ALSA not working inside Xorg

Fresh Trisquel install from netinst. No DE installed, just Xorg and Awesome - thus no PulseAudio.

From console alsamixer & mplayer work as expected. Yet, from inside Xorg, alsamixer returns "cannot open mixer: No such file or directory", and no sound from mplayer.

This goes against my understanding of how ALSA and Xorg work?

Any suggestions for solution or method to diagnosing further.