by Lou Reed, which sacrificed the punk bravado of the original and favoured placing the beautifully-penned lyrics as the song's focal point: "Big sky holding up the stars / Big sky holding Venus and Mars / Big sky catch you in a jar / But it can't hold us down anymore".

The next song, 'Cusseta', filled the theatre with free jazz sonics, led by the incomparable stylings from Vatalaro. Once it's finished, and following the impressed crowd's applause, Amidon observed the performance as comprising "the first ever bass solo on a Sacred Harp song...and the first ever guitar solo".

'I'm On My Journey Home' was a highlight of the night. It’s a truly captivating track, a modern reimagining of a song first documented in the 1700s, which Sam mentioned he discovered through a field recording of the early 20th-century vocal group, The Denson Quartet. Depicted as a shimmering heavy roller of a song, drenched in drone-like, smoky mysticism, it’s a sound I’d liken to the atmospheric style of Lankum.

Naturally, it's difficult to bring a studio sound to the live stage, but Amidon and Vatalaro do it flawlessly, managing to make such spacious sonics fit between two people while maintaining the imperfect majesty of their album versions.

It’s been said that Sam aims to recontextualise folk music to better understand what folk music means in the current, and constantly updated, definition. If that’s the case, then Salt River stands as the most fully realised solo album of his career. In their live setting, the album weaves raw acoustic textures with avant-garde found sounds and electronics, all while offering a wonderfully eclectic mix of material. The gig at the Gate Theatre offered a perfect home for the songs, which span everything from folk tunes tied to 18th-century shape-note singing to works by a spread of 20th century visionaries. At the heart of it all was Sam, his acoustic guitar and a relentless curiosity for new sounds that unfolded in real time, all while channeling songs and tunes that have been ingrained in his mind for decades.