As an engineer and producer at both John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studios and his own studio, Scott Solter has worked with some pretty recognizable names, including Spoon, the Court & Spark, the Jim Yoshii Pile-Up, and the Mountain Goats. In 2005, Solter released his solo debut, The Brief Light, an eclectic composite of tribal percussion, exotic instrumentation, and ambient tones, and while it was different than most of the work he's recorded, its crisp production and layered arrangements marked it as the work of a studio wiz.
Solter's second foray into solo recording is One River. This time, the percussive aspects are gone and the layers are stripped away, leaving quiet, slowly evolving songs to ebb and flow. Whereas The Brief Light's rhythm-heavy focus placed it alongside Meat Beat Manifesto's recent work, One River is a more straightforward ambient release-- a mixture of heavily processed guitars, field recordings, and manipulated voices (provided by Wendy Allen)-- more comparable to Brian Eno or the Wind-Up Bird. Seven songs run seamlessly together, each inhaling and exhaling tone after tone. There isn't much in the way of tune or melody; instead there is a deliberate growth as each moment surges and fades. The structures, hinted at by the album's title, recall waves lapping at the shore, or a current twisting and winding-- both alive and lifeless at once. At times the textures are dense, but there aren't really layers in the traditional sense. Since there are very few melodies in the songs, the sounds weave together to create single tones that spread out before the listener.
"Desert Trains" evokes the image of an eerie sunset with a slight, guitar-picked melody surrounded by a fabric of humming. It slowly transforms into "The Great Cold", which drops the melody and shifts to a more constant drone. It's difficult to say if the title reflects the music or if the music reflects the title, but the image of a barren, frozen landscape fits well regardless. In fact, landscape imagery comes to mind in every song, making listening to this record not so like hearing a story as taking a journey.
