(Decoder) The latest Alan Sondheim CD, his 2017 Limit with Azure Carter and Luke Damrosch on Public Eyesore, pushes the notion of hyperreal environmental manipulation almost beyond music into time travel. Building on their previous Threnody disc, this Sondheim trio is essentially an acoustic improvisation unit whose music continues to expand the unique sonic possibilities first heard in his Ritual-All-7-70 recordings released via Bernard Stollman’s ESP Disk label in the late 1960s. However, carefully-conceived real-time signal processing provides a compositional framework for this new music that results in a truly unique listening experience. Sondheim deploys hot-rodded live compression to reverse normal musical dynamics, causing the notes he is playing on various instruments to be restrained while normally “extramusical” sounds such as breaths and moving around on the instruments are exaggerated. Luke Damrosch’s SuperCollider programming takes on pronounced significance in this set, reinserting very short musical fragments backwards into the mix in a manner that approaches “real-time reversal,” affecting both reverbation and the familiar timbral formants of acoustic instruments. The aural result is utterly fascinating, as an improvising ensemble seems to be working in a heretofore impossible pocket just before “in the moment” even begins. If you’re a sheet music reader, you may have come upon a few examples in literature where the practicalities of notation create philosophical quandaries on paper. The eighth rest at the very beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is an example, with so much potential energy bottled up in an insistent piece of music that it somehow feels strange to be led with a rest. Imagine an ensemble drawing from that energy and expanding the duration of that rest into whatever length they desire, rendering potential energy kinetic before the ear can even process what has happened, and you’re getting near Sondheim’s Limit. - Scott Scholz

(Gapplegate) This past September 8th I was happy to review a recent Alan Sondheim album with Azure Carter and Luke Damrosch. We have yet another, entitled Limit (Public Eyesore 138). Sondheim, you will recall, had a couple of multi-instrumental iconoclastic free improv albums out on ESP back in the day. He is going strong again, as this album attests. Luke Damrosch plays madal and is responsible for engineering and programming, Azure Carter gives us her quirky songs and sings them with disarming straightforward candor, and Alan handles the music concepts and plays a battery of instruments as we have come to expect, in this case viola, guqin, flute, clarinet, alto clarinet, long necked saz, dan moi, ghichak, ukelele, guzheng, holeless shakuhachi, hegelung, sanshin and rebab. The blend is spaced out at times by studio enhancements. All is plainly what it is, regardless. And what it is gives the listener plenty of pause (plus playback and fast forward)! There is at all times a provocative kind of freedom that, as is Alan Sondheim's way, never stays put in a single free idiom, instead covering free jazz and world roots in ways he has come to make his fingerprint sound. Azure adds much with the special songs that form a vivid, whimsical contrast to the freedom swirling about her. Limit pleases greatly if you give the music a chance to grow within you. It is not like anything else exactly. It is Alan Sondheim. - Grego Applegate Edwards

(Kathodik) Di etnie apparse e scomparse nel volger di un battito impro arcaico/alieno. Lande ampie, ventose assolate, fra pietra e cielo terso, di silenzi, movimenti materici ed echi misteriosi sul limite del percettibile. Il tempo e lo spazio, concetti alterati e forzati. Alan Sondheim a fornir sollecitazioni etno non ortodosse, corde, soffi, metalli e legni, in modalità: acusticheria meraviglia. Azione decisa, il giusto scapestrata, fra accelerazioni e dilatazioni in un guazzabuglio di latitudini e longitudini (dalle parti di un'impossibile), fra l'attrito e un intenso struggimento devozionale. Come crepitanti arbusti del deserto che annusano l'arrivo della pioggia, viola, guqin, flauto, clarinetto, long-necked saz, dan moi, ghichak, ukulele, guzheng, shakuhaci, hegelung, sanshin e rebab. Voce e testi di Azure Carter nel loro misurato apparir quando si accende il canto, come anomala brace folk a brillar con naturale eleganza all'incirca fra Irlanda e Papua Nuova Guinea. Damrosch macro-amplifica e tratta la movimentazione parassitaria prodotta dal duo, la esalta e pone in primo piano, i respiri e i sospiri, le dita che toccano i corpi/strumento, quel che accade, l'istante impercettibile prima dell'emissione, porzionato in brevi frammenti a ritroso nel mix quasi in tempo reale. Una (quasi) sostituzione del presente, con ambienti, echi e risonanze per lo più trascurati e meno rassicuranti (evidente lo smattimento in fase di programming). Nella stanza Feldman e i suoi tappeti orientali, brezza di Appalachi e umidori sacri cambogiani, poi mi passa. Bello questo mondo. - Marco Carcasi

(Chain DLK) I was unfamiliar with these artists, but I have enjoyed a lot of what Public Eyesore has put out lately, so I was interested to see how this one measured up. Plus, it’s always fun to hear something where you don’t recognize half of the instruments. I mean, here is a partial list of instruments credited to Sondheim – long-necked saz, dan moi, ghichak, holeless shakuhaci, hegelung, sanshin, and rebab. After listening to this album a few times, I would describe it as “pretty dissonance.” This is what you get when you get some mellow, ethereal music – say Durutti Column or Love Spirals Downward – and the tape gets eaten by the machine. Everything is infected with glitch and washed over with a heavy layer of reverb. For some examples, the album begins with “aacbb,” which sounds a lot like an orchestra warming up before they have hit the correct note – everything is shifted just off from the center, “afghaninvdynb” sounds like bagpipes that have been looped repeatedly and played through an AM radio, and “zymphonyb” is frantic and chaotic, while never quite becoming noise. There is a lot of variety to keep this interesting, but the ones that really stand out are the tracks featuring Azure Carter’s vocals. For example, “aborrowers” seems to depict the tale of a snail, with lyrics like “I will take my tiny house with me / Where will my tiny house go / I am a snail in a shell / My shell is memory / …. I’m living on borrowed time.” In another track, “harbinger,” Carter begins, “Everything I do is grotesque, misshapen / the sooner I get to space and time the better.” What makes these tracks so engaging is the contrast between her pleasant voice and the odd lyrics. Overall, this is interesting and engaging and would appeal to fans of bands like Coil and Oval. Well worth checking out. - Eskaton

(Sound Projector) Alan Sondheim is the cultish musician loved by many on account of the bizarre records he made for ESP’-Disk in the 1960s. Ever since Fire Museum Records dug him up in 2005 we’ve heard a lot more from this multi-instrumentalist, a player who seems to be in competition with Keiji Haino for the prize of “no instrument left unplayed”. Last dug him in 2015 in the company of singer Azure Carter and the programming whizz Luke Damrosch; Threnody: Shorter Discourses of The Buddha left Steve Pescott’s mind reeling, and no wonder. Sondheim is at it again on Limit (PE 138) playing no end of Western and Eastern woodwinds and flutes, but also experimenting with something called “reverse reverberation”. According to his abstruse sleeve notes, of which I understand about less than 1 per cent, he’s referring to something that’s impossible given the laws of physics, time, and space. But that hasn’t stopped him having a damned good try at it, and aided by the computer programs of Damrosch he proceeds to play havoc with the space-time continuum inside the confines of Adobe Audition. His unsettling experiments are interspersed by the songs of Azure Carter, charming interludes which almost bring us back to earth for five minutes; for the most part we’re on alien sonic territory, hearing things which can’t really exist. - Ed Pinsent