SAM VALLEN - Flicker
CALIGULA’S HORSE Guitarist Going Solo
Written by: Rod Whitfield - Independent Writer | Monday 12 September 2022
Sometimes, to move ahead in life, we have to delve back into the past. Sometimes, everything new is old again. Or is that vice-versa? Whatever the case, no matter what cliches we throw around, artists are products of their pasts and their influences. And Sam Vallen, guitar wunderkind from Queensland prog sensations CALIGULA’S HORSE, is no exception.
On the eve of the release of his first ever solo track, Vallen tells us that his main band actually started out as a solo instrumental project for himself, before adding a vocalist and morphing into something entirely different. It was a return to that early mindset that partially inspired him to bite the bullet, take the risk and release something under his own name after more than a decade and five studio albums with the mighty C-HORSE.
Pictured: Jim Grey, Sam Vallen + Dale Prinsse - CALIGULA’S HORSE
Live @ The Metro Social for their Rise Radiant tour - 2022
Photo by: Jimmy Wah - Sense Music Media
“CALIGULA’S HORSE actually was this, in its earliest form,” Vallen recalls. “Late 2010, early 2011 was when I was writing the material that was to become the debut CALIGULA’S HORSE album, Moments from Ephemeral City. I had actually picked a lot of that album, more in my mind than anything else, as being an instrumental guitar album, and some of bears that quality: there are three mostly instrumental guitar tracks on there. It was really only when I got ‘guest vocalist’ Jim Grey in on a song, and we hit it off and just had a great time, we realised there was a lot of promise to that project, and it became something very different. That was very late in the project’s development.
“So the funny thing about all this is, I tried to do this in 2011, and it became a totally different band!”
Another factor in Vallen’s decision to branch out beyond the C-HORSE comfort zone and put out his own instrumental music was his strong affinity with both old school and new school guitar instrumentalists, from ALLAN HOLDSWORTH to PLINI and just about everyone in between. Even if the influence was perhaps more subconscious than intentional.
“This just felt like a comfortable place to explore,” he says, “and also a nostalgic, interesting sentimental place to explore. The funny thing is, it’s less a case of trying to fit in that world and more one of convergent evolution. I grew up with a lot of this music, it really is in my DNA. I love all those guys, I talk to PLINI and we’ve got exactly the same guitar heroes. I can see the DNA going back to all my favourite guitar albums like (STEVE VAI’s) Passion and Warfare or GUTHRIE GOVAN’s Erotic Cakes, all these albums that made me sit up and consider the value in the instrument and how much effort at all needs.
“It definitely aligns with a lot of that.”
First single, Flicker, is a twisty, turny, six and a half minute roller-coaster ride of different colours, emotions and dynamics, and Vallen tells us that: a) this is the first taste of a lot more to come from him from a solo perspective, and b) it is generally pretty indicative of what to expect in the future, although he intends to shake things up a little as the whole thing progresses as well.
“Yep, I think so,” he confirms. “As a broad stylistic representation of where it’s heading. Although I can’t help but be eclectic, that’s who I am. It’s still ostensibly progressive metal. I think, dynamically, there’s a little more freedom in the instrumental guitar world, just because, when you’re not writing with a vocalist in mind, and the vocals and lyrics aren’t a big part of the melodic sell . . . let me take a step back. When we’re writing CALIGULA’S HORSE material, you can write themes, which are strong, but maybe which aren’t carried as well by a lyric or recontextualised by a lyric, so the moment you’ve got to take that away and make stuff mean something in the instrumental world, the toolkit that you’ve got ends up being quite different. I found I had to dig a little bit deeper in some places.
Pictured: Sam Vallen live with CALIGULA’S HORSE
Photo by: Jimmy Wah - Sense Music Media
“Some material in the CALIGULA’S HORSE world, where I’d come up with it and be really proud of it, I’d give it to Jim, and it’d be just made infinitely better. Now, without that resource, it becomes more tricky.”
At this stage, the release of a single doesn’t necessarily mean that an EP or album is on the way, but it certainly won’t be the first and last we hear from SAM VALLEN in a solo context, although it will need to fit around the schedule of the main project and may not follow on from the initial release in super-quick succession.
“There is more to come, definitely,” he says, “the only reason I stopped digging into this is because CALIGULA’S HORSE deadlines came back around, we had to stop being in denial about (last album) Rise Radiant having its day in terms of it being the main push in the promotional cycles goes. That was a pretty hard thing for us to do.
“But I wrote quite a bit of music (for the solo project), most of it in a more scattered form than Flicker ended up, but basically when I realised I had this time limit to do it in, I just dug into the Flicker material because I really liked it it, I liked where it was heading. I thought, if nothing else, I can test the waters with something like this, and then dig into it again at a later date. It probably won’t happen before the end of this year, we’re trying to get to a point where the new CALIGULA’S HORSE material is all written and we can go away and record, but what I will say is, once that’s done and we’re in that limbo state where the album’s finished but it’s not released, that’s exactly the period where I’m going to be digging back into this.”
Pictured: Sam Vallen