by Ben Hogwood

What’s the story?

It is relatively rare for electronic albums to be performed ‘as live’ – but that is what Saloli achieves with Canyon. Saloli – the Cherokee word for ‘squirrel’ – is the alias under which Portland pianist and instrumentalist Mary Sutton operates,

The whole album is performed on a Sequential Circuits MultiTrak synthesizer, routed through a delay pedal to add the spatial quality of ‘echoing off canyon walls’.

There is a concept powering Canyon, too, the album evoking ‘a day in the life of a bear in a canyon in the Smoky Mountains’. As the press release explains, ‘in Cherokee teachings, humans and animals are considered to have no essential difference – originally, all the creatures of the earth lived together in harmony.’ The album’s cover art is by Sutton’s father Jerry, its yellow lettering using Cherokee Syllabary and spelling ‘Yona’, which means ‘bear’.

What’s the music like?

Strong in character. Saloli’s writing is very ‘in the moment’, creating portraits full of colour and musical content.

Waterfall shimmers and glistens in the light, the melodic patterns of the synthesizer sustained as they bounce around the sonic picture. At this point Saloli’s music resembles earlier Philip Glass, both in its melodic language and its pleasingly rough timbre. This is clearly music evoking the outside, and is all the better for its untampered state.

Lily Pad is much more fragile, the live setting capturing the surface tension of the water on which it sits, while Snake is more obviously right and left hand, as arpeggios in the left complement higher melodies in the right.

The sonic picture changes strikingly for Yona, the playful bear portrait, whose lack of reverberation makes this feel a close-up, indoor encounter. Panning out again we hear the softer Silhouette, whose vibrato casts a spell and draws parallels with Wendy Carlos.

Full Moon brings a pipe-organ sonority to Saloli’s music, wide-eyed and brightly lit, the echoes used again to playful effect. The slightly jaunty mood continues to the elusive Nighthawk, the left hand on the keyboard establishing a Habañera-type rhythm while trying to pin down an elusive right hand melody.

Saloli ends with the exhilarating Sunrise, its rippling arpeggios telling of the light forcing its way upwards out of the darkness and into the day. Its evocative growth from subtle flickers to stabs of daylight shows Sutton’s skill at painting pictures in sound.

Does it all work?

It does. The intimate portrait of the bear is slightly curious, given the animal’s size, but it is typical of the personality running through Sutton’s music. This is electronic music with a beating heart, for sure.

Is it recommended?

It is. Saloli has made an album of instrumental tone pictures with lasting character and quality.

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