Amidon and friends make beguiling music

Sam Amidon's collaborations have produced "All Is Well," a record full of traditional folk songs giving surprising life.

Just when we thought we had heard every scintillating, supernatural, and sumptuous variant of post-millennial folk music, Sam Amidon appears with an album called "All Is Well" and a musical strain that's beguilingly resistant to the usual adjectives. Technically, Amidon, a 27-year-old singer, fiddler, and banjo player, takes traditional songs and gives them fresh, surprising life. As with all of Amidon's projects, and there are lots of them, this one was a collaborative effort. And by collaborative, we mean weird as hell.

Here's how it went down: Amidon traveled to Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland, and recorded 10 Appalachian folk songs in two hours in the middle of the night, in the style of field recordings, with a microphone at his mouth and a bottle of whiskey by his side.

Then he left, returned home to Brooklyn, and Amidon's friend, composer Nico Muhly, and the studio's owner, Valgeir Sigurosson, had their way with the tracks: layering them with modern chamber orchestrations and electronic flourishes. The result is a gripping collision of old and new, cobbled with a sense of adventure and mutual trust that's at the heart of Amidon's musical cosmos.

"There was a real chance element to seeing where these songs would go," says Amidon on the phone from a tour van on the outskirts of Seattle. "But that seems like a neat parallel with the genesis of these songs. There's no single author, there were no tape recorders, and accidents played such a big role in how people learned them. There's a real mystery to it."

Amidon has just performed at the first show of the 802 Tour, which stops at the Museum of Fine Arts Sunday night. Featuring the wildly divergent talents of Amidon (the folkie), Muhly (the contemporary classical hotshot), and Thomas Bartlett (a.k.a. Doveman, the indie rocker), 802 is named after the area code in Vermont where all three grew up.

They've contributed to one another's projects in the past, and various configurations of the trio, with the support of a few musically inclined drinking buddies, will perform together during the show. Amidon has been known to flesh out his part with warp-speed recitations of Melville and liturgical dance.

"It's totally unclear how this little experiment is going to go," he says. "It's not like we all get together and it feels like one aesthetic. It's more like different lines of connection that may not intersect all three of us at once, but they add up to something. There's an ease and a quickness and a sort of shimmering consistency to our sound context. We rehearsed for four hours total. Nobody is scared."

Amidon's parents are professional folk musicians, and he and his brother grew up immersed in a tight-knit folk community in Brattleboro. He began violin lessons at 3, started performing with his family when he was 7, and at 14 formed a fiddle band with Bartlett that played at community dances. During college - he studied philosophy at Sarah Lawrence - Amidon took lessons from free-jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins.

"I think he can so successfully combine experimental music with what he learned growing up with us because he really understands tradition," says Amidon's father, Peter, a well-known choir director and dance caller. "He gets under and around the songs, he'll change a melody, and the harmonies are quirky. But they're always right, because he knows where it came from."

After moving to New York, Amidon met Shannon Fields, leader of the dreamy pop collective Stars Like Fleas. The two bonded over a mutual love of shape-note singing, a 1,000-year-old form of notation used in sacred music, and Amidon became an adjunct member of SLF.

"Sam's contribution is less about instrumentation than his sensibilities as a person," says Fields. "He brings a hodgepodge of outsider expressions that go well beyond folk music and really gets that the music isn't as much a performance as a coming together, not so much a blending into one harmonious whole as a collection of personalities."

Indeed. Amidon and his cohorts are building a music scene that reaches back in time for more than its musical foundations.

"Even though we're in New York, now there's been an awareness of trying to create the kind of feeling we had in Vermont," Amidon says of his community of artists. "I'm lucky to have encountered it, and to be making it happen in the city."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.